Every Saturday, Culture Weekly presents you with a summary of major events and small feelings worth knowing in foreign literary and art circles, publishing circles and bookstores over the past week. This week, we focus on the finalists of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, the 25th anniversary of the Bailey Gifford Prize and the controversy over rare gloves.
David Chipfield won the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 2023.
On March 7, local time, the 2023 Pritzker Architecture Award was announced. The winner is British architect, urban planner and activist David Chipperfield. His works include Humez Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, Turner Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich Art Museum and Anji Museum in zhejiang museum of natural history.
The Pritzker Prize is one of the highest honors in architecture. Past winners include Frank Gehry, Luis barragan and Zaha Hadid.
According to NPR’s analysis, unlike previous winners such as Hadid and Balagan, Chipfield’s design works usually have no strong personal characteristics. He prefers simple and elegant style to fashion, which is why the Pritzker Prize judges said, “We won’t distinguish the buildings designed by strange Pfeiffer at a glance in different cities, because every design is tailored for the local area.” In this regard, Chipfield responded in an interview, “I like this. The idea that architects need to have their own characteristics has become a bit too utilitarian. “
According to Chipfield, the world today is full of “ugly modern buildings”. He said in a speech, “No wonder everyone hates architects.” He believes that there are so many “ugly buildings” mainly because of three reasons-the aesthetic problems of Party A, the general pursuit of quick delivery in the industry, and the architect’s failure to consider the future when designing.
Chip Field in Venice Architecture Biennale 2012
In 1997, when he took over the project to restore the new museum in Berlin, he made sure that he would not make the same mistake. He did not blindly pursue novelty, but kept many original designs of buildings, and even used the residual fragments left by the original buildings after they were destroyed in World War II. In the view of architect Mabel Wilson, this is also Chipfield’s greatest personal characteristic. “His design is very introverted, not the kind that scares you at first sight … The New Berlin Museum is a masterpiece of modernist architecture and one of my favorite buildings.”
Chipfield is 69 years old and has been engaged in architectural design for decades. His construction company named after himself won many design awards. In 2004, Chipfield was awarded the Commander of the British Empire; In 2012, he served as the chief curator of Venice Architecture Biennale; In 2019, he won the annual landmark architect award.
The finalists of the 25th anniversary of the announcement of the Bailey Gifford Award are all previous award-winning works.
Bailey Gifford Award is one of the most important non-fiction writing awards in Britain. Its predecessor was the samuel johnson Prize named after the editor of the first English dictionary in history, with a prize of 25,000 pounds (about 210,000 RMB). Founded in 1999, it will celebrate its 25th anniversary this year, so the selection criteria are slightly different from previous years.
According to the jury composed of Jason Cowley, Shahidha Bari, scholars and Sarah Churchwell, the editors-in-chief of New Politicians, their selected works this year are all award-winning works in the previous 24 years, and the six shortlisted works span many categories such as history, reportage, investigation and reporting, literature and biography, highlighting the outstanding.
American writers account for half of the list. Barbara Epidemic was selected in Our Happiest (an award-winning work in 2010). In the book, she analyzed how Kim Jong-un worked hard for the regime as a young ruler, and recorded the life experiences of six defectors in detail. Patrick Raton Keefe was also shortlisted. In Empire of Pain (an award-winning work in 2021), he described how the sackler family made a fortune with tranquilizers in the name of charity, but was discredited by the painkiller Oxycontin. Another American writer is James Shapiro, who was shortlisted for Shakespeare’s biography 1599 (the award-winning work in 2006).
mediate
[Plus] Deng Feng translated Margaret Macmillan
CITIC Publishing House | Xinsi Culture 2018-3
Canadian writers Wade Davis and Margaret Macmillan were also shortlisted. Davis’s Into Silence (an award-winning work in 2012) reproduces the past when two climbers tried to conquer Mount Everest but never returned. Macmillan presented the real history of the Paris Peace Conference in Making Peace (an award-winning work in 2002). Her great-grandfather Lloyd George was one of the participants, but she did not whitewash the wrong decision made by the latter. The last finalist is English writer Craig Brown, who unveiled the mystery of the Beatles’ daily life for readers in 1234 (an award-winning work in 2020).
Chief Justice Cowley said that the short list of works showed “depth and thickness”. “These books are very exciting. Even after many years, they are still as important and relevant as when they were first published. ” The winner of this year’s Bailey Gifford Award will be named “the winner among the winners”, and the results will be announced on April 27th, local time.
Should I wear gloves when touching precious books?
Last month, a rare medieval Hebrew Bible was hotly debated because of its auction valuation of 50 million US dollars (about 347 million RMB). However, in the comment area of related reports, what surprised readers was not the daily price figures, but that the staff who touched the Bible in the picture did not wear white gloves.
It seems to be an unwritten rule to wear gloves when touching valuables such as antiques and jewels in the auction, but do you need to wear gloves when touching precious books with a long history? In fact, in the eyes of most rare book librarians, this is a big misunderstanding about how to deal with rare books.
In an interview with The New York Times, Eric Holtzen, director of Grolier Club, the largest rare book collection association in the United States, said that he had answered this question countless times. “Every time someone asks this question, I will sigh deeply.” He explained that wearing gloves to touch rare books is actually harmful, because gloves will weaken the wearer’s sense of touch and increase the possibility of damaging the pages of rare books. For example, excessive force will tear the pages or erase the handwriting, and even the friction will be too small to grasp the books, leading to accidents.
Barbara Heritage, deputy director of the College of Rare Books at the University of Virginia, believes that public misunderstanding of this concept is inevitable, because white gloves symbolize purity, value and social status. When people discuss or read rare books, they are actually interacting with the fantasy of how they were valued in the past. Therefore, it is human nature to be shocked when they directly touch the rare books with their hands.
So how should we read a precious book? The article concludes that the answer is simple, use your hands, but only if you wash your hands.