by Katharine Logan

In June, 2001, Chilean architect Matthias Klotz won the first Francesco Borromini International Award for Young Architects. In a profession where many practitioners reach their full potential late in life, this award celebrates the promise and achievements of architects whose career is still young.

It recognizes the work of architects under 41 years of age whose innovative ideas and work are "helping to build a common identity, where the relationship between humanity and the environment may find a new balance."

Honorable mention in the Young Architects category went to Bernard Khoury of Lebanon, while the Premio Borromini itself went to French architect Jean Nouvel.

A Fast-Emerging Talent

In 1997, when the GG Portfolio series produced a monograph of Klotz's work, the publication met with surprise and delight: both at the novelty of publishing a monograph on the work of an architect just starting out, and, more profoundly, at the clarity, balance, and elegance of that work.

Reviewer Dennis Dollens described Klotz's architecture as displaying "a compositional purity that recalls Mies, and a material pallet that recalls Breuer." As a body, Klotz's work evidences a "thoughtful balance and material sensibility gracefully executed."

With the attention brought by the Borromini Award, these qualities, evident in Klotz's work from the outset, have now earned him a wider audience.

The Altamira School, Matthias Klotz's first large-scale building, earned him the Borromini Award for Young Architects. Photo: Alberto Piovano With its transparent assembly space flanked by solid classroom blocks, the street facade reiterates the building's generating idea. Photo: Alberto Piovano   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.