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April 13, 1999
Web posted at: 2:56 p.m. EDT (1856 GMT)

(CNN) -- For Sir Norman Foster, a 63-year-old English architect heading a London-based international firm, honors are a regular matter. Dozens have come his way in his more than 30 years in practice. He has collaborated with greats of the industry from the outset of his career.

But the award he's to receive on June 7 in Berlin tops them all. On Sunday, Foster was named the 1999 laureate for the Pritzker Architecture Award, the highest honor in the profession. The annual prize, which includes a $100,000 grant and bronze medallion, honors a living architect who demonstrates "consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture."

Foster's projects include the world's largest airport (the new Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong), the British Museum's Great Court and headquarters towers for Citibank and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank at London's Canary Wharf. He also designed London's Third Airport at Stansted and a rapid transit system for Bilbao, Spain.

"He embodies the architect's ability, through technology, to create lasting edifices, not romantic, but classical in the true sense of the word," said Pritzker juror Toshio Nakamura in a statement.

Foster's work on historic buildings has established his reputation as a thoroughly modern architect with a sensitivity to the site and surroundings. His soon-to-be-completed work on the Reichstag in Berlin adds a glass dome to the German parliament building, with two spiraling ramps that allow visitors to climb to the top for a view of the city.

In the United States, Foster created a 1994 wing for the Joslyn Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. A research center he designed for Stanford University's Medical School in Palo Alto, California, is close to completion.

The chairman of the Priztker jury, J. Carter Brown, describes Sir Norman as an architect whose "vision forges the material of our age into a crystalline, lyrical purity that is highly personal, brilliantly functional and -- shy as we are about using the word -- just downright beautiful."

Among Foster's earliest noted projects in England: an inflatable office building -- a nylon and PVC fabric "bubble" erected as temporary space for a computer company in 1970 -- and the IBM Pilot Head Office, still in use today. That one turned out to be both highly artistic and functional under budgetary and deadline constraints usually reserved for temporary structures.

Sir Norman received his Knighthood from the Queen of England in 1990. Seven years later, he was appointed to the Order of Merit.

Foster is only the second Briton to receive the Pritzker Prize, now in its 21st year. Sir James Stirling, who encouraged Foster in the early days of his career, took the award in 1981. (Buckminster Fuller, the designer of the geodesic dome, was a mentor to the young architect as well, inviting him to collaborate on the Samuel Beckett Theatre project in 1968.)

Italian architect Renzo Piano claimed the coveted Pritzker last year. Previous winners also include Philip Johnson (1979), I.M. Pei (1983), Richard Meier (1984) and Aldo Rossi (1990). A jury of seven experts chooses the winner each year from more than 500 nominees from dozens of countries.