This was originally written for a seminar taught by Lisa Hsieh at the Ohio State University (it’s been heavily edited since then), but it seems appropriate for this format as well. It’s a bit longer than usual, but I’ve been sitting on this piece for a while and want to just get it out there. I’ve been a bit afraid to publish it because at the moment it feels a bit like Walter Pichler is my own personal hero that no one else is talking about. I’m sure I’ll get over that. Here goes…

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[Architecture] is born of the most powerful thoughts. For men it will be a compulsion, they will stifle in it or they will live – live, as I mean the word. […] [Architecture] has no consideration for stupidity and weakness. It never serves. It crushes those who cannot bear it. […] Machines have taken possession of [architecture] and human beings are now merely tolerated in its domain […] [1]

A statement of singular nihilism, unabashed iconoclasm; a statement Ulrich Conrads once called “the most absolute thesis” in all twentieth century architecture.[2] Austrian sculptor and architect Walter Pichler wrote these words in 1962, on the eve of an exhibition on which he collaborated with fellow Viennese architect Hans Hollein. Titled “Absolute Architecture,” the exhibition added two new voices to the growing chorus of dissent aimed at derailing architectural functionalism. For Pichler and Hollein, architecture was not what it enables, nor what in encloses, but what it is. Architecture is a thing, and it can take whatever form an architect wishes. Given this seemingly impossible assignment, Pichler and Hollein developed a series of underground buildings, modeled by Pichler in bronze and concrete. These underground environments were to have extensive environmental controls so that their position underground would not matter. The two were at this time fascinated by such simulation and the media by which it is accomplished. Though the weight of these first models ended with “Absolute Architecture,” both Pichler and Hollein recycled their conceptual bases in subsequent investigations.

For Hollein, this took the form of literal environmental simulators like his Non-Physical Environment Pill (1967) and later Svobodair Spray (1971), both of which were hypothetical propositions about the power of environmental simulation. Pichler also experimented with such hypotheses in the late sixties, most transparently in the works of his “Prototypes” exhibition of 1967. These strange objects critique new media’s ability to induce laziness and atrophy. Three of these works in particular—TV Helmet/Portable Living Room, Small Room, and Intensivbox—form a kind of suite, all taking roughly the form of an isolation chamber and including media inputs. For Pichler, it seems, media isn’t architecture, hence he makes it architecture by creating armatures to embody its physical presence.

Walter Pichler, "TV Helmet/Portable Living Room," 1967

These works are also a critique of his one-time collaborator Hans Hollein’s ironic assertion that “everything is architecture.” TV Helmet/Portable Living Room (1967) and Small Room (1967) are to be worn, while the unrealized Intensivbox is a spherical chamber into which a subject is slid on a track. These isolating simulators remove one from a given reality and can be seen as the ultimate conclusion of technology’s encroachment on the body. Constructed of plastic and embedded with television sets and speakers, these helmets enhance the television experience to the detriment of all else. Pichler hoped to isolate and insulate himself (and his viewers) from the pitfalls of consumerism and media obsession, but in his helmets this took the form of a literal representation of such pitfalls. The “consumer” is isolated from her environment, but within the helmet only media are permitted as input.

Walter Pichler, "Small Room," 1967

For Pichler, media are far from participatory but instead somnambulating and hypnotizing, pulling humanity’s attention away from its greatest attributes. Instead of making human abilities more numerous, like prosthetics, the Portable Living Room and Small Room disable a subject from moving with their usual acuity. Unlike the other helmets designed by his Viennese contemporaries, Pichler’s don’t provide more experience or more engagement, but instead subtract. It’s terribly ironic, therefore, that Pichler subtitles his piece “Portable Living Room,” because it is certainly not portable, and at best a shoddy simulation of a living room. The Portable Living Room enables a person to remain motionless, separating them from their obligations and necessities to simply be entertained. Pichler sees media not as enabling but disabling, entrapping, enabling of nothing more than laziness.

