What the Nobel Prize is to science and the Pullitzer Prize is to journalists, the Pritzker Architecture Prize awarded since 1979 is to architecture. Endowed by the American couple Jay and Cindy Pritzker, the list of prize winners is the Who's Who of the world's most important designers of recent decades. The most ground-breaking building of Vienna's recent past was also created by a winner of the Pritzker Prize. We're talking about Haas House opposite St. Stephen's Cathedral, whose glass façade provides a photo-suitable reflection of Vienna's famous symbol.

Pritzker Prize winner from Vienna

It was designed by the Austrian Hans Hollein, who passed away in 2014. Hollein won the Pritzker Prize in 1985. As befits visionary architecture, Haas House, which opened in 1990, caused a scandal at the time for its unusual stylistic idiom on one of the most prominent building sites in Vienna: modern architecture with large glazed surfaces in the middle of the historic center was a big no-no, came the response. Today, the people of Vienna love Haas House. Hollein used the building to show Vienna the way to a new architectural age. The Pritzker Prize winner was very active in downtown Vienna. He also designed the canopy of the Albertina (2003), the Mediatower on the Danube Canal (2001), and the shop unit of the jewelers Schullin on Kohlmarkt (1984).

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Vienna, city of stilts

The latest newcomer on the list of Pritzker Prize winners represented in Vienna is the French duo Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, who received the prize in 2021. In Vienna, Lacaton and Vassal were responsible for the fantastic interior design of the Café Restaurant Kaan in the MuseumsQuartier. The restaurant completed in 2001 impresses above all with its ceiling design in the form of oriental ceramics. The leading Italian architect Renzo Piano, who won in 1998, was also active in Vienna. Piano's Parkapartments am Belvedere, completed in 2018, thrust high into the sky on daring-looking stilts and dominate the skyline from afar. The complex comprises several high-rise blocks and includes apartments and a hotel. The exclusive group of Pritzker Prize winners also includes the Swiss team of architects made up of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. They won in 2001. Ten years previously, in 1991, the duo took part in the creation of a large residential complex of around 200 properties on Pilotengasse in the 22nd district, on the eastern edge of Vienna. Striking detail: quite a few of the single-family homes stand on stilts, just like Renzo Piano's Parkapartments. Zaha Hadid, winner of the Pritzker Prize in 2004, also opted for concrete stilts for one of her Viennese projects in order to create visual accents.

In 2006, the British-Iraqi architect, who passed away in 2016, thus created a sculpture-like overbuilding of Otto Wagner's historic Stadtbahn line at Spittelauer Lände in the 9th Viennese district. Far larger in scale and at least as spectacular as the stilt buildings is Hadid's contribution to the campus of the Vienna University of Economics and Business. An area that has been one of the figureheads for contemporary architecture in Vienna since 2013. Hadid designed the library building of the university site, whose overhanging façade forms the imposing center point of the campus.

Nouvel from the city’s edge to the center

Jean Nouvel, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2008, first worked on designs in Vienna in the late 1990s. At the time, the Frenchman realized a residential complex with an E-shaped footprint on Leopoldauer Strasse in the 21st Viennese district. At the beginning of the 2000s, Nouvel was among the ranks of architects who transformed several historic gasometers in the 11th district into a new residential district. With spectacular results: the venerable brick architecture of the gasometers meets a modern architectural vocabulary to produce a whole new field of tension. Nouvel's most recent design coup dates to the year 2010 and is located in a highly visible site on the bank of the Danube Canal in the center of Vienna: Nouvel Tower, which also goes by the name Design Tower, houses a hotel, shops and food outlets. Situated on the 18th floor is a panoramic restaurant designed by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. The restaurant's ceiling is one of the most spectacular sights that Vienna's restaurant architecture has to offer. A riot of colors that can even be easily seen with the naked eye from Schwedenplatz, on the other side of the Danube Canal.