Designed by the British architect David Chipperfield, the three-story building is a plain, compact block of light travertine, unornamented apart from a saw-tooth crest on top. It’s a no-nonsense, no-ego structure that seems to look inward rather than outward. — NYT

London's iconic Crystal Palace just moved one step closer to its magnificent resurrection with the announcement of six shortlisted design teams, all vying to rebuild The Crystal Palace and the surrounding public park as a major landmark. — bustler.net

Three proposals have been chosen to move to the second stage of the architecture competition for the Nobel Center, the new Nobel Prize headquarters in Stockholm. In case you missed our previous post, 11 big-name architects submitted designs under anonymity — and we asked if you could guess who designed what! — bustler.net

British architect David Chipperfield has been named as one of the five laureates in the Praemium Imperiale Awards for 2013. The announcement was made on Sept. 17 in Rome, New York, London, Berlin, Paris and Tokyo. — bustler.net

On the occasion of the quickly approaching closing weekend of the 13th International Architecture Exhibition Common Ground at La Biennale di Venezia, the online community gets the chance to talk interactively in a live chat with David Chipperfield, curator of the exhibition. — bustler.net

Chipperfield lamented how architects have resorted to designing bars, cafes, restaurants, and interiors and criticized the propagation of the discipline as fodder for the “lifestyle pages” in popular media. To him, the role of architecture and design is diminishing into nothing more than an “anesthetic” and a “palliative” in a larger economic crisis, rather than stepping up as a means to address serious socioeconomic problems: “I feel more and more impotent in really doing things..." — blogs.artinfo.com

They are happy to lay down the law on what makes a good stadium, tower block or concert hall, but do architects practise what they preach when it comes to their own homes? We go through the keyhole to meet three nominees for the hotly contested RIBA Stirling prize — guardian.co.uk

In a letter titled ‘Kicking against the Prix’, the RIBA gold medallist claimed the Coop Himmelb(l)au founder had failed to attend the biennale despite issuing a critical press release last week describing it as ‘banal’. — architectsjournal.co.uk

Labelling the festival an ‘expensive dance of death’, the Coop Himmelb(l)au-founder went on to claim a ‘great’ biennale would have featured forums and themes looking ‘behind the scenes’ at decision-making ‘instead of boring exhibitions’. — The Architects' Journal

Four finalists have emerged from the Menil Collection's extensive international search to select an architect to design its Menil Drawing Institute (MDI), the first major project to be built as a part of the museum's long-range master plan. — houston.culturemap.com

The British architect David Chipperfield will oversee a major renovation of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, a concrete, steel and glass landmark at Potsdamer Platz completed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1968.

Chipperfield has worked extensively in Berlin, finishing work on the war-ravaged Neues Museum on the Museum Island complex in 2009. — bloomberg.com

When his appointment is officially announced, the British architect – renowned for his cool, clear almost chaste designs, most notably his recent Turner Contemporary in Margate and the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire – will have just eight months to come up with a theme for two huge group shows: one in the former rope works of the Arsenale; the other in the nearby Giardini. — guardian.co.uk

"It was a shock to come out [of graduate school] and realize [modern architects] were a public enemy,” Chipperfield said.

This “hostile public opinion,” he said, was the result of poor work by the previous generation of architects, whose bad reputation became projected onto Chipperfield and his contemporaries. Furthermore, the damage to England’s monuments and other edifices caused in World War II contributed to the public’s grim outlook on architecture, he added. — yaledailynews.com

Chipperfield... says creating the gallery was like “a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle” and there’s certainly a lot of geometry involved.

More important, though, there’s an uplifting sense of space, height and – exactly what you don’t expect from the exterior – light. The rooms are flooded with light reflected off white walls, from skylights and from floor-to-ceiling windows that counterpoint the sculptures with the urban reality of Wakefield outside. — yorkshirepost.co.uk