Walter Pichler, Drawing for "Intensivbox," 1967

Pichler’s critique mirrors German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” Like Heidegger, Pichler rentains a rigorous skepticism towards technology. Speaking of techne, Heidegger writes, “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral […].”[3] Pichler’s provocation is that if one let’s media (or technology more generally) isolate and insulate, it will be to the detriment of other abilities. If a helmet is a Portable Living Room, it means the only important part of the room is the television. Perhaps Pichler foresaw the perpetuation of television’s war on education, its wholesale adoption of entertainment and its denigration of objectivity, choosing to critique these regressions with ironic constructs enabling television’s conquest of attention at the expense of all other sensory function. As television becomes an ever-more self-referential and solipsistic media, early critiques like Pichler’s have only gained poignancy.

Many today sit idle at their terminals or on their sofas for extended periods, limiting the need for handicraft and patience. In Pichler’s world, these traits are paramount, and any device or medium that disables them is worthy of demonization. Pichler doesn’t see technology as an enabler of the strenuous life so much as a preventer. Like the simulation machines in the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix series, Pichler’s helmets and immersive environments provide an armature within which movement is unnecessary.

Simulation Pod, from "The Matrix," Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999

Instead of a destruction of the technology he demonizes, Pichler constructs ridiculous analogs to their abilities. If television provides a subtle escape from the ordinary, Pichler’s helmets enhance this ability to the point of absurdity. Pichler’s environmental simulators aren’t portable, and in fact limit one’s range of motion quite significantly. Portable Living Room is the best illustration of this fact, it’s elaborate counterweighted system protruding from both sides of the subject’s head obtrusively. It doesn’t fold, doesn’t retract, and doesn’t provide anything but sensory input. One puts it on because of a desire to be isolated. With his “Prototypes,” Pichler definitively states an interest in isolation, a concern that would come to dominate his career thereafter. It is almost as if he is rehearsing a retreat, one that would come to fruition in the mid-seventies, when Pichler indeed retreated from public life to his property at St. Martin’s in the Tyrol region of western Austria, a place dominated by its geography, removed physically and psychologically from the bustle of modern Vienna where Pichler received his artistic training. Returning only to exhibit and to sell his drawings, Pichler remains free to explore and create at his own pace and in his own idiom. These drawing sales have funded an increasingly isolated practice, concerned with sculpting and with constructing ever-more-complex armatures and environments for said sculptures.

Perhaps calling his buildings environments sells short his activity. His constructs are worlds, worlds in which his work is isolated from both critique and the media-obsessed culture it critiques. They are in fact alternate—but not virtual—realities in which his work can remain indefinitely. The “Prototypes” can also be thought of as such. More than mere simulators or enhancers, they offer the subject another world to inhabit, portable or otherwise. Pichler must have imagined himself within them, isolated from the laborious requirements of contemporary life. But ultimately this subtle escape wasn’t enough, leading Pichler back to the Tyrolean Alps, free from his obligations in Vienna and free to investigate the kind of craft- and skill-based sculptural techniques he felt technology would eventually preclude.

[2] Conrads wrote this in his introduction to “Absolute Architecture,” written in 1970. Programs and Manifestoes, 181.

[3] Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977): 4.

Where: Bela Dubby

Among the things that so fascinate me about the work of German architect and designer Jurgen Mayer is his obsession with the data protection patterns we all find within secure mail from our banks, our employers and government agencies. His recent monograph contained a scattering of reproduced envelopes, inserted as chapter dividers but also as reminders of Mayer’s preoccupation. But why don’t these willfully decorative and saturated surfaces somehow make their way into his architectural design? Why are all his walls so blank?

Mensa Moltke, Jurgen Mayer H. Architects

The answer might be that Mayer uses the security pattern as a gambit, a metaphorical security device for his design process. He obfuscates the willfulness and specificity of his forms with data protection patterns, covering his tracks by saturating shape with color.

Mayer’s forms are a registration of absent forces, forces he feels no need to map or describe. Instead of the explanations and justifications (i.e. diagrams) that so obsess his European and American contemporaries, he prefers to have a signature and stick with it, ignoring or remaining intentionally naive to the need for clarification. His designs retain an element of mystery – a mystique – that enables them to overcome specificity and look almost universal or transportable, something out of science fiction or the future.

