David Chipperfield has been formally welcomed as a newly elected member of Germany’s Orden Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste – one of the country’s highest honours – at the annual public meeting in Berlin 11 June presided by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the Chancellor of the Order, Hermann Parzinger.
Following a laudatory speech by Peter Busmann, David Chipperfield entered the Order alongside the musicologist Peter Gülke, the philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Stefan Hell, the Swiss composer, conductor and oboist Heinz Holliger and the American anthropologist Michael Tomasello.
The association of artists and scholars was founded in 1842 by Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV and revived in 1952 by Federal President Theodor Heuss.
Alongside membership to the Order, David Chipperfield also received the Grand Cross of Merit with star, a class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, from Frank-Walter Steinmeier at Schloss Bellevue on 11 June.