As the architecture community looks ahead to the announcement of the 2026 laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, anticipation once again gathers around what is widely regarded as the profession's highest honor. Founded in 1979 by Jay Pritzker and administered by the Hyatt Foundation, the prize recognizes a living architect whose body of work demonstrates a consistent and significant contribution to humanity and the built environment.
Patio houses embody one of the most enduring architectural typologies, encapsulating the duality of openness and seclusion while nurturing a profound connection with nature. While the term is also used in contemporary American real estate to describe low-maintenance, single-story dwellings on small lots, its classic architectural meaning refers to an introverted design organized around a private, central courtyard. It is this traditional form, the subject of this article, that traces its origins back thousands of years. Patio houses emerged independently in various regions, responding universally to fundamental human needs: privacy, climatic adaptability, and spatial coherence. Despite diverse geographic and cultural expressions, the core principles of introversion, controlled openness, and environmental sensitivity remain remarkably consistent throughout the evolution of this typology.
In Copenhagen, during the 2024 UNESCO International Day of Light, The Daylight Award has announced Spanish architect and professor Alberto Campo Baeza as the laureate for the architecture category and German professor of chronobiology Till Roenneberg for his scientific research regarding the impact of daylight. The two categories create an interdisciplinary bridge between fields, grounding architectural thinking with high-level research. The two winners have been commended for scientific investigations into issues like circadian rhythms and dependencies in the case of Professor Roenneberg, and the poetic qualities obtained through the use of daylight in Alberto Campo Baeza’s architectural works.
As part of our yearly tradition, we have asked our readers who should win the 2023 Pritzker Prize, the most important award in the field of architecture.
For those who don't know, the Pritzker Prize is funded by Jay Pritzker through the Hyatt Foundation in the United States and has been awarded to living architects, regardless of their nationality, whose built work "has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity through the art of architecture."
A few weeks ago, this year’s edition of the Serpentine Pavilion opened to the public. Designed by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, it’s an evocative project, its cylindrical form referencing American beehive kilns, English bottle kilns, and Musgum adobe homes found in Cameroon.
What the pavilion is named tells the viewer a lot more about its intentions as a spatial experience. Titled Black Chapel, it houses a spacious room with wraparound benches, and an oculus above that allows daylight to filter into the space. It’s a fairly minimal interior – designed as a site for contemplation and reflection. This minimal quality of Gates’ Serpentine Pavilion raises particularly interesting questions. How artists and architects opt for a “less is more” approach when designing meditative spaces, but also how these introspective spaces have been equally enhanced by ornamentation.
Alberto Campo Baeza has added another recognition to his already impressive repertoire as the 2020 winner of Spain's National Prize in Architecture, an award bestowed by the country's Ministry of Transportation, Mobility, and Urban Planning in recognition of the winner's professional as well as academic contributions to architecture.
The Magazzino Italian Art museum is expanding its campus in Cold Spring, NY with a new pavilion by Spanish architects Alberto Campo Baeza and Miguel Quismondo. Following the museum's public opening in 2017, the new pavilion will be dedicated to special exhibitions and public and educational programs. The free-standing structure will feature flexible programming to enable the nonprofit museum to support its growing program and better serve its visitors.
Madrid architect Alberto Campo Baeza was born in 1946 in Valladolid, Spain and grew up in Cádiz. He graduated from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 1971 and earned his PhD there in 1982. Campo Baeza has been teaching architecture at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, ETSAM for more than 40 years. He sees architecture as building ideas and expressing them in the most essential and clear ways, consistently relying on such basic elements as firmly grounded rectangular platforms, thick solid walls with deep cavities and frameless cutouts, and flat thin planes propped up by delicate posts. Colors, complex curves, and diversity of materials are largely avoided to accentuate primary relationships between elementary prisms and to exalt magic out of sunlight. Campo Baeza’s architecture is about transparency and precision, as well as asserting such fundamentals as ground planes, straight lines, and precise corners. He has built relatively few projects and, for the most part, on a small scale. Yet, his legacy is remarkably complete, consistent, profound, memorable, and inspirational.
A large tree, whose leaves are drawings, a pond from which photos of projects arise, a large installation which recreates the mental landscape of Alberto Campo Baeza: this is CAMPO BAEZA. THE CREATION TREE, the third of the monographic exhibitions of NATURE, the series of four monographic installations in which MAXXI Architectura explores different interpretations of contemporary architectural investigation.
Co-produced by MAXXI Architectura and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) with the special collaboration of TOTO GALLERY MA of Tokyo, the show, dedicated to the work of one of the masters of Spanish architecture, is curated and designed by Manuel Blanco. More information on the event after the break.
