Christian de Portzamparc, 2018 Praemium Imperiale Award

Christian de Portzamparc, born in Casablanca in 1944, is an architect and urban planner. He graduated from the Paris School of Fine Arts in 1969 and set up his agency, the Atelier Christian de Portzamparc, in 1980. Based in Paris, France, the Atelier is a global operation with a close-knit team of 100 employees who enjoy positive working relationships with established partners around the world. Organized into several “studios”, they work with partners on a wide variety of ambitious international projects. As well as constructing buildings, Christian de Portzamparc, an architect, urban planner and painter, is engaged in the search for form and meaning.

From the city to the object, Christian de Portzamparc has worked on towers since his first projects in 1974. His best known tower is the LVMH Tower in New York, USA, completed in 1999 (Business Week and Architectural Record award 2006), followed by the competition for the Hearst tower in 2000 and soon to be accompanied by the residential tower 400 Park Avenue in Manhattan, New York, USA, approved by the City Planning authorities in 2004 and for which the site demolition started in December 2011. The 603-feet high headquarters of French bank Société Générale at La Défense district in Paris, the Granite Tower (completed in 2008) is the first sustainable high-rise building in France (H.E.Q. certified, the French equivalent of the North American LEED).

In 1994, Christian de Portzamparc became the first French architect to gain the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize at the age of 50. He has been made Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Officier de l’Ordre du Mérite and Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur, and was awarded the Grand Prix d’Architecture de la Ville de Paris in 1990, the Médaille d’Argent in 1992 and the Grand Prix National d’Architecture in 1998. He has also been appointed an Honorory Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.). The most prestigious city planning prize in France, Grand Prix de l’Urbanisme, was awarded to him in 2004. In 2006, the Collège de France created a 53rd chair dedicated to “artistic creation”, Christian de Portzamparc was its first holder.

Fujiko Nakaya was born in Sapporo, Japan, in 1933. Her father, Ukichiro Nakaya, a physicist credited with creating the first artificial snowflakes, influenced her work, and as a young art student she became interested in working with cloud-like forms. Although her work has been primarily based in Japan, Nakaya studied at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, from 1954 to 1957, and later became an instrumental figure in the rise of video art in Japan.

In the late 1960s, Nakaya became involved with the activities of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), the organization founded by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver. She participated unofficially as a performer in Deborah Hay’s Solo in 1966, and officially joined E.A.T. in 1969 as the Japanese coordinator for the Pepsi Pavilion project at Osaka’s EXPO ’70. As part of the pavilion’s multisensory expanded art experiments, Nakaya created the world’s first fog sculpture, enveloping the exterior of the Pepsi Pavilion in a vaporous mist composed of extremely fine water droplets that interacted with local atmospheric conditions.

Nakaya has since created fog installations all over the world, including projects for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Grand Palais in Paris, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and the Exploratorium in San Francisco, among others. She was also a consultant to the architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro on the Blur Building for the 2002 Swiss Expo, and has worked with numerous artists, including Trisha Brown, David Tudor, and Bill Viola, in music and performance settings.

Alongside her pioneering work with fog, Nakaya played a central role in the development of video art in Japan. She was a co-founder and key organizer of Video Hiroba, coordinating equipment access for the group’s first exhibition at the Sony Building in 1972. Fluent in English and closely connected to E.A.T., she became an important point of contact between the US and Japanese art scenes. She also produced the first Japanese translation of Michael Shamberg’s alternative media manual Guerrilla Television, and founded Video Gallery SCAN in Harajuku, which from 1980 to 1992 exhibited works by both Japanese and international artists, including Bill Viola, New York’s DCTV, founded by Keiko Tsuno, and Nam June Paik. Nakaya also participated in various video art exhibitions in New York and elsewhere, including the seminal Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto at MoMA in 1979, curated by Barbara London.

As an active video artist herself, Nakaya’s work has often addressed both natural and social ecologies. In her representative early work Friends of Minamata Victims — Video Diary (1972), she filmed a sit-in in front of the Chisso Corporation headquarters, where demonstrators were protesting the company’s mercury pollution of local waters. By playing the video back immediately to the protesters, Nakaya used the medium to heighten their awareness of the impact of their own actions.

A leading figure in contemporary Japanese art for the past fifty years, Fujiko Nakaya has built a reputation for her fog sculptures: works composed of clouds of extremely fine droplets that significantly, but ephemerally, transform the spaces through which the public moves.