The 2024 Pritzker Prize, widely regarded as architecture’s Nobel, has again been awarded to a Japanese architect.
In an announcement from Chicago on March 5, Yokohama-based architect Riken Yamamoto was named the recipient of this year’s award, which is dedicated to “a living architect 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.”
This makes Yamamoto, 78, the ninth Japanese person to be awarded the prestigious honor. No country has produced more laureates than Japan in the prize’s 45-year history, an indication of the high regard that its architects and architecture are held in globally.
The Pritzker’s jury citation identifies Yamamoto’s sustained focus on engendering human connection through built space as being his defining contribution to architecture.
“In his long, coherent, rigorous career,” the Pritzker jury writes, “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.”
Unlike many other laureates, Yamamoto is not a household name. But his work and approach have long been admired within the Japanese architectural scene. His work is unostentatious, devoted to the plan rather than the concept or the image, and ultimately most concerned with that most fundamental “material” of architectural space: social patterns and human connection. His colleague and sometime collaborator, the late Kazuhiro Kojima, once wrote of his astonishment at hearing Yamamoto state that “museums and public halls do not excite me. ... Collective housing and schools are more interesting.”
Private and public
This interest in what the Pritzker citation calls “the responsibility of the social demand” can be seen from Yamamoto’s earliest works, which, as is the case for most young architects, were inevitably.. Read More Here
