Volume 46, Number 2 · February 4, 1999
High Wire Acts
By Martin Filler
Logbook
by Renzo Piano
Monacelli, 288 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Complete Works
in three volumes, by Peter Buchanan
Phaidon, each 240 pp., $75.00 each
Technology, Place & Architecture: The Jerusalem Seminar in Architecture
edited by Kenneth Frampton
Rizzoli, 288 pp., $39.50 (paper)
Since its inception two decades ago, the Pritzker Architecture Prize has been promoted by its donors, owners of the Hyatt hotel chain, as the Nobel Prize of the building art. The roster of Pritzker 'laureates,' as the Hyatt Foundation calls the winners of its annual $100,000 award, has indeed come to resemble that of the Nobel Prize in literature, if only in its sometimes odd choices, inexplicable omissions, ideological biases, and geopolitical motives. But the quality of an award's recipients can sometimes do more honor to the prize than vice versa, and that was the case when the Italian architect Renzo Piano was named as the 1998 winner of the Pritzker.
Review, 4999 words
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