Prix Portraits

The videos, embedded below, were released yesterday, when Switzerland's Federal Art Commission and Federal Office of Culture held the Swiss Art Awards ceremony in Basel, bestowing the Prix Meret Oppenheim 2023 on art historian Stanislaus von Moos, artist Uriel Orlow, and architecture platform Parity Group.

Although Stanislaus von Moos is labeled an art historian in the official award announcement, his is a name familiar to many architects, in and beyond Switzerland. He is certainly known to Swiss architects, at the very least, as the founder of archithese, the German-language publication that publishes to this day. English-reading architects may have read his books and other writings on Le Corbusier, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Herzog & de Meuron, among others. The importance of books in von Moos's life is clearly apparent in the video portrait, which spends much of its time among his bookshelves and finds him saying, appropriately, “Some people are able to separate their work from their everyday environment, I simply can't.”

At the other end of the spectrum from the 82-year-old von Moos is Parity Group, the young, bottom-up initiative founded at ETH Zurich's Department of Architecture in 2014. A voiceover in the short video, where the faces are numerous but are not named, says that Parity Group is “a fluid group of students, teaching staff and research assistants, and professors that come together to discuss diversity, parity, and … institutional change that didn't have space in the curriculum yet.” One undertaking of the group is Parity Talks, held at ETH Zurich (or on Zoom) on International Women's Day every year since 2016.