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The Pritzker Architecture Prize was awarded to Japan’s Riken Yamamoto, who received the field’s highest honor for his long career focused on “increasing opportunities for people to meet spontaneously through precise and rational design strategies.”
Yamamoto, 78, has spent five decades of his career designing private and public buildings — from homes to museums to schools, from bustling airport hubs to glass-walled fire stations — and celebrating community spirit in all spaces.
“His aim is to dignify, enhance and enrich the lives of individuals, from children to the elderly, and their social relationships through the solid, consistent quality of its architecture,” the jury said in a review released on Tuesday. “For For him, a building has a public function even if it is private.”
In an interview in Yokohama, where he is based, Yamamoto said he was both proud and “surprised” to receive what is considered the Nobel Prize in architecture at this stage of his career.
“I’ll be 79 soon,” he said. “This award is an important moment for me. I think in the near future, a lot of people will listen to me very carefully. Maybe I can express my opinions more easily than before.”
The architect explains that his craft is not just about designing buildings, but designing in response to, and hopefully influencing, the surrounding context.
An important example: Yamamoto’s almost transparent Hiroshima Nishi Fire Station, designed in 2000, with exterior, interior walls and floors made of glass. The building invites the public to experience the daily activities of firefighters, which is rarely the case. Organizers said the result encouraged passersby “to pay attention to and interact with those who protect the community, thereby creating a mutual commitment between public servants and the citizens they serve”.
Typically, fire stations are constructed of concrete, Yamamoto said. He presented a different perspective in competition with other architects.
“I came up with a very radical idea,” Yamamoto said. “The idea is that the fire station should be the center of the community. Not only their fireworks, but their daily life should be the center because they live in this place and there is activity 24 hours a day.” He described how the firefighters were seen from outside Visible use of ropes and ladders for training in the atrium.
“A lot of kids came to see it,” he said. “It’s very interesting for them.”
The latest design with a similar concept is The Circle at Zurich Airport, designed in 2020 as a major business center with shops, restaurants, hotels and conference halls. Yamamoto said his goal was to create a 24-hour environment, a welcoming space for city residents and visitors.
“I came up with a very open system,” he said, “no doors, no entrances, no gates.” Snow or rain sometimes enters the space through the partially open roof, he said.
Another notable design is the Hotakubo housing project in Kumamoto, Japan, which was Yamamoto’s first social housing project and consisted of 110 housing units in 16 “clusters”.
“How do you create a community with 110 homes?” he thought about the 1991 design in an interview. “This one is very difficult.” He noted that most apartments are a box within a larger box. “It’s easy to create privacy, but it’s difficult to create community because each house is independent,” he said.
The architect’s solution: a central tree-lined square accessible only through the residence. In this way, he explains, he was able to combine the private with the public, providing privacy to individual families while promoting connections between them. The terrace also overlooks the public space.
Yamamoto was born in China in 1945 and grew up in Japan. He said he first became interested in architecture in high school. In 1971, he received a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Tokyo and founded his own practice two years later.
Many of his ideas about community were inspired by three extensive trips he took early in his career—not to famous monuments, he said, but to villages around the world, including Europe, North Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. In these villages, he studied the relationship of the family unit to the wider community and explored the idea of a “threshold” between public and private space. He also stated that he was inspired by the work of philosopher Hannah Arendt.
Yamamoto’s book, “The Space of Power, the Power of Space,” an English translation of his 2015 work, will be published next month.
Yamamoto, who lives and works in Yokohama and has held several teaching positions, is the 53rd recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, established by the late entrepreneurs Jay A. Pritzker and Established in 1979 by his wife, Cindy. The winner will receive a $100,000 prize and a bronze medal.
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