Allen M. Turner attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he received his bachelor’s degree of business administration in 1958. He received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1961. In 1965, he joined the family investment firm The Pritzker Organization where he is now a partner. He is immediate past chairman of the board of Columbia College Chicago's Board of Trustees. His academic activities include: lecturer on American Theater, Cambridge University and Yale University, and lecturer, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He came to Peking University on May 6th.

A Changing World

Things have changed so quickly in this world. Changes used to take place over years, over decades. But no more. Change takes place every day. We get up in the morning, we read the newspapers about some new inventions, some ideas. So everyday is new.

So what does that mean to us? That means every aspect of world cultures is changing constantly, and the change is going on now. But sometimes it’s hard to recognize. Sometimes it takes distance to realize what is really happening. I will give you an example of that.

 I am going to take the period of 1900 to 1920s. People engaged in that period of time weren’t really sure; they just knew that things changed. Albeit Einstein turned the world around. The Theory of Relativity and the Special and General Theory in 1905 and in 1920 rocked their world. Isaac Newton no longer was their standard; Albeit Einstein became the standard. “Infinities”, “Space was curved”, “Constantly expanding universes”, the whole way of how we thought about ourselves in connection with the rest of the world and rest of our cosmos changed dramatically. Sigmund Freud and the psychology and his analytics became very important in their lives. Of course, there were arts. We had modernistic painters before that, like Monet and Cézanne, but now we are stunned, because we have Picasso. There were inventions of radios, airplanes, and people for the first time actually had telephones. Electric lights were unknown to people’s lives till the turn of the 20th century. There was the First World War, the Russian Revolution. People were fighting everywhere, and people moved all around the world at that time.

The world was changing, but you were in the middle of it. And you didn’t understand all the influences that were going on. So only by looking back do we understand how everything changed at the same time. And it has to be true today. It is just hard for us to see we are instruments in this change – affected by it and will cause the change. And the changes transform the society. And how is the world affected by this?

There are lots of ways in which the world is connected today. The news is everywhere, and a lot of them change their attitudes towards each other, about people we don’t know. For the first time in our lives, we don’t have to only communicate long distance. We have instant communication. We changed the way that we do science, and we certainly change the way we do architecture. Sadly, the art of drawing sort of disappeared in the architecture world.

Within the interdependent world, the fact is that none of us could stand alone anymore. The economic interdepence for all of us suggests a new world structure where no matter how strong and tough they are, we still want to pay attention to what other people have to say. In an area where you depend on each other economically, problems will happen. But in the end, you have to work them out, because it is of national interest.

Architecture, and its results may be the only thing that is left when we all disappeared. We think about ancient civilizations, how do we remember them? We remember them by the built environment – whether this is the period, or some rock in some Pharaoh place, or even a tomb. We look at that and we say, yes, this is a civilization when writing and fertilized ground didn’t exist. Some sorts of structures and buildings did exist. So it is the built environment that is so important to us.

The Story of Pritzer Prize

You all probably know that I was one of the founders of Pritzker Architecture Prize, what we now call the Nobel Prize of architecture. I thought you would be interested in the story of how it happened, because it wasn’t the story where I and my partners decided to have an architecture prize. It didn’t happen that way. In 1979, I was sitting in my office and my partner who had the office next to me said there was a man here for me. This man, Carleton Smith, said: “Well, the Nobel Prize has left out a prize for architecture – one of the most significant things. And I think you, the Priztker family, ought to start the architecture prize.” When my partner asked how much were they willing to cost, Carleton said they would give away 25,000 dollars to anyone who won the prize, in addition to one of the little sculptures made by the greatest sculptor Henry Moore. And we asked the members in the jury, he said he could get Thomas Watson, President of IBM, Carlos Jimenez, and also J. Carter Brown, who was the head of National Gallery of Art.

We didn’t know that this prize would be so famous. The first choice of the jury was Philip Johnson. Philip Johnson was the most famous residensial and corporate architect in America, thus he was the natural choice. In the speech, he said: “I am the best architect of the world, because I steal from the best. 

The face of architecture is represented by people who are sensitively environmental thoughtful. One of our jury is a Chinese, Yung Ho Chang. He is the perfect example. He was involved in a graduate institute in Peking University, and he worked betweem Beijing and New York. He designed space stations, and I saw great exhibition of his here in Beijing. So, architects have become world figures.

Edited by Liu Yiping