David Chipperfield

The River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames is devoted particularly to the sports of rowing; the town is home to the Annual Royal Regatta Olympic boating events in 1908 and 1948.

The building is a blend of modernist and traditional forms and materials.

It was inspired by the form of traditional boat sheds, as well as the traditional barns of Oxfordshire.

The building occupies a space of 2,300 square metres and is lifted above the ground on concrete pillars to avoid flooding.

The exterior and parts of the interior are covered in planks of non-treated oak, matching the local rural architecture.

The roofs and sunscreens are of stainless steel.

The entrance has glass walls, and the galleries on the ground floor receive natural light through the roof.

The Des Moines Public Library in Des Moines, Iowa, United States, covers an area of 110,000 square feet, and cost 32.3 million dollars to construct.

The two-storey building has no front or back; instead it fans out into three wings.

A glass tunnel allows passers-by to stroll through the library.

Sir David Alan Chipperfield, (born 18 December 1953) is a British architect.

Chipperfield was born in London in 1953, and graduated in 1976 from Kingston School of Art in London.

He studied architecture at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, receiving his diploma in architecture in 1977.

He established David Chipperfield Architects in 1985, which grew into a global architectural practice with offices in London, Berlin, Milan, and Shanghai.

In 2023, he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered to be the most prestigious award in architecture.

He worked in the offices of several notable architects, including Douglas Stephen, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, before founding his firm, David Chipperfield Architects, in 1985.

As a young architect Chipperfield championed the historically attuned, place-specific work of continental architects such as Moneo, Snozzi and Siza through the 9H Gallery situated in the front room of his London office.

He first established his reputation designing store interiors in London, Paris, Tokyo and New York.

Among Chipperfield's early projects in England was a shop for Issey Miyake on London's Sloane Street.

His shops in Japan led to commissions to design for a private museum in Chiba prefecture (1987), design for a store for the automotive company Toyota in Kyoto (1989), and the headquarters of the Matsumoto Company in Okayama (1990).

His major works include the River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire (1989–1998); the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, Germany; the Des Moines Public Library, Iowa (2002–2006); the Neues Museum, Berlin (1997–2009); The Hepworth Wakefield gallery in Wakefield, West Yorkshire (2003–2011), the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2005–2013); and the Museo Jumex in Mexico City (2009–2013).

His firm opened an office in Tokyo in 1989.

His first major project in Britain was the River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames (1989) (see below).

His first commission to design an actual building was for a house for the fashion photographer Nick Knight in London in 1990.

Other projects in the 1990s included the Circus Restaurant in London (1997) and the Joseph Menswear Shop (1997).

The latter shop featured a curtain of glass six meters high around the two lower floors, and an austere modernist interior with dark grey sandstone floors and white walls.

His first completed projects in London were the gallery of botany and the entrance hall for the Natural History Museum (1993), and restaurant Wagamama, both in London.

He also began to build in Germany, designing an office building in Düsseldorf (1994–1997).

In 1997, he began one of his most important projects, the reconstruction and restoration of the Neues Museum in Berlin, which had been largely destroyed during World War II.

After 2000, he won commissions for several other major museum projects in Germany, designed several major museum projects in Germany, including the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach (2002–2006), and the Galerie Am Kupfergraben 10 in Berlin (2003–2007).

He also constructed his first project in the United States, an extension of the Museum of ethnology and natural history in Anchorage, Alaska (2003–2009).

In the same period, he designed and built, at rapid speed, a new headquarters for the America's Cup in Valencia, Spain (2005–2006), and an enormous judicial complex in Barcelona, Spain, which consolidated the offices previously contained in seventeen different buildings into nine new immense concrete blocks.

Until 2011, most of his major projects were on the continent of Europe, but in 2011 he opened two notable museum projects in Britain, the Turner Contemporary (2006–11) in Margate, and The Hepworth Wakefield in Wakefield.

In 2013, he opened the Jumex Museum in Mexico City, and the extension of the Saint Louis Art Museum in the United States.

His most remote project was the Museum of Naga, on a site in the desert 170 kilometers northeast of Khartoum in Sudan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

He designed a structure to preserve the remains of two ancient temples and an artesian well, dating to 300 B.C.-300 A.D. The building, built of the local stone, blends into reddish mountains around it.

In 2015, Chipperfield won a competition to redesign the modern and contemporary art wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.

He also began his first ground-up building in New York City, the Bryant, a thirty-three storey hotel and condominium project next to Bryant Park in Manhattan.

In 2017, he and his associates were engaged in a multitude of major projects around the world; including new flagship stores for Bally and Valentino, the reconstruction of the U.S. Embassy in London; One Pancras Square, an office and commercial complex behind King's Cross Station in London, a project for the Shanghai Expo tower in China, the new Nobel Center headquarters for the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, a headquarters store for the online firm SSENSE in Montreal, the extension building for Kunsthaus Zurich, the Haus der Kunst cultural center in Munich, the completion of the headquarters of Amorepacific in Seoul, Korea, and the Inagara Reien Project, a temple complex in Japan.

Work for Chipperfield's first project in the Southern Hemisphere is scheduled for 2025, partnering with Molonglo Group to design and build Canberra's Dairy Road development.