Home for Children and Adolescents, Jurgen Mayer H. Architects

Another of Mayer’s preoccupations is the use of thermosensitive materials, a concept repeated in most all his gallery installations over the past decade. Similar to the data protection pattern, one could see these disappearing traces as metaphors for the way Mayer works. The traces of his design process have a life span, they don’t matter after a given period, at which time the thing itself takes precedence. The ends exceed the means.

"In Heat" Exhibition, Jurgen Mayer (Henry Urbach Gallery)

Together these two preoccupations serve as purifying filters for Mayer to act within a discipline too concerned with means and not enough with ends. Diagrams and narratives of design have become unnecessary encumbrances for Mayer, and these material preoccupations betray a subconscious intent. He speaks of data protection as “a text without meaning,” but that Eisenmanian phrase must merely be a hangover from Mayer’s education. The patterns and traces in his design work insulate him from the theoretical and linguistic concerns of the previous generation, and demonstrate what makes him distinct from other contemporary designers.

Once upon a time there existed a genre of popular music collectively know as “Post-Rock.” It was loud, it was cerebral, it was novel. But most of all it felt important, like your big brother in a rock band was now all grown up. Undeniably “grown-up” influences popped up as fluidly and organically as did rock n’ roll. Krautrock, Free Jazz, Minimalism… no style was safe from Post-Rock’s penetrating eye.

Post-Rock cleansed the palette of many a Gen-X soul burned by the popularization and ultimate downfall of grunge. Bands like Chicago’s Tortoise, Glasgow’s Mogwai, and those released on Montreal’s Constellation Records (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Silver Mt. Zion) seemed more than adequate mediums for the introduction of new stylistic, rhythmic and melodic tendencies to popular music. Their albums challenged the limits of volume and the attention span of their listeners in ways traditional pop had never attempted; tracks spanned fifteen minutes, crescendos blasted your eardrums, and a general malaise often threatened to break one’s mood.

But oh how far the star has fallen. Post-Rock is fading into obscurity, and I for one don’t think it should.

When online music-review juggernaut Pitchfork.com recently released their list of the top 200 albums of this decade, the editors seem to have completely blocked Post-Rock from their collective memories. With the exception of Iceland’s Sigur Ros (arguably a genre all their own), Pitchfork has overlooked Post-Rock. No Standards, no Rock Action, no Lift Your Skinny Fists…? Really? All of these albums were critically acclaimed, and Pitchfork itself gave Standards a 9.2 upon release. What happened?

This is indicative of a trend in music criticism toward an obsession with vocals and lyrics. One might blame this shortsightedness on the rise of Rap. When radio is dominated by a genre whose players are pure lyricists, it becomes harder to appreciate an instrumental. Post-Rock is the victim. But why must we keep the faith? Why is Post-Rock still relevant?

For many, Post-Rock was (and still is) a gateway. Personally, it made me care about and get into all those “grown-up” influences it was tossing about so haphazardly. Without Post-Rock, I may never have discovered artists as wonderful as Lee “Scratch” Perry, Steve Reich or Neu!; I might never have noticed the sound of the studio in my headphones, and my music life wouldn’t be as rich.

Let’s not forget Post-Rock. It’s good for us. Much better, anyways, than a genre rife with misogyny and homophobia. It has plenty to say, it just chooses to do so musically.

What is Cleveland’s recommended daily intake of architecture?

All You Can Eat posits that Cleveland is of a high metabolic rate, that it burns through ideas faster than they can be generated. In response, All You Can Eat presents a binge of possible futures excessive in scale and exhaustive in scope, ideas both raw and cooked, half-baked and hair-brained. All You Can Eat is a an event/exhibition to be held at The Sculpture Center in Fall 2009. A formal announcement and call for entries is forthcoming.

More information, in addition to the call for entries and a press release are available at: postarchitecturejournal.wordpress.com

Mountain Dwellings, Bjarke Ingels Group

The Mountain Dwellings were completed last year in Copenhagen and published widely, but have remained immune from real critical analysis; thousands of words have been written about this unconventional building, but far too many of them have been gushing. I too think Bjarke Ingels Group’s building is deserving of praise, but by extension it requires more attention, closer reading. Projects like Mountain, however, are resistant to close reading. Their details aren’t often what one might call tectonic but instead laissez faire. They leave the talking to the program. There are things to read, just not what Ken Frampton might look to first.

