Building across generations

In the week that Sir David Chipperfield won the Pritzker Architecture Prize — the most prestigious global prize in the profession — at a ceremony in Athens, Greece, he was also honoured as part of the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, which were taking place concurrently in the ancient city. He has lent his name, his time, his talent, and his inspiration to the initiative, aimed at creating a global culture that transmits knowledge and perpetuates the arts across and between generations.

As Sir David Adjaye, another architectural luminary and Rolex mentor, says, “It’s become a little like the Oscars — it’s definitely up there as one of the great things to be: becoming director of the Venice Biennale, winning the Pritzker Prize, being a Rolex mentor. It is now part of that garland of great things that one should do as a professional.”

Starting in 2002, the initiative has partnered 63 mentors and protégés from 40 countries in dance, film, literature, music, visual arts, architecture and, since 2020, in an open category to cultivate interdisciplinary work. I was delighted to have my path cross that of Chipperfield at both of these celebrations in Athens, especially considering the architectural heritage of this city, where the Parthenon dominates the landscape, firing imaginations and creating an architectural dialogue with the world for millennia.

The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative cultivates this rich transmission of information between the built environment and society by making architecture one of its pillars. Rolex mentors in architecture have included such luminaries as Kazuyo Sejima, Peter Zumthor, and Anne Lacaton. These mentors and their protégés have collaborated on projects in Niger, the UK, South Korea, and an area of Japan devastated by the 2011 tsunami, among many others. Protégés have also spearheaded master plans for entire neighbourhoods, from London to Lebanon.

To celebrate Rolex’s 20-year milestone they curated an architecture-driven group exhibition at Athens’s Benaki Museum / Pireos 138 with Rolex architecture protégés Sahel Al-Hiyari, Gloria Cabral, Mariam Issoufou Kamara, Simon Kretz, and Yang Zhao. These exhibits bore witness to a multiplicity of responses to their own environments, the question of how best to live now, and what that means in terms of the spaces we create and the environments we cohabit — all of which was both fascinating and timely.

Speaking of his mentorship role in the Rolex initiative, he explained, “Architecture is a profoundly collaborative profession, and there is a vast community rich with talent eager to play a bigger role. Too often, the rivalrous nature of our profession puts us in competition with one another, rather than emphasising our common purpose and shared responsibility. “Mentoring is an opportunity to revitalise our approach, to step outside our individual tasks, to share the lessons of our experience and to reflect on the nature of our practice. We must take this opportunity to consider the wider legacy that we are leaving to the next generation, connecting with the excitement, the energy, and the commitment that we find in the protégés. This initiative is a unique opportunity to emphasise the importance of dialogue, exchange, and collaboration.”

Chipperfield also discussed the paradox inherent in the business of architecture. “It is an incredibly collaborative process, but over the past 30 years it has ended up being increasingly identified by singular things — singular buildings, singular architects. We know that, as we deal more and more with the issue of our built environment, the challenge is not necessarily the singular building. The crises we have are to do with the bits between the buildings: the gaps, the spaces, the public spaces, the gaps in terms of responsibilities, the gaps in terms of administrations, the gaps between ministries — because they don’t talk to each other, because they [don’t] see it as a shared problem. We are going to need to learn to work in very different ways. Therefore, my generation looks with great expectancy and wishes towards the next generation, not to imitate us at all but to learn from what we know, from where we sit and how we can transfer that.”

He continued, “Of course, the paradox is that, as a young architect, probably the only thing you want to do is to build something. We get our thrills as architects out of building physical things. That’s our reward, that’s our stuff… and it’s also our career, because we have to be noticed in this slightly rivalrous profession, where in order to be commissioned we have to be identified. As such, this accentuates the individual to the detriment of the collaborative and the collective thing that we can offer as architects to the next generation. But I’m very encouraged by how the next generation is thinking in different ways, and I think it’s very indicative that these practitioners have decided that they need to not only talk to us but also talk among themselves, and that is a really fascinating evolution, and probably the unexpected evolution of this programme — unexpected but very necessary.

• From the 2023/2024 edition of Wanted Watches, Jewellery and Luxury.