This was announced on September 20 at a special ceremony at the Japanese Cultural Center in Paris. The award ceremony itself will take place in Tokyo on October 16 this year.
Herzog & de Meuron won in the architecture category, although the awards are given in other categories as well: painting, sculpture, music and theater. Each of the winners will receive a prize of € 100,000.
"Praemium Imperiale" is a kind of completion of the collection of various professional awards from Swiss architects. In 2001 they received the Pritzker Prize and the French Silver Square, the British Sterling Prize in 2003, and the RIBA Gold Medal in 2007. Pierre de Meuron joked at the announcement ceremony on September 20: “How Frank Gehry has already spoken about this, now we have no choice but to receive one of these prestigious awards again …"
And only relatively recently - in 1990 - there were only three employees in the staff of the studio of architects. Today it employs 250 people, scattered across branches in Basel, Hamburg, London, New York and Beijing. This multinational team is currently working on 40 projects around the world.
Herzog & de Meuron buildings such as the Tate Modern in London (2000), the Prada Epicenter store in Tokyo (2003), the Museum de Young in San Francisco (2005) or the Allianz stadium in Munich (2005) are not known only for specialists, but also for the widest circles of the public.
