The architect Riken Yamamoto, based in Yokohama (Japan), has been appointed today winner of the Pritzker Award for Architecture 2024. This 78 -year -old Japanese architect is known for its housing projects and civic buildings, such as schools, libraries and municipal service buildings – the majority in Asia – with designs that foster coexistence and social interactions. As founder and director of the Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop architecture, among Yamamoto's main works are Hotakubo Housing (1991) in Kumamoto (Japan), a complex of 110 units that share a central green space and adjacencies; The Yokosuka Museum of Art (2006), a crystal -coated structure with a winding entrance that places many galleries underground so as not to interrupt the natural views of Tokyo Bay; The Tianjin Library (2012) in China, a large -scale project with a grid design that creates a variety of reading room sizes for its collection of five million books; and the circle of the Zurich airport (2020), a mixed district of hospitality, purchases and offices located a few steps from the terminal. Riken Yamamoto is the ninth Japanese architect to be awarded the Pritzker Prizejoining other outstanding figures of the design world such as IM PEI (1983), Tadao Ando (1995) and Shigeru Ban (2014).
«The current architectural approach emphasizes privacy, denying the need for social relations,» says Yamamoto in a statement. «However, we can still honor the freedom of each individual while we live together in the architectural space as a republic, promoting the harmony between cultures and phases of life.» This philosophy can be seen in Yamamoto projects in all typologies, from homes that include terraces that cover several units or patios shared with the public to normally inaccessible spaces for foreigners. Its design for the Japanese Firefighters of Hiroshima Nishi, for example, creates a transparent glass grid cube, as well as a terrace for visitors and a lobby of exhibitions, inviting the community to unprecedented opportunities to know and learn more about the work of local firefighters in their park.
«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 meet and interact,» says the president of the jury and winner of the 2016 pritzker award, Alejandro Aravena. «By carefully blurring the boundary between the public and the private, Yamamoto contributes positively beyond the commission to allow the community.»
Born in Beijing (China), Yamamoto moved to Yokohama after World War II and lived with his mother in a house that, in the front, had the pharmacy she drove, while the house was in the rear. Growing up in a space where the relationship between the public and the private marked it deeply was sailed. In 1971 he graduated from Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of the Arts of Tokyo, and two years later he founded his study, dedicated to works that «remind us that in architecture, as in democracy, spaces must be created by the determination of the people», according to the mention of the jury of the jury of the jury of the Pritzker Award for Architecture 2024.
After the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Yokohama founded an institute to support the community through architecture, local Area Republic Labo, and later established an award for young architects with these objectives.
More recently, from 2018 to 2022, Yamamoto was president of the Japanese School of Art and Design of the Nagoya University and designed a new headquarters for its academic programs in Nagoya, two hours by Kyoto's car, at the end of his mandate. With a squared facade at its separate base, the building saves a train station, creating a bridge of its superior volume glazed. He is currently a professor at the University of Kanagawa, in Yokohama, and is designing his first project in Taiwan, the Taoyuan Museum of Art, of 29 thousand square meters, which flanks a raised railroad in Taoyuan.
«The city is essentially a place to inhabit,» Yamamoto said on one occasion. «If so, what means do we have to restructure the city and turn it into a habitable place?» Promoting the creation of relations through common private spaces and incorporating the public sphere in each project, its more than five decades of work have tried to answer that question.
Article originally published in AD Us.