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The international Pritzker Architecture Prize 2024, considered to be architecture’s highest honor, goes to Japanese architect, professor and social advocate Riken Yamamoto, born in Beijing and residing in Yokohama, Japan. Yamamoto’s Laureate Lecture will be held at the S. R. Crown Hall of the Illinois Institute of Technology, in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Center, in Chicago, on May 16th.
The prize’s purpose is to honor annually a living architect/s whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.
Yamamoto, by activating the threshold between public and private realms, achieves social value with every project and creates harmonious societies despite a diversity of identities, economies, politics, infrastructures and housing systems. For these and more reasons, he was selected as the 53rd Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, sponsored by the Hyatt Foundation.
In his 50+ years’ career, Yamamoto has designed private residences, taking inspiration from and readapting traditional Japanese machiya and Greek oikos housing, such as his earliest work Yamakawa Villa in Nagano, Japan, or his own home GAZEBO in Yokohama, Japan; public housing projects like Pangyo in Seongnam, Republic of Korea, responding to his goal of “fostering harmony across cultures and phases of life”; elementary schools - e.g. the Koyasu school in Yokohama, Japan; university buildings (e.g. Saitama Prefectural University in Koshigaya, Japan); institutions such as the Yokosuka Museum of Art, prioritizing the user experience; civic spaces - for example, his well known Hiroshima Nishi fire station or the Fussa City Hall in Tokyo; and city planning projects. They all widely range in scale and location, mostly throughout Japan, in the People’s Republic of China, Republic of Korea and Switzerland.
Deconstructing the traditional perspective where the value of privacy has become an urban sensibility, he defines community as a “sense of sharing one space” and bridges cultures, histories and multi-generational citizens by adapting international influence and modernist architecture to the needs of the future, as a result of his extensive international travels where he investigated the roots and history of community life.
He also believes “in the concept of transparency as a reflection of the functionality and accessibility of the space for users and viewers alike”, as the Jury acknowledges.
The members of the Jury of the Prize’s 2024 edition not only come from the architecture/design industry, but are involved in politics, academia and law: Alejandro Aravena, who served as Chair (Architect, Educator and 2016 Pritzker Laureate), Barry Bergdoll (Architecture Historian, Educator, Curator and Author), Deborah Berke (Architect and Dean, Yale School of Architecture), Stephen Breyer (U.S. Supreme Court Justice), André Aranha Corrêa do Lago (Architecture Critic and Secretary for Climate, Energy and Environment, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Brazil), Kazuyo Sejima (Architect and 2010 Pritzker Laureate), Wang Shu (Architect, Educator and 2012 Pritzker Laureate), and Manuela Lucá-Dazio, who served as Executive Director.
“Riken Yamamoto has managed to produce architecture both as background and foreground to everyday life, [...] and multiplying opportunities for people to meet spontaneously, through precise, rational design strategies”. And finally, “For creating awareness in the community in what is the responsibility of the social demand, for questioning the discipline of architecture to calibrate each individual architectural response, and above all for reminding us that in architecture, as in democracy, spaces must be created by the resolve of the people, Riken Yamamoto is named the 2024 Pritzker Prize Laureate”.
>>> In 2023, the Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize was Sir David Alan Chipperfield
All images courtesy of The Pritzker Architecture Prize
