Lord Peter Palumbo
Peter Palumbo (Lord Palumbo of Walbrook), patron of the arts and architecture, has been the Chair of the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury since 2004. He is currently Chairman of the Trustees of the Serpentine Gallery, one of London’s most respected galleries for modern and contemporary art, and a former trustee of the Natural History Museum in London. Lord Palumbo served as a trustee of the Tate Gallery from 1978 until 1985, and was chairman of the gallery's foundation between 1986 and 1987.
He was Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1988 until 1993. He has been a trustee of the Mies van der Rohe Archive, Museum of Modern Art, New York and also of the Whitechapel Art Gallery of London. He was the former Chancellor of the University of Portsmouth. A member of the House of Lords, Baron Palumbo, of Walbrook in the City of London was appointed a life peer in 1991. He attended Eton College and Worcester College, Oxford, and received a Masters degree in law.
Alejandro Aravena
Born in Chile 1967, Aravena established his private practice after graduating with a degree in architecture from the Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago in 1992. He has built portfolio primarily in the field of institutional and public buildings, such as the Siamese Towers, the Medical, Architecture, and Mathematic Schools all for the Catholic University in his native Chile and new residence and dining facilities for St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.
He is one of the founders and currently the Executive Director of Elemental, a “Do Tank” working on projects for social housing, public spaces, infrastructure, and transportation. Elemental’s is supported by the Universidad Catolica and Copec, the Chilean oil company.
Aravena has been visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design and is the Elemental Professor at the Universidad Catolica de Chile. In 2004 he was chosen among the '10 Design Vanguard Architects' of the year by Architectural Record.
Stephen Breyer
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, born in San Francisco in 1938, graduated from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Law School. Breyer completed his clerkship at the Supreme Court and later worked at the Justice Department’s anti-trust division, as an assistant special prosecutor in the Watergate Investigation, and as both special and chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. In 1980 he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and become Chief Judge in 1990. In 1994 Breyer was appointed a Supreme Court Justice by President Clinton.
Justice Breyer taught law for many years at Harvard Law School and at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He has written books and articles about administrative law, economic regulation, and most recently authored Making Democracy Work; A Judge’s View, a book about the U.S. Constitution. Breyer has always had a special interest in architecture: he helped oversee the design and construction of the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse and Harbor park in Boston and wrote the foreword to Celebrating the Courthouse: A Guide for Architects, Their Clients, and the Public.
Yung Ho Chang
Practicing architect and educator, Yung Ho Chang was born in Beijing and educated both in China and in the United States. Chang attended the Nanjing Institute of Technology (now Southeastern University). He received a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design from Ball State University and a Master of Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been practicing in China since 1992 and established his firm, Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ), in Beijing in 1993.
Yung Ho Chang served as Professor and Founding Head of the Graduate Center of Architecture at Peking University from 1999 to 2005; he held the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard in 2002 and the Eliel Saarinen Chair at the University of Michigan in 2004. He is currently a professor at MIT’s Department of Architecture and led that department as its Chair from 2005 to 2010.
Recognized internationally through many prizes such as a Progressive Architecture Citation Award in 1996, the 2000 UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts, and the Academy Award in Architecture from American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006, he has participated in many international exhibitions of art and architecture, including five editions of the Venice Biennale.
Glenn Murcutt
The internationally acclaimed Australian architect Glenn Murcutt (born in London, 1936) received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2002. He and his work have also been recognized with numerous other awards including the Alvar Aalto Medal in 1992, the Green Pin of Denmark for Architecture and Ecology in 1999, and the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 2009. Furthermore, he is an honorary member of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Glenn Murcutt studied architecture at the Sydney Technical College of the University of New South Wales. In 1969, he established his own firm. Since then—while undertaking all the design-related tasks himself—he has created an impressive oeuvre of environmentally conscious buildings of exceptional quality and vision.
Glenn Murcutt has shared his vision with countless students around the world. He holds a professorship at the University of New South Wale, and has been a visiting professor at schools such as Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Helsinki University of Technology, Aarhus University, and many others.
Juhani Pallasmaa
Born in Finland, Juhani Pallasmaa studied architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology. He has practiced architecture, and exhibition, industrial and graphic design since the early 1960s, establishing his own office in 1983. Among the many academic and civic positions he has held are those of professor and dean of Helsinki University of Technology, director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture, and head of the Institute of Industrial Arts, Helsinki. He has also held several visiting professorships in the United States, and has lectured widely in Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia.
Pallasmaa has published two dozen books and over 300 essays in 30 languages. Some of his best know publications include: The Thinking Hand: embodied and existential wisdom in architecture (2008), Encounters: Architectural Essays (2005), The Architecture of Image: existential space in cinema (2001 and 2007); and The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (1995 and 2005).
Martha Thorne
Executive Director
Martha Thorne has been Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize since 2005. In that capacity she works closely with the jury; however, she does not vote in the proceedings. Currently she is Associate Dean for External Relations at IE School of Architecture in Madrid, Spain. She served as Associate Curator of the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago from 1996 to 2005. She is the editor and author of several books, including The Pritzker Architecture Prize: The First Twenty Years, and author of numerous articles for architectural journals and encyclopedias. Ms. Thorne received a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Urban Affairs from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She undertook additional studies at the London School of Economics.