In 1994, Christian de Portzamparc (born 1944) became the first French architect to receive the prestigious Pritzker Prize, architecture's equivalent to the Nobel Prize. This honor placed Portzamparc's name among the ranks of some of the world's most renowned practitioners in his field.

Though he belongs to a younger, postwar generation of design philosophers, he has won acclaim for a style that melds centuries-old classical forms, modernist radicalism, and postmodern quirkiness. "My point of view can be summed up by Lao-Tzu," Portzamparc explained to Artforum's Lauren Sedofsky. "My house is not the wall, or the floor, or the roof, but the emptiness between."

Christian de Portzamparc was born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1944, into a family of French Breton heritage. He attended the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1962 to 1969, a traditionalist school where he studied architecture, and spent a year at Columbia University in 1966. He opened his...