Winners Architecture

Zaha Hadid (1950–2016)

Milestones in architectural history are oftern dwarfish buildings. It was not the grand symphonies of the cathedrals and palaces that have inspired the history of ideas but the chamber musical building forms. Even in the case of a fire station for a furniture factory in the state of Baden, its creator Zaha M. Hadid has at once realized her ambitious, almost presumptuous architectural concept. Zaha Hadid is the most rigorous embodiment of a new spirit in architecture which simultaneously opposes late and post-modernism, high-tech and high-touch positions. The motive of this architecture is neither the rediscovery of history nor the beginning of a new modesty, neither the historistic cult of the dead nor the purist migration of the souls, but the foundation of an independent formal language free of imitations and utterly contemporaneous.” (M. Mönninger)

Zaha Hadid is awarded the Schelling Architecture Prize 1994.

• Laudation Michael Mönninger ~631 KB | pdf

Coop Himmelb(l)au | Helmut Swiczinsky & Wolf D. Prix

Coop Himmelb(l)au is a mental state of emergency, having lasted over twenty years. It it is the attempt to pull away the rug beneath the feet so that at least the head can pass through the wall. What was once Coop Himmelb(l)au’s provocative aesthetic has today become an internationally recognized paradigmatic architecture. What for modernism was once the collage, Coop Himmelb(l)aus have turned into a crash. Their aesthetic of the accidental constitutes the built reaction time; they cultivate the shock of the impact up to the last detail. For this reason, Coop Himmelb(l)au’s buildings can be termed quite unmetaphorically as urban sound-boxes. They reflect and amplify the enormous overlay effects of large cities. Quite different from many of their “deconstructivist” comrade-at-arms, they are practitioners without theoretical concept. Jacques Derrida’s writings, for example, Prix and Swiczinsky have only heard of second hand. For them, their built abstractions come into existence out of their unperturbed conception. They were the first to liberate architecture from the technical and formal constraints of history. Although they have found comrades-at-arms and imitators all over the world, they are still the best of their kind by miles. (M. Mönninger)

Coop Himmelb(l)au are awarded the Schelling Architecture Prize 1992.