Lacaton & Vassal's Pritzker Architecture Prize win reinforces the need to focus much more on our city's existing buildings, says Phineas Harper.

Finally, a major architecture award has been given to a studio best known for refurbishments. French architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal who have clinched the 2021 Pritzker Prize, are invigorating winners because so much of their finest work is in retrofitting, an environmentally critical practice that is rarely celebrated by mainstream design awards.
Most of Paris-based Lacaton & Vassal's best projects ? refurbishing a 16 storey tower with cantilevered winter gardens, a similar upgrade of three social housing blocks in Bordeaux, and extending an industrial building to make an arts centre in Dunkerque ? weren't built from scratch. Their ingenuity instead comes from the extraordinary technical creativity at play in refurbishing each existing building, which when combined with the practice's unrivalled gift for detailing steelwork, gives them a gently industrial personality and immense social, and environmental value.
Long-term care of the built environment is by far the most important, but least celebrated aspect of contemporary city-making
Awarding the Pritzker, arguably architecture's highest honour, to a team so synonymous with refurbs marks an important shift in the values of wider architectural culture. It is a move that should pave the way for a better generation of architectural prizes less seduced by sh...