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Rem Koolhaas Named Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate for 2000See the Pritzker Prize web site for details about the award, Koolhaas' work, and a media kit with images.
The Libraries for All News Articles page includes coverage of this award.
See also the library's Press Release.
Return to Libraries for All Central Library page.
Rem Koolhaas, currently designing Seattle Public Library’s new 355,000-square-foot downtown library, has been named the Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate for 2000. The award is known throughout the world as architecture’s highest honor, or the Nobel of architecture.” Koolhaas is principal and founder of The Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
"We are thrilled Rem has received this great honor," said City Librarian Deborah L. Jacobs. " We know firsthand, the outstanding qualities of talent, vision and commitment he brings to a project. It is very exciting to have someone so widely respected and gifted in world architecture designing our central library." Koolhaas will be presenting current work on the library at a free public presentation at 2 p.m. Wednesday, May 3, Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium. Everyone is welcome. The library is slated to open in 2003.
J. Carter Brown, Pritzker Prize jury chairman, said Koolhaas is widely respected as “one of the most gifted and original talents in world architecture. The leader of a spectacularly irreverent generation of Dutch architects, his restless mind, conceptual brilliance and ability to make a building sing have earned him a stellar place in the firmament of contemporary design.”
The formal presentation of the Pritzker prize will take place in a ceremony in Jerusalem, Israel on May 29, 2000. Koolhaas will receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion. He is the first Pritzker Laureate from the Netherlands and the 23rd to be honored. More than 500 nominees from approximately 40 countries are considered each year. Philip Johnson was the first Pritzker Laureate in 1979. Sir Norman Foster, now Lord Foster, of the UK was the 1999 Laureate.
The present jury is composed of Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art and chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts; Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat from Torino, Italy; Ada Louise Huxtable, author and architecture critic of New York; Jorge Silvetti, chairman, department of architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design; and Lord Rothschild, former chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund of Great Britain and formerly the chairman of that country’s National Gallery.
posted: 17 April 2000