The Guardian

If David Chipperfield upped sticks and left Britain altogether, we'd only have ourselves to blame. An architect whose scalpel-like logic often results in buildings of austere sophistication, Chipperfield has been trumpeted as one of the finest architects in the country for much of the past decade, apparently to little avail: you could count his significant British projects on one hand. He has almost given up complaining that he is held in far higher esteem abroad than he is here. It's like Zaha Hadid all over again. When Hadid won the Pritzker prize - world architecture's highest accolade - there was a collective mumble of guilt that nobody in Britain had had the guts to give her a decent commission. Now Chipperfield is basking in the glory, having taken this year's Stirling prize - British architecture's highest accolade - on Saturday. His winning project was the Museum of Modern Literature, in Marbach, Germany. The fact that he had another project on the Stirling shortlist outside the UK, the America's Cup pavilion in Valencia, suggests Britain's architectural patrons should be giving themselves a double kicking. If we're not careful he'll simply hand in his passport and move somewhere more sympathetic, such as Germany, or Spain, or Japan, or the US. Anywhere else, in fact.