French Architect Wins Pritzker Prize : Awards: Christian de Portzamparc, 49, is praised for his originality and poetic use of space.

French architect Christian de Portzamparc, a champion of architecture’s life-enhancing potential whose adventurous Parisian buildings include a music school, an apartment complex, a cafe and a sculpture museum, has won the 1994 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Cited as “a high-wire artist with sure and confident footwork” who has drawn on French tradition and the work of pioneering modernist Le Corbusier to develop his own exuberant vocabulary, Portzamparc is the first French architect to win the Pritzker.

The annual award, known as the Nobel of architecture, was established in 1979 by the Hyatt Foundation to honor living architects and stimulate creativity in the field. Laureates receive a $100,000 grant along with a formal citation and a bronze medal.

In announcing the award, J. Carter Brown, former director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and chair of the Pritzker Prize jury, praised Portzamparc’s originality, poetic use of space and sensitivity to the users and function of his buildings. “He has all the things you want without being formulaic or occupying some architectural pigeonhole,” Brown said.

But Portzamparc was “a high-risk choice,” according to Los Angeles-based architect Frank O. Gehry, who won the Pritzker in 1989 and served on this year’s jury. At 49, Portzamparc is a young laureate whose idiosyncratic work with opaque white forms contradicts France’s prevailing taste for glass buildings, Gehry said. “We had heated discussions, but we were all interested in finding a person who had a strong trajectory. . . . He has a force vector going and you can see its evolution.”

Reached by telephone at his office in Paris, Portzamparc said the prize is “a great honor,” which he didn’t expect to receive so early in his career. He attributed his relatively youthful success to changes in French law, about 15 years ago, that have promoted architectural competitions for public buildings and have put mayors in charge of building permits--giving young architects a fair shot at major commissions while making mayors accountable for buildings erected during their tenures.

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Portzamparc’s best-known project is the City of Music, a complex for music and dance instruction, research, practice and performance in Parc de la Villette, one of French President Francois Mitterrand’s “Grand Projects” in Paris. “I tried to make separate spaces with open circulation that are open to the eye but also to the ear,” he said of the project. “Many different kinds of music are played there. Each group is like a family that needs its own place, but the families also need to live happily together.”

Among Portzamparc’s other buildings in Paris are the Erik Satie Conservatory of Music and Elderly Housing, Cafe Beaubourg, a popular eatery overlooking the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Bourdelle Museum, a museum built around French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle’s studio. Elsewhere in France, he has designed a residential dance school in Nanterre, an urban development and landmark water tower in Marne-la-Valee, and a high-rise building that will bridge a railway station in Lille. Portzamparc also has designed an apartment complex in an experimental housing district in Fukuoka, Japan.

The award will be presented on June 14 in Columbus, Ind., at the Commons, a town square designed by Cesar Pelli, a former Pritzker Prize juror.