Mountain’s details have the appearance not of carelessness but ease, as if designed to be ignored. On the terraces, vines are meant to grow over and cover the architect’s handiwork, in other places it’s obfuscated by paint. A perfect example are the circulation hallways, where every material is saturated with a bright, glossy color that doesn’t permit one to scrutinize their interconnection. Furthermore, the metal panels along the circumference of the building seem to refuse to take a position. Are they volume or surface? Material or dematerializing? None of these seem worthy of much scrutiny.

One must instead scrutinize diagrams. Mountain, after all, is a constructed diagram in the best possible sense, a representation of its social and architectural agendas in built form. It’s a social experiment collapsing suburban dream and urban reality, but also a formal experiment based on the stepped massing BIG has so favored since their amiable split from JDS.

Mountain Dwellings, Bjarke Ingels Group

These two PLOT successor firms have continued work on what might be called a “Powerpoint Formalism,” dependent upon narrative diagrams to explain (but not justify) their designs’ ostentation. There is an important distinction to be made between explanation and justification here: justification would mean that the solutions developed by Ingels and de Smedt are logical or rational, based on statements of fact, when in fact they are not. Their logic is fuzzy at best, their calculations vague.

The point of fuzzy logic is to make an argument financiers can’t deny, to “cook the numbers” such that a project can’t be dismantled by value engineering. Lewis Tsurumaki and Lewis may have best encapsulated this approach in their neologism “surrational,” describing those instances when the rational, taken to extreme, becomes absurd and therefore surreal. Mountain is nothing if not surreal.

Mountain Dwellings, Bjarke Ingels Group

Mountain’s formal conjecture cuts to the core of Modernism’s default rectangularity. A flat roof, it says, doesn’t satisfy contemporary needs. It questions the rectangle’s ability to make all equal and also its ecological performance. Mountain’s form in incredibly specific, but it’s strategies (roof terraces and a stepped massing) are transferrable. Like Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation before it, Mountain makes a lifestyle rather than just a building, its argument is green without being greenwash, a rethinking of typological models rather than a reskinning with technology. It’s also cheeky. Denmark has no mountains. A mountain lifestyle there is one so different it nearly constitutes a category error. In order for the lifestlye to be transposed it had to be simulated.

But Mountain is no mere simulation. It makes an argument in the affirmative, constructing a fully-formed alternative lifestyle within the confines of its site. No small feat. PLOT’s earlier VM Housing next door didn’t transform the urban lifestyle thoroughly enough, so BIG had to go further. They’re always going further. I for one can’t wait to see what they do next.

Mountain Dwellings, Bjarke Ingels Group

Villa NM, UN Studio

Remember the Villa NM? UN Studio’s house for upstate New York, completed a couple years ago and destroyed by fire not a year after its widespread publication? Haven’t we heard this one before? An impossibly pristine architectural vision is destroyed beyond recognition, only to come to prominence later in life? Like many lost architectures before it, the Villa NM seemed destined for destruction. A little bit too white, too shiny, too pristine to exist in perpetuity. Something like a Barcelona Pavilion for the age of Photoshop, in more ways than one.

Like Mies van der Rohe’s genre-defining collage of space and material, UN Studio’s Villa could serve as a watershed in the brief history of our digital architecture. Odd, then, that it should have its origins in such a simple diagrammatic model, a morphing of plane from horizontal to vertical. So much contemporary architecture is based on over-the-top complexity and excess, but it’s transformative diagram might have more power as an advance over the three modernist masters’ transformations: Wright’s blurring of inside to outside in his Prairie houses, Le Corbusier’s liberation of the ground in Villa Savoye, and Mies van der Rohe’s performative staging of the Farnsworth House.

