How to visualize Pritzker Architecture Prize winners

This personal project combines my fascination for architecture and information visualization.

In this visualization, I'm interested to know how each Pritzker laureate compares with the average age and which schools and countries produced the most number of recipients.

I cannot find the data I was looking for on the web so I created my own data set gathered from the Pritzker website and the architects' web pages. I have an enormous interest in architecture so this was also an opportunity for me to read the biographies of these well-renowned architects. I then started sketching and putting my ideas on paper.

I also intended to show the entire body of work of each architect to see how much experience they've got before the award but gathering such data was a little tricky so I dismissed the idea. I originally wanted to know whether the schools they've been to appear in the QS ranking by subject but it's a bit of a stretch and in this case, irrelevant.

I did a Stem-Root Diagram based on the metaphor that each architect is a stem with the 'fruit of their labor' (i.e., the award) depicted as white ellipse mapped to their age when they were awarded. Each of them is then connected to the school they went to — their root, so to speak. The ground, which fills the bottom part of the screen, shows the country they're from.

Stem (Richard Rogers) connected to root (Architectural Association and Yale University)

Graduates of Harvard Graduate School of Design

Japanese Laureates

The youngest to ever get the prize is Ryue Nishizawa (2010) from Japan and the oldest is Frei Otto (2015) from Germany who died before his announcement went public. The average age is 61. Harvard Graduate School of Design produced the most number of laureates while the University of Tokyo and the Architectural Association in London both have 3 laureates each to boast of. If you look closely, one of the stem doesn't link to any of the schools. Tadao Ando (1995) never formally studied architecture. He taught himself the craft by apprenticing to several studios, which is quite a feat! About a third of the recipients are Americans and Japanese. The visualization didn't capture it but most of these architects are not only visionaries but thought-leaders in the academe as well. It seems to me that great architects have their visions concretized in practice and their ideas echo in research.

Download the app and source code here . Run the app or exe file depending on your machine. Also available on Github .

Tools

Processing, Illustrator