What do the Pritzker Prize headlines tell us about promoting your architecture?
Last week I was struck by the reporting on the winners of the 2021 Pritzker Prize: Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, from their eponymous practice based in Paris.
Pritzker Prize winners Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, photo courtesy of Laurent Chalet
It was a significant announcement because of their body of work, which is less about creating flashy objects and more about refreshing and renewing existing structures and spaces, with a light touch and often minimal intervention.
In a sense, their architecture is perfect for the age of the Anthropocene, where the demand for the architects’ unique skills – which combine consideration of embodied energy, operational energy, doing more with less and the ability to work with existing conditions – are likely to be in greater demand than ever before.
I was struck by the different ways that this single story – about the Pritzker Prize announcement – was presented across various news sites, both industry and mainstream, Australian and international.
It reminded me of something I learned in Year 8 from Sister De Chantal, who explained how one story can be interpreted and presented in multiple different ways. She used the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to illustrate her point that those four narrators each wrote about the life of Jesus in four different ways, depending on their own emphasis, biases, roles in the events and other factors. You see the same process playing out in a legal trial, when different witnesses place different emphasis on events and actions, depending on their own perspectives.
With this in mind, I undertook a quick analysis of the Pritzker Prize headlines when I was putting together The Drill last week. I concluded that editors and journalists prioritised different parts of the story, even though they were mostly working from the single source of the Pritzker Prize media kit, which you can access here. Few journalists would have conducted interviews with the architects themselves, so they put their own slant on the headlines and stories to emphasis certain elements and highlight particular angles that would likely appeal to their audiences.
A few examples to show you what I mean:
My favourite – which coins the term “retrofit aces” – from the UK’s Architect’s Journal:
Architects Journal, UK
This is from The New York Times :
The New York Times, USA
The UK’s Guardian, France’s RFI and Australia’s The Urban Developer all picked up on the couple’s “never demolish” and do nothing approach:
The Guardian, UK
RFI, France
The Urban Developer, Australia
Meanwhile two headlines from online industry publications – Dezeen and ArchDaily – presented straight announcements, without singling out a particular aspect of their body of work.
Dezeen, global
ArchDaily, global
And ArchitectureAU picked up on the notion of “reinvigorating modernist dreams”.
ArchitectureAU, Australia
ArchitectureAu also ran this quote from Anne Lacaton, sourced directly from the Pritzker media release:
“Good architecture is open – open to life, open to enhance the freedom of anyone, where anyone can do what they need to do,” said Anne Lacaton, on winning the prize. “It should not be demonstrative or imposing, but it must be something familiar, useful and beautiful, with the ability to quietly support the life that will take place within it.”
To me this coverage in its different forms and showcasing different viewpoints on the same story highlights a very important concept for architects who want to produce and distribute stories about their work for public consumption.
That is: There are multiple ways to construe, present and prioritise various facts or interpretations that make up a story, and it’s your job – as the owner of the project and the story – to ensure that your preferred message is the one that gets published.
So you have to control the narrative around your work, rather than leaving it up to others – journalists, editors, jurors, critics – to find the angle and present your projects, practice and approach in the way they see fit. If you don’t provide a clearcut and appealing angle, the editor or journalist will choose to highlight the aspects of the story that they wish to prioritise.
That’s why I advise my clients and students to create media kids for their new projects – containing all the salient points you wish to make, your own quotes, and contact details so that journalists can obtain further details if need be – and then to distribute those to the media outlets where you’d like to see coverage of your project (ideally, in publications whose audiences you wish to reach; because they may be your future clients).
Essentially, in this digital era – which has forced editors and journalists to do more with less, as production budgets drop and editorial teams shrink in line with revenues each year – it’s your job to ensure that the story of your project (or practice or approach) is told in the way you want it to be told.
If you’d like to learn more about how to promote your work and your practice via publication in the media, you can access my series of how-to articles here.
And if you’d like to view a good media kit as an example, you can click here to view the Pritzker version.
And can I give you one final tip? An Australian architecture practice that does a great job of framing its project messaging and securing high-profile coverage for its work is Austin Maynard Architects, so take a look at their website for guidance too.
If you’d like to learn more about how to use Publishing – it’s one of the six channels that I recommend architects use to promote their practice – you can enrol now in my Architecture Marketing 360 CPD Course, an online, self-guided program that you can complete in as little as three weeks. You can find out more and enrol here.