Villa NM, UN Studio

UN Studio’s move, then, is the contemporary zero-gravity equation of wall and floor, the single-surface so central to the last two decades of design, but in simple, digestible form. Along with the Yokohama Port Terminal by FOA and perhaps OMA’s Educatorium at Utrecht, the Villa NM assembles a demonstrative canon of sorts, illustrations of the possibilities of the new, folded diagram of the twenty-first century. What does all this have to do with Photoshop, you might ask? It’s a question of collage.

At some point in the nineties, Rem Koolhaas coined the term “Photoshopism” to describe a group of new techniques overturning the hegemony of collage over post-modernity. If transparency and pure form (Analytical Cubism) permeated modernism, the logic of collage (Synthetic Cubism) has permeated all the movements of postmodern architecture since the seventies. Then came Photoshop, the logic of which overturns collage through the instrumentalization of blur, dodge, burn, pixelation, texture, et cetera et cetera.

Villa NM, UN Studio

The wall-to-floor diagram is a blur and a morph, formal as well as conceptual, social as well as political. It’s a connection between the three modernist diagrams, morphing between Wright, Corb and Mies, conflating their political agendas into a postmodern cocktail of libertarianism and socialism and performance. But then one night in early 2008 it disappeared, at least as far as further photographic documentation is concerned. All we have are some overworked photographs, some drawings and a digital model or two. There will be no Savoye-esque farm storage phase, no pilgrimage cycle, no rebirth. It was over before if got started. But maybe that’s perfect for this materialistic, media-saturated age, in which planned obsolescence is a problem as well as a solution.

Such obsolescence was part of the reason Barcelona Pavilion, along with Alvar Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion for New York and Melnikov’s USSR Pavilion among others, became so canonical. Their immortality was perpetuated by the unsustainable level of polish captured by photographs. It’s terribly premature to canonize the Villa NM, but this is just the internet after all, and the halflife of this post is most likely even shorter than the house itself.

Villa NM, UN Studio

Last night I attended the opening of Coop Himmelb(l)au’s Beyond the Blue exhibition at the Wexner Center in Columbus, a retrospective of forty years of work by Wolf Prix and his firm taking the form of a large model collection and detailed displays on the Akron Art Museum and Musee de Confluences in Lyon, France. It was a nice distraction from much current architectural discussion uncomfortably dominated by the economy. 

Musee de Confluences, Lyon. Rendering: Coop Himmelb(l)au

While it’s always nice to see projects in detail, Coop’s model collection was the heart of the exhibition, encapsulating a position statement I’ve not heard Prix make before, namely that his work isn’t about sculptural form, but creating public space. This point was underlined by placing the models not at a normal level, but on a pair of oversized pedestals to force viewing them as a city all their own. It made a convincing case, but unfortunately the models I was personally most interested in seeing (specifically those from the mid-80s) were near the center of these tables, out of effective viewing range. This “model city” was accompanied by a video of interviews with Prix, highlighting the projects in the show and some of his process. 

Though it seems a bit ridiculous for Prix to suggest that projects as ostentatious as the Musee de Confluences or the BMW Welt in Munich are driven by public space rather than form, the exhibition aims to convince us. The models show that they do indeed provide such space, but the question of ownership is overlooked. Can a corporate-owned indoor space really provide the kind of interactions and surprise as a Viennese platz? I’m hardly convinced. 

BMW Welt, Munich. Photo: Abitare

The opening was marked by a conversation between Prix and consulting curator Jeff Kipnis. Their discussion ranged from softball questions — who his biggest inspirations were (Keith Richards) and the reasons for the firm’s name (a plane ride in 1968, and lots of drinks) — to more poignant and unanswerable ones, cutting to the depths of the now decade-long debate around “starchitecture.” 

Perhaps the most interesting thing Prix said concerned his process. “The most vulnerable moment in architecture is the moment of design,” he said, and in order to transform architecture, one must open up that moment to forces outside architecture. This realization led to things like the blindfolded sketching he used in the eighties. Though unsuccessful in producing an architecture that changes as rapidly and easily as clouds (his stated intent), Prix has produced some highly unconventional forms since this transformation. The versatility of his language is another question, however.

Often diagnosed as a peculiarly Viennese architect, a product of the milieu that also shaped Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler, Prix was also asked how well such a specific language travelled, specifically to Akron. What, after all, can a contextually-uninformed Austrian contribute to Northeast Ohio? Prix had no answer.

