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Riken Yamamoto’s understated architecture, which understates community and connection, won this year’s Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor.
“Whether he designs private homes or public infrastructure, schools or fire stations, city halls or museums, a communal and convivial dimension is always present,” the jury said in its citation announcing the award on Tuesday. “His sustained, careful and substantial attention to community has resulted in a system of public interconnected spaces that inspire people to gather in different ways.”
The desire to eliminate barriers between the public and private realms was evident in Yamamoto’s first project in 1977, a private open-air summer house in the woods of Nagano, Japan. “It had only a roof, no walls,” the 78-year-old architect recalled in a telephone interview from Yokohama, Japan, where he lives. “A lot of animals come here in the winter.”
Likewise, a house Yamamoto designed for two artists in Kawasaki the following year featured a pavilion-like room that could serve as a stage for performances, with living areas below.
People kept asking: “Why did Yamamoto build such a strange house?” said the architect. “I explain this every time: community is the most important thing. Every family has a connection to community.”
The prestigious Pritzker Prize is perhaps most associated with “starchitect” winners such as Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. But in recent years, the jury has also recognized lower-profile designers such as West Africa’s Francis Kéré (2022), Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal (2021), and Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara (2020).
Yamamoto and his company Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop’s public projects are also oriented towards social interaction. Completed in 1999, Saitama Prefectural University has nine transparent buildings connected by terraces that allow one to see from one classroom to another. “The place that distinguishes where one building ends and another begins is intentionally blurred, giving rise to an architectural language of its own,” the Pritzker Prize said in the catalogue.
“His architecture clearly expresses his beliefs through modular structures and simple forms,” the jury said in the citation. “However, it does not determine the activity, but rather allows people to move around in his buildings.” Shape your life with grace, normalcy, poetry and joy.”
The architect combines transparency, functionality and accessibility in projects such as Hakodate Mirai University (2000), whose basic philosophy of “open space, open mind” is reflected in Yamamoto’s open spaces. Classrooms, auditoriums and libraries are lined with glass walls, and open common areas are located on overlapping levels outside transparent rooms, encouraging students and teachers to work collaboratively.
For the Hiroshima Nishi Fire Station (2000), Yamamoto built the exterior, interior walls, and floors out of glass and placed an atrium for firefighter training in the center of the building, encouraging passers-by to view and interact with those who protect the community.
Yamamoto said that when he designed the Jianwai SOHO east of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 2004, he successfully resisted developers’ efforts to close off the neighborhood, a project that included nine residential buildings and four small home offices. “I tried to open it up to the city,” said the architect.
In 2020, Yamamoto designed Zurich Airport’s Circle, an indoor-outdoor complex of hotels, restaurants, and shops that features glass walls, windowed ceilings, and thin concrete columns.
Yamamoto said in 2016 that usually airports “only have souvenir shops, but this is completely different,” adding that his complex “is not designed for the airport itself. The planned city is for the local residents of the Zurich area.”
Born in China in 1945 and trained in Japan, Yamamoto lost his engineer father at age 5 and tried to emulate his father’s career, eventually finding his own path in architecture. At 17, he visited Kofukuji Temple in Nara, one of Japan’s most famous Buddhist shrines, dating back to the seventh century. There he was mesmerized by the five-story pagoda symbolizing the elements of earth, water, fire, air and space.
“It was dark, but I could see the wooden tower illuminated by the moonlight,” he said in his biography of Pritzker, “and what I discovered at that moment was my first encounter with architecture.”
In 1968, Yamamoto graduated from Nihon University and three years later received a master’s degree in architecture from Tokyo University of the Arts. He established his own practice in 1973.
Yamamoto was influenced by his mentor, architect Hiroshi Hara, designer of the Umeda Sky Tower in Osaka, whose two towers are connected at the top by a glass bridge and is now considered a landmark. Yamamoto 2018 The winning design for Taiwan’s Taoyuan Art Museum consists of two buildings with green pitched roofs connected by above-ground walkways.
]Inspired by the theories of Hannah Arendt, Yamamoto worked “to believe that all spaces can enrich and serve the considerations of the entire community,” the Pritzker jury said, “not just those who occupy them. He From single family homes to social housing, such as the Hotakubo project in Kumamoto (1991), 16 housing clusters are arranged around a tree-lined central plaza. The design draws on the traditional Japanese ‘machiya’ (townhouse) ) and the Greek “oikos” (family)—living arrangements that promote collectivism.
He went on to create larger public projects, such as the Tianjin Library in China (2012), which incorporated bookshelves into a grid of intersecting wall beams. Exterior stone louvres reduce dust and allow for transparency.
After the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that struck the Tohoku region in 2011 and caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Yamamoto also made personal efforts, working with architects Toyo Ito and Kazuyo Sejima Collaboratively designed community housing for disaster relief. In 2018 he established the Local Republic Awards to recognize young architects.
Architect and professor Graham McKay writes on his Misfits’ Architecture blog: “For some reason, we’ve been taught that architects have to be kind and arrogant, which leads us to the error of Earth believes that arrogance is a condition of kindness.” 2021. “I want to use Riken Yamamoto and his career to illustrate that this is not the case.”
Yamamoto’s buildings, often composed of important, everyday materials such as aluminum, glass, concrete and wood, are unobtrusive in their own right. But their priorities are loud and clear. “My architecture sends a strong message,” Yamamoto said, “to create something that others can relate to.”
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