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.

Rolf Fehlbaum

Rolf Fehlbaum worked in the areas of art editions, documentary film and architectural education before becoming chairman of Vitra, the design driven producer of furniture for living and working, the position he holds today. At Vitra, he has established relationships with many leading designers for the development of new products. Architects such as Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Nicholas Grimshaw, and Alvaro Siza, have realized projects for the Vitra campus at the company headquarters near Basel, Switzerland.

Fehlbaum, born 1941 in Basel, is interested in the relationship between culture and industry. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences. Rolf Fehlbaum collects twentieth century design and in 1989 founded the Vitra Design Museum, an institution that communicates the messages of design through exhibitions.

Carlos Jimenez

Carlos Jimenez is an architect and academic based in Houston. Born in Costa Rica in 1959, he moved to the United States in 1974. He received his degree at the University of Houston School of Architecture, in 1981, and established his professional practice in Houston the following year. Today, Carlos Jimenez Studio is recognized for numerous residential projects as well as the Central Administration/Junior School Building for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, W.L.S. Spencer Studio Art Building at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the Peeler Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana among others.

He holds the Ruth Carter Stevenson Chair at Rice University, and has been a visiting professor at schools across the country, including UCLA, Southern California Institute of Architecture, and Harvard University. He has served as a juror and visiting critic at universities and cultural institutions throughout the US and Canada, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Switzerland, Chile and El Salvador. He is also a writer and his articles have appeared in numerous international architectural journals.

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).

Renzo Piano

Architect Renzo Piano received the Pritzker Architecture prize in 1998, and has been recognized with many other awards; including the RIBA Gold Medal (1989), the Praemium Imperiale (1995) and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal (2008).

He has strong sentimental and cultural roots with his home city of Genoa, where he was born into a family of builders in 1937. He graduated from the Milan Polytechnic Architecture School in 1964. In 1971, he founded the studio “Piano & Rogers” with Richard Rogers, and together they won the competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. For many years, he collaborated with the engineer Peter Rice, forming “Atelier Piano & Rice” between 1977 and 1981. In 1981, he established “Renzo Piano Building Workshop” which today has a hundred people working in Paris, Genoa, and New York. His extensive body of work includes numerous museums; such as the Menil Collection Museum, Houston, the Beyler Foundation near Basel Switzerland, the extension to the High Museum, Atlanta, the "freshly" opened California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, as well as a variety of other types of buildings which include office buildings, sports stadia, and educational and cultural facilities.

Karen Stein

Karen Stein is a writer, editor, and architectural consultant. From 1998 until June 2007, she was Editorial Director of Phaidon Press, the preeminent publisher of books on the arts. She joined the London-based Phaidon to establish a New York office and editorial program, following 14 years at Architectural Record magazine, most recently as Senior Managing Editor. In 1994-95 she was awarded a Loeb Fellowship in Environmental Studies by Harvard University. She currently serves as a Board Member of The Architectural League of New York and as co-chair of the Architecture and Design Circle of The Museum of Modern Art. She has a degree in architecture from Princeton University.

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. 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. Prior to her tenure in Chicago, Ms. Thorne resided in Madrid, where she curated exhibitions and produced publications on architecture for various public institutions. 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.