This seems to me to be the central problem of the kind of cultural imperialism architects have proffered since Bilbao. We’ve been blind to the emptiness of the stars, content to merely import architecture rather than fostering it at home. This has to change, and it will. For now, however, I’m content with the occasional ostentatious distraction such as this exhibition provided, a respite from the recession blues.

Beyond the Blue is on view at the Wexner Center through the end of July.

The architect who proposes to run with technology knows now that he will be in fast company, and that, in order to keep up, he may have to emulate the Futurists and discard his whole cultural load, including the professional garments by which he is recognized as an architect. If, on the other hand, he decides not to do this, he may find that a technological culture has decided to go on without him. [Reyner Banham, 1960]

I’ve just finished reading Banham’s masterly introduction to early modern architecture, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, and was struck in particular by the above quotation. It seems to encapsulate the central problematic of not only that heady age, but our own.

 The choice, as Banham frames it, is between Futurism and Academicism, between a framework emptied of history and one overflowing with it. Banham takes for granted (his later work notwithstanding) a mythical future age in which technology and architecture are in symbiosis, one in which Buckminster Fuller has been declared prophet and messiah, and the Futurist dream of disposable buildings has been realized. But it seems this future would also require the dissolving of disciplinary boundaries.

Intervening years have found architecture unwilling to submit, instead refocusing on the discipline’s “interiority” through several iterations of postmodernism. In the end, Banham’s was interpreted as just one more piece of what Manfredo Tafuri would come to call “operative criticism,” a motivated and subjective history meant to direct rather than document. But this Structuralist hyperbole has long since become untenable, and perhaps it’s time to reconsider Banham’s polemic. 

Though it’s quite clear architecture and technology have maintained their delicate balance since Banham wrote these words, change has come in recent years to representation, not just realization. As many have observed, the modern movement was brought on by a critical mass of advancements to construction, but the technology of representation remained the same throughout it’s period of dominance. Like construction technologies, the digitization of drawing cannot help but have a revolutionary effect on architecture. 

A more apt temporal model for the transformation currently underway might be the Renaissance, when technologies advanced to a degree that drawings could be reproduced in print. Mario Carpo has written that because of this shift, “the architectural forms being built throughout Europe changed in a sudden and radical way–but without any corresponding change in either materials or construction procedures.” (Architecture in the Age of Printing, 5) 

That being said, what has Banham’s analysis to teach us? In short, to quit being so stubborn and acquiesce. Resistance to the onset of new methods is not only futile but untenable. 

Banham faults the moderns for inadequately transforming architecture and ultimately returning to old modes of thought and composition. Change in construction methods was inadequate to transform modes so deeply ingrained. The modern movement fell short of transforming architecture at a structural level, maintaining the conventions of pictorial representation and of line, plane and volume as compositional elements. It’s revolution was both social and aesthetic, but failed to change the way we conceive and describe our buildings. 

One might say technologies of digital representation have already allowed some to conceive of an architecture of points, an architecture no longer based on two dimensional drawings but on descriptions as complex as the buildings themselves. Greg Lynn says that this is the age of calculus, and perhaps he’s right. But we can’t fall into the same trap as the moderns, whose machine-mania was based on only a base understanding of the machines they championed; they jumped to conclusions, and ultimately only represented rather than transformed.

But there comes a certain amount of amateurism whenever architects proclaim an interest in anything but buildings; we are ultimately laypersons at everything else. Perhaps the expectation that architecture be transformed is based on a less-than-complete understanding of architecture itself.

In his last completed essay “A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture,” Banham posits that architecture, as he understood it, is a mode of designing, one “recognized in its output but unknown in its contents.” (A Critic Writes, 293) Architecture, by his definition, isn’t building design, nor even “good” building design, but a mysterious modum architectum in which some makers of buildings act. He states that architecture, after all, isn’t defined by what is done, but how it’s done; Architecture, with a capital A, is only “the making of drawings for buildings in the manner practiced in Europe since the Renaissance,” and nothing more. (298) A transformation of this mode of doing architecture, then, would mean the end of architecture itself. 

