DAVID CHIPPERFIELD

Tucked among the unassuming stone-fronted buildings of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, northwest Spain—the traditional end point of the Camino de Santiago, where pilgrims arrive at the cathedral to visit the tomb of St. James—is an unlikely outpost of one of the most influential architects working today.¹ For much of his career, David Chipperfield has worked between London and Berlin where his internationally renowned practice has gained a reputation for considered, conscious architecture: offices, housing, civic buildings and, above all else, cultural projects that integrate their historical context and local culture. But in recent years, Galicia has become a working base for the architect. It’s a place he knows well—he’s been vacationing here for more than 30 years, after having designed a seafront retreat in nearby Corrubedo in the 1990s.

When it opened in 2022, the Santiago de Compostela office joined a network of studios in Milan, Shanghai, Berlin and London, where Chipperfield first founded his practice, David Chipperfield Architects, in 1985. Over the subsequent four decades, he became recognized for major commissions such as the restoration of Berlin’s Neues Museum, Turner Contemporary in the UK, and the St. Louis Art Museum expansion in the US; he received a knighthood in 2010 and the Pritzker Prize in 2023. Chipperfield’s work now spans Europe, Asia and North America, with projects in the works for Australia and Africa.

This corner of Spain—perched above Portugal and bordered on two sides by the Atlantic—has a distinctly un-Iberian climate, and it’s an overcast February afternoon when I speak to Chipperfield at his practice’s Santiago office.² It’s located within Casa RIA, a former 19th-century sanatorium in the historic center of the city that is also home to Fundación RIA—a regional agency Chipperfield established in 2017 to support environmental and spatial planning initiatives across Galicia. Part workshop, research hub, exhibition space and public restaurant, the building operates less as a headquarters than as a civic platform, with projects running the gamut from car parking to forestry issues. 

Seated at a conference table in one of the meeting rooms, framed by orderly white bookshelves, Chipperfield speaks openly, pausing at times to choose his words carefully—aware, perhaps, of the responsibilities that come with articulating ideas beyond the scale of a single building: “Ten years ago, I was invited by the then-president [of Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo] to give some advice to the government about planning,” he says, explaining how he came to be based in Santiago. “That turned into a decision to create a foundation which coincided with a shift in the architectural profession—a need to think about how we contribute to social and environmental issues, not just the commercial ones.”

The city—the political capital of Galicia, a semiautonomous region—offers the foundation direct engagement with a government that holds significant administrative power. It’s an area that has long grappled with rural depopulation, land use and economic transition, and these questions shape the foundation’s work.³ “A typical architectural practice waits for projects to happen, and then designs them,” Chipperfield explains. “Whereas the foundation team works in the community—we stimulate projects. It’s a different idea of the role of the architect.”

The building itself is part of this experiment: a testing ground for ideas that privilege reuse over replacement, collective process over singular authorship. There is no grand entrance or overt branding to announce Casa RIA (named after the Galician rias, or inlets, that punctuate the coast). Instead, the foundation has embedded itself discreetly into the historic fabric of the town, opposite the municipal food market and overlooking a public park. The ground floor houses an exhibition space open to the public; upstairs, a conference room—“a big living room,” as Chipperfield puts it—hosts regular talks and debates, and the top floors accommodate visiting students. A working garden supplies produce for the community-focused restaurant directed by chef Iago Pazos, reflecting the central role that food plays in the foundation’s thinking about territory and sustainability.⁴

Despite this emphasis on collective process, Chipperfield himself has become synonymous with a particular architectural sensibility. His work has come to represent a counterpoint to the era of architectural spectacle and exuberance, offering instead restraint, material discipline and continuity. Though now best known for his work with historic structures and cultural institutions, Chipperfield’s path to prominence was less direct than it might appear in retrospect.

Born in 1953 and raised on a farm in Devon in the southwest of the UK, Chipperfield was initially drawn to veterinary medicine, but lacked the necessary grades. He entered architecture via art school before studying at London’s Architectural Association in the 1970s. Early roles with Richard Rogers and Norman Foster exposed him to the emerging language of high-tech architecture, but his own practice has evolved along a more restrained trajectory. The UK offered limited opportunities for the fledgling architect, and a series of shop designs and retail concepts for Issey Miyake took him to work in Japan. He set up his temporary Tokyo office in 1987 at the height of the bubble economy and completed three small buildings—the Gotoh Museum in Chiba, the Toyota Auto Kyoto, and the Matsumoto Corporation Headquarters in Okayama.

