Christian de Portzamparc (; born 5 May 1944) is a French architect and urbanist. He graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1970 and has since been noted for his bold designs and artistic touch; his projects reflect a sensibility to their environment and to urbanism that is a founding principle of his work. In 1994 he was awarded the Pritzker Prize. Life and career De Portzamparc was born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1944, when that country was a French protectorate, to a family of Breton noble descent. He began studying architecture in 1962 at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he was influenced by professors Eugène Beaudouin, who "encouraged his taste for formal expressionism", and George Candilis, who "emphasized systematic work on grids and networks." In 1966 he traveled to New York where he spent a few months during a nine-month academic hiatus that was rooted in his hesitations about continuing in architecture— "Architecture seemed to me to be too bureaucratic, and not free enough compared to art; and the modernistic ideals which I worshiped before, seemed to me unable to reach the richness of real life. I also began to criticize my first influences like Le Corbusier". Nevertheless, he returned to his studies in the 1967 academic year and would graduate from the Beaux-Arts in 1969. De Portzamparc created his agency in 1980, supported by Marie-Élisabeth Nicoleau, Étienne Pierrès and Bertrand Beau, and later welcomed Bruno Durbecq, Céline Barda, Léa Xu, André Terzibachian and Clovis Cunha. Based in Paris, the agency has 'satellite' offices near building sites, in addition to offices in New York and Rio de Janeiro, and represents a team of 80 people, drawn from all corners of the globe. Both an architect and urban planner, Christian de Portzamparc is implicated in the research of form and meaning, as well as being a constructer. His work focuses on research over speculation and concerns the quality of life; aesthetics are conditioned by ethics, and he maintains that we have too often dissociated one from the other. Christian de Portzamparc focuses on all scales of construction, from simple buildings to urban re-think; the town is a founding principal of his work, developing in parallel and in crossover along three major lines: neighbourhood or city pieces, individual buildings and sky-scrapers. The growth of Christian de Portzamparc's urban projects through competitions and studies