Now we know what’s at stake. We can either play the Futurist and discard the weighty cultural burden we carry, or keep our “professional garments” and ultimately be left behind. Neither seems terribly attractive.

One of my favorite days of the year is coming, when we find out which living architect will be awarded the career-making Pritzker Prize, often called “the Nobel Prize of architecture,” for calendar year 2009. The winner will be announced on April 12th, so I’ve decided to set some odds for a selection of annual (and not so annual) favorites for the coveted prize. Past juries have selected a few long shots (most recently the Brazilian Paolo Mendes da Rocha in 2006), but it’s likely these candidates will be under consideration. Please place your bets in the comment board.

5:1 – David Chipperfield (British, b. 1953)

Chipperfield has been on a hot streak of late, having won the 2007 RIBA Stirling Prize for the Museum of Modern Literature in Germany (his America’s Cup building in Valencia, Spain was also on the shortlist). He has also just completed major portions of the Museum Island redevelopment in Berlin that he has masterminded since 2001. At 55, he’s a bit young, but past juries have rewarded those whose careers are gaining momentum. 

7:1 – Steven Holl (American, b. 1947)

It seems ridiculous that Holl has yet to collect a Pritzker. With his practice consistently growing worldwide and his acclaim not far behind, Holl would seem a deserving candidate. He will finish his largest building to date in 2009, the Linked Hybrid in Beijing, and has recently won several international competitions. Holl has many well-received buildings to his credit and a Pritzker could send him over the top in terms of exposure.

7:1 — Wolf Prix (Austrian, b. 1946) of Coop Himmelb(l)au

On the eve of a major exhibition of their work at Columbus’ Wexner Center, don’t count out Coop’s partner. Their Wolfsburg center for BMW was a major hit, even if the Akron Art Museum wasn’t.

10:1 – Peter Eisenman (American, b. 1932)

It seems that if they were going to give it to ol’ Peter, they would have done so already, but this might be the year. His magnum opus, the City of Culture in Santiago, Spain is nearing completion, and he also published a well-received book (Ten Canonical Buildings) in 2008. He might just win this thing yet!

10:1 – Kazuyo Sejima (Japanese, b. 1956) and Ryue Nishizawa (Japanese, b. 1963) of SANAA

SANAA may never have another year like 2007, in which their first two American buildings (the New Museum in New York and Glass Pavilion in Toledo) opened to much acclaim, but their practice continues to get larger commissions and deliver for their clients with quiet grace. 

12:1 – Peter Zumthor (Swiss, b. 1943)

Often called “the architect’s architect,” Zumthor works so slowly that it’s a major event when he completes a building. He has finished two fabulous ones in the past two years: the Bruder Klaus Chapel in rural Germany, and the Kolumba museum in Cologne, yielding a huge amount of momentum given his plodding output.

15:1 – Toyo Ito (Japanese, b. 1941)

Ito has been quiet for the past couple years, but he has some major works under construction at the moment and he’s always been popular with the architecture establishment. Not many would argue his selection. 

15:1 – Ben Van Berkel (Dutch, b. 1957) of UN Studio

The completion of the Mercedes-Benz Museum has brought Van Berkel and his partner Caroline Bos much recognition, but the momentum in terms of built work is yet to come. Watch out for Ben a couple years from now, but don’t count him out this year either.

20:1 – Massimiliano Fuksas (Italian, b. 1944)

Fuksas is a bit of a dark horse, but he has been on a roll since the completion of the Milan Expo complex in 2006. He exhibited at the recent Venice Biennale and has just completed an ambitious showroom for Giorgio Armani in New York.

20:1 – Daniel Libeskind (Polish/American, b. 1946)

He has just completed the Jewish Museum of San Francisco and major developments in Denver and Newport, Kentucky. The round of projects commissioned after he won the Ground Zero masterplan are coming due, so look for his chances to grow in the coming years.

30:1 – Greg Lynn (American, b. 1964)

Don’t count out the prophet of digitalia. He finished 2008 strong, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and publishing a successful monograph with Rizzoli.