Having found his feet in Japan, Chipperfield later returned to Europe with a growing confidence. In contrast to the formal exuberance of his mentors, he had developed a language defined by sobriety, continuity and calm. And increasingly, his work—including a cemetery extension in Venice and museum and civic projects in Milan and Salerno—became concerned with how new architecture might sit alongside that which already exists.

Yet, as Chipperfield is quick to point out, the idea that architecture should consider itself part of a broader civic whole was hardly a new approach. Venice, he suggests, offers the clearest example: “If you go to St. Mark’s Square in Venice, your perception is of quite a uniform space. But those buildings were created by different architects over 150 years. Why is there conformity? Because each architect felt that there was a responsibility between individual action and the collective representation of what one does.”

In 2022, he added his own chapter to St. Mark’s Square through the restoration of the 16th-century Procuratie Vecchie, the arcaded building at the square’s northern edge. After it had been closed to the public for centuries and used primarily as offices, Chipperfield’s practice carefully reconfigured the structure to house the Human Safety Net foundation, opening its upper floors for the first time in 500 years.⁵ The intervention is restrained but exacting: Historic fabric is repaired rather than replaced, and new insertions are precise yet deferential.

In Berlin, these sensitivities were tested at a different scale. The German capital is a place where reconstruction, memory and continuity are lived realities, and questions about how to build with history are part of the civic conversation and carry a greater emotional charge. Chipperfield’s restoration of the war-damaged Neues Museum, undertaken with Julian Harrap Architects, would push his ideas to their limits—and ultimately come to define his engagement with history and memory. 

Originally designed by Friedrich August Stüler and completed in 1855, the Neues Museum suffered extensive bombing during the Second World War and stood as a ruin for more than half a century, largely forgotten by East Germany. After the Berlin Wall fell and the country was reunited, its reconstruction took on national significance. Chipperfield won the international competition to restore and complete the museum in 1997 with a design that approached the project as an act of repair—edging out Frank Gehry’s entry, which treated the ruin as an opportunity for reinvention. 

Rather than reconstructing what had been lost, Chipperfield proposed stabilizing the surviving structure and completing it using new brickwork, concrete and pale stone that would sit harmoniously alongside the original fabric. In the finished scheme, bullet-scarred columns have been preserved, fragments of frescoes dissolve into bare wall and new staircases thread through rooms where ceilings once collapsed.

Although the museum is celebrated as a benchmark in contemporary conservation today, the approach was controversial at the time. Many questioned why the building could not simply be rebuilt as it once was—a response Chipperfield acknowledges as “logical and emotionally understandable.” “If you accept that everything which has survived is original, then you have to consider what it means to repair it,” he explains. “If it was a painting or a sculpture, you wouldn’t immediately cover everything as if it were new again. The priority must be the surviving material—and that material must remain readable.”

The project demanded a prolonged process of dialogue with curators, politicians and the public in order to gain consensus; the five years of planning saw protests against the project from heritage groups such as the “Save Museumsinsel” initiative, who argued that the visible integration of war-damaged remnants “defaced” or “downscaled” the original 19th-century structure.⁶

“This was the architect not being a sort of forceful genius—coming with a vision and telling everybody that’s where it’s got to be—but instead being a leader of discussion and debate,” Chipperfield says, reflecting on how the decade-long project challenged traditional notions of architectural authorship. “The reward was that it meant a lot more to people than it might have done if we had just done exactly what they wanted in the first place, but it required persuasion and engagement.”

“Anything which has been built by somebody else should have some value and significance. Before we knock it down, we should take it seriously.”

