World Honors for Architecture and Other Arts

One of the two highest international awards for design accomplishment, the Japan-based Praemium Imperiale, honors one outstanding individual per year in the field of architecture, recognized along with achievers in painting, sculpture, music, and theater/film. (In that last category, most seriously impacted by the current pandemic, no winner was named this year.)

Within each of these art fields, the program’s laureates may vary widely in their specific accomplishments. In music, for instance, winners have included composers, conductors, and soloists. As in other top awards for architecture – the Pritzker Prize, for instance, or the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal – the winners usually lead an international practice producing buildings of worldwide prominence — but that need not always be the case.

Architecture: Glenn Murcutt of Australia

The 2021 honoree for architecture, Glenn Murcutt, differs from the typical Praemium Imperiale winner by operating an essentially one-man practice. He designs works of small to medium scale, and only in Australia.

Preferring to work without computers, he draws freehand to arrive at design solutions that are, as he puts it, waiting to be “discovered, not created.” All of his works exemplify an interest – now especially timely — in conserving resources and responding to local cultures. He consistently strives to “touch the earth lightly.”

Born in London in 1936, Murcutt spent much of his childhood in Papua, New Guinea. He studied architecture in Australia and opened his office in the Sydney suburb of Mosman in 1969. Even as he has gained worldwide recognition over the past several decades and taught architecture abroad, he has not accepted commissions in places where he is less familiar with topography, climate, and building crafts. Given his personal attention to every detail and his reputation among design cognoscenti, he has a waiting list of clients.

Murcutt has previously received other top international honors for architecture: the Pritzker Prize in 2002; the AIA Gold Medal in 2009. It may look as if the Praemium Imperiale judges are now playing catch-up, but in the intervening years he has produced several notable works, cited with this award, that support their decision.

Music: Yo-yo Ma of the United States

Cellist Ma is considered one of the foremost musicians of our time and is a passionate advocate of culture’s power to generate international understanding. Born in 1955 in Paris to Chinese parents, he began to study the cello with his father at age four. Moving to the U.S. three years later, he played as a child prodigy before Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy in 1962 and has played for eight other American presidents since.

Although trained in the Western Classical tradition, Ma has collaborated with musicians from other musical genres. The Silkroad Project, founded by him in 1998, has fostered some genuine cross-cultural works. In 2011 Ma played at the Kennedy Center Honors and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Launching the Bach Project in 2018, he set out to play Bach’s cello suites at 36 locations on six continents. He recently made headlines with an impromptu performance at the site of his vaccination in Massachusetts.

Painting: Sebastião Salgado

Recognized under the award program’s heading Painting, Salgado is known for his black-and-white photographs that express both the beauty and the fragility of the world and its inhabitants. Born in Brazil in 1944, he moved in 1969 to France as a political refugee. Trained as an economist, he took up photography full time in 1973.

His photos focus on subjects such as the impact of wars and natural disasters and the imbalance of the world’s wealth. His works are organized by themes: Sahel portrayed the famine in Africa; Workers documented the realities of manual labor; Migrations took up the struggles of migrants and refugees.

Since the 1990s, Salgado has been actively involved in environmental and reforestation issues through the Instituto Terra, which he and his wife established at their current home in Brazil. His book Amazônia embodies a seven-year study of the Amazon ecosystem and its indigenous people. Its publication earlier this year was accompanied by an exhibition now touring the world.

Sculpture: James Turrell

Light and space are Turrell’s art media. His fascination with light even as a child was related to the silent meditation practiced by his Quaker family. He noted early on that even in our sleep, with eyes closed, we see light in our dreams.

Born in Los Angeles in 1943, Turrell reinforced his innate interest in light with his studies of perceptual psychology and fine arts. In 1967 the Pasadena Museum of Art mounted his first solo exhibition, Projection Pieces, incorporating light-projected geometric shapes, where viewers experienced light occupying space, rather than just lighting a wall. He went on to create a number of Skyspace installations with openings to the sky, encouraging viewers to spend time experiencing the changes generated by natural light.

Turrell has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the Americas, Europe, and Asia,

along with permanent installations in all those areas. His largest single work – perhaps the world’s largest — is the Roden Crater in Arizona. There, starting in 1979 and on-going, he is transforming an extinct volcano into a vast observatory for the naked-eye observation of celestial phenomena.

Among Turrell’s many honors are a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984 and a National Medal of the Arts in 2013.

2021 Grant for Young Artists

This annual honor for young artists was initiated in 1997 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Praemium Imperiale. The 2021 honoree is to the Advanced Training School of the Central Institute for Restoration, an Italian academy that educates young professionals in art restoration. Founded in 1939, the program produces experts who have dealt for many decades with the effects of warfare and natural disasters. Its graduates can be found today working on Italy’s cultural heritage throughout that nation and at such institutions and the Louvre in Paris, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Getty Institute in California.