The Japan Art Association announced today that Dominique Perrault, Hon. FAIA, has won the 2015 Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award. The award, bestowed annually since 1989, recognizes artists from five fields that fall outside of the purview of the Nobel Prize: Architecture, music, painting, sculpture, and theater/film. Each of the five winners will receive a gold medal and a prize of 15 million yen (approximately $124,000) at a ceremony to be held in Tokyo on October 21. Perrault, who opened his Paris-based firm Dominique Perrault Architecture in 1981, adds this award to a collection of prior accolades such as the Grand National Prize for Architecture in France in 1993 and the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion Award for European Architecture in 1997. Perrault also curated the 2010 Venice Biennale.
Perrault released this statement on his website:
“The Praemium Imperiale has a very very important meaning to
all artists and creators across the world, for it is a profoundly cultural
award,” “It is not a commercial award. It is a prize that pays
tribute to works, therefore to authors, to writings, to sensibilities that are
extremely varied and are involved in all artistic fields. For me, it is a very
strong signal—from a symbolic point of view, of course, but also from the point
of view that it encourages [us] to keep on developing the widening of the
architectural discipline, that is to say of the architectural field.
Architecture, as we have said, and as many agree today, cannot be summed up to
the construction of buildings.
Architecture has a global dimension that touches all
territories, all cultures, all human beings, whoever they are. And architecture
must be able to house, to protect everyone in the wealthy economies, but also,
and especially, in the poorer economies. And to that end, architects must
develop research fields. Architects today are faced with extraordinary
questions about protecting the planet, but also about protecting the human kind
that lives on this planet. And for that, it is not enough to practice architecture:
we must share the architecture that we practice with as many people as
possible.”
Perrault joins a roster of laureates that includes some of the most prominent architects in the field: Inaugural winner I.M. Pei, FAIA; Frank Gehry, FAIA (1992); Kenzo Tange (1993); Tadao Ando, Hon. FAIA (1996); Alvaro Siza (1998); Rem Koolhaas, Hon. FAIA (2003); last year’s Pritzker Prize winner, the late Frei Otto (2006); Zaha Hadid, Hon. FAIA (2009); Toyo Ito, Hon. FAIA (2010); and last year’s winner, Steven Holl, FAIA. This year’s other winners include pianist Mitsuko Uchida (music), graphic Tadanori Yokoo (painting), Wolfgang Laib (sculpture), and dancer Sylvie Guillem (theater/film).
See more work from Dominique Perrault Architecture in ARCHITECT's Project Gallery.