The experience proved career-defining for both Chipperfield and his studio, marking his emergence as a major international architect. He opened an office in Berlin in 1998 after securing the Neues Museum project, and the city has remained an important base for the practice ever since. The office today—housed in a former piano factory in Mitte—is also home to the practice’s product design team, David Chipperfield Design.⁷ His subsequent commission for the James-Simon-Galerie on the city’s Musuem Island further embedded him within Berlin’s cultural landscape.

Chipperfield argues that architecture must be understood not only as the production of buildings, but as part of a wider cultural and material continuum. Across projects in historic contexts, his practice regards the existing urban fabric as something to be stabilized, interpreted and continued. As with the Neues Museum, any new interventions operate in dialogue with what already exists. At the Royal Academy in London, for example, an enclosed concrete bridge was used to form a new public route between two listed buildings—Burlington House and Burlington Gardens. And in Shanghai, the Rockbund Art Museum transformed the 1930s Royal Asiatic Society Building, China’s first public museum, through careful repair. “Anything which has been built by somebody else should have some value and significance,” he says. “Before we knock it down, we should take it seriously.”

Such thinking has particular resonance in an era shaped by climate urgency. A growing awareness of materials as finite resources—and the embodied carbon released through demolition—has reinforced the importance of Chipperfield’s approach. “There’s only one thing we absolutely know: that repurposing an existing building is better than building new,” he explains. “If you can reuse a building, you’re already in front of the game.”

Like food, he argues, architecture also reflects where things come from and how they are understood over time. It can be treated as a commodity, a form of real estate, or as part of a shared cultural knowledge about how we live and use resources. The tension between these two positions has shaped much of the built environment in recent decades, often privileging market value and individual expression over collective continuity.

Architecture, he argues, is inseparable from memory and meaning—an idea he articulated when he accepted his Pritzker Prize—the most prestigious award in architecture—in 2023:⁸ “As an architect, I’m in a way the guardian of meaning, memory and heritage. Cities are historical records, and architecture after a certain moment is a historical record. Cities are dynamic, so they don’t just sit there, they evolve. And in that evolution, we take buildings away and we replace them with others. We choose ourselves, and the concept of only protecting the best is not enough. It’s also a matter of protecting character and qualities that reflect the richness of the evolution of a city.”

Postwar architects of the 1950s and ’60s—the generation who taught Chipperfield—were deeply involved in shaping cities and public institutions, contributing to housing programs, universities and cultural infrastructure as part of national rebuilding efforts. By the late 20th century, however, the profession had largely retreated into designing within predefined commercial, political and planning constraints. “We learned that decisions that are made in planning can be much more important than the decisions that we make by the time the problem arrives on our desk,” Chipperfield explains. 

Fundación RIA seeks to extend the methodology developed at the Neues Museum into the civic and territorial frameworks that shape development itself. In Galicia, the foundation reengages with planning decisions and the conditions in which architecture takes place, creating platforms for collective reflection and operating as a forum for analysis, mediation and long-term thinking around the often invisible decisions that shape the region’s landscapes, towns and infrastructures. “The work we’re doing here is a continuation,” he says. “We’re trying to do things on behalf of others—and sometimes they don’t want you to. But this is a house of discussion and dialogue.”

Recent projects include planning the integration of circular forestry, agriculture and livestock systems into multifunctional landscapes in the Barbanza Mountains; transforming a traffic-dominated road in the nearby coastal town of Palmeira into civic space through a masterplan developed with port users and residents; and piloting sugar kelp cultivation in the Ría de Arousa to explore its potential for carbon capture, nutrient removal and economic diversification.

Chipperfield sees this shift in his role as an architect as a natural consequence of the later stage of his career. “I’m in an extremely privileged position in my life and my profession now,” he acknowledges. “I’ve received the Pritzker Prize—I don’t really need to build more individual projects to establish a name for myself. I’m comfortable, so perhaps I can think more broadly than I might have at 35. I can experiment a little, and now there are 18 young architects [working within the Fundación RIA] who are part of this experiment too.”

Is he thinking about his legacy, or is it simply the next logical step in his career? “I’m doing it out of pure pleasure,” he smiles. “It’s totally indulgent on one level—but I enjoy it.”

“There’s only one thing we absolutely know: that repurposing an existing building is better than building new. If you can reuse a building, you’re already in front of the game.”