Japanese architect, Riken Yamamoto has won the 53rd Pritzker Architecture Prize, lauded by the jury for “reminding us that in architecture, as in democracy, spaces must be created by the resolve of the people.”
(Credit: Tom Welsh)
Japanese architect, Riken Yamamoto, has won the Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate for 2024. Yamamoto is the ninth architect from Japan, following in the footsteps of Kenzō Tange (1987) Fumihiko Maki (1993), Tadao Ando (1995), Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (2010), Toyo Ito (2013), Shigeru Ban (2014), and Arata Isozaki (2019).
“For me, to recognize space, is to recognize an entire community,” he said in a statement. “The current architectural approach emphasizes privacy, negating the necessity of societal relationships. However, we can still honor the freedom of each individual while living together in architectural space as a republic, fostering harmony across cultures and phases of life.”
The 2024 Pritzker jury was led by Chilean architect and 2016 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Alejandro Aravena.
“One of the things we need most in the future of cities is to create conditions through architecture that multiply the opportunities for people to come together and interact. By carefully blurring the boundary between public and private, Yamamoto contributes positively beyond the brief to enable community,” said Aravena. “He is a reassuring architect who brings dignity to everyday life. Normality becomes extraordinary. Calmness leads to splendour.”
Key projects:
Koyasu Elementary School, Kanagawa, Japan
(Credit: Mitsumasa Fujitsuka)
Yokosuka Museum of Art, Kanagawa, Japan
(Credit: Tomio Ohashi)
Hotakubo Housing, Kumamoto, Japan
(Credit: Tomio Ohashi)
Fussa City Hall, Tokyo, Japan
(Credit: Sergio Pirrone)
Jian Wai SOHO, Beijing, China
(Credit: Tomio Ohashi)
Pangyo, Seongnam, South Korea
(Credit: Kouichi Satake)
The full jury citation:
The Pritzker Prize is conferred in acknowledgment of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which have persistently produced significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture. In his long, coherent, rigorous career, Riken Yamamoto has managed to produce architecture both as background and foreground to everyday life, blurring boundaries between its public and private dimensions, and multiplying opportunities for people to meet spontaneously, through precise, rational design strategies.
By the strong, consistent quality of his buildings, he aims to dignify, enhance and enrich the life of individuals – from children to elders – and their social connections. And he does this through a self-explanatory yet modest and pertinent architecture, with structural honesty and precise scaling, with careful attention to the landscape of the surroundings.
His architecture clearly expresses his beliefs through the modular structure and the simplicity of its form. Yet, it does not dictate activities, rather it enables people to shape their own lives within his buildings with elegance, normality, poetry and joy.
Riken Yamamoto deliberately engages with the widest range of building types as well as scales in the projects he chooses. Whether he designs private houses or public infrastructure, schools or fire stations, city halls or museums, the common and convivial dimension is always present. His constant, careful and substantial attention to community has generated public interworking space systems that incentivize people to convene in different ways. The entire building space of the Saitama Prefectural University (1999), for instance, is conceived as a community.
Yamamoto suggests rather than imposes this shared dimension through understated, yet precise architectural interventions. By including spaces for common activities within, in addition to and even regardless of the main function of his buildings, he allows these to integrate into the quotidian life of the community, instead of being only experienced in exceptional circumstances. The two departments for the students and researchers to work together in the Future University, Hakodate (2000), or the transparent louvred glass facade to expose the inner workings of the department in the Hiroshima Fire Station (2000) both exemplify his belief in the concept of transparency as a reflection of the functionality and accessibility of the space for users and viewers alike.
As a young architect born in China and trained in Japan, he felt the urgency to complete his own education with a real understanding of the ‘other than the self.’ He extensively travelled not (primarily) to visit renowned monuments, but rather to experience at first hand the culture and everyday life of communities on other continents. From North to South America, across the Mediterranean to the Middle East and Asia, Yamamoto has investigated the roots and history of community life that he might bring his own contribution to the modernization of the contemporary city through architecture. For him a building has a public function even when it is private.
Riken Yamamoto is not an architecture historian, yet he learns from the past as well as from different cultures. As an architect, he does not copy from the past, rather he adapts, re-uses and evolves, showing that fundamentals persist in their relevance. Yamamoto has expanded the toolbox of the profession towards both the past and the future to be able to give each time, in very different modes and at very different scales, the most pertinent response to the challenges of both the built environment and of collective living.
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.
