Japanese architect wins Pritzker Prize for community-driven spaces
THE Pritzker Architecture Prize has been awarded to Japan’s Riken Yamamoto, WHO EARNS THE fiELD’S HIGHEST HONOR FOR WHAT ORGANIZERS CALLED A LONG CAREER FOCUSED ON “MULTIPLYING OPPORTUNITIES FOR PEOPLE TO MEET SPONTANEOUSLY, THROUGH PRECISE, RATIONAL DESIGN STRATEGIES.”
Yamamoto, 78, has spent a fivedecade career designing both private and public buildings — from residences to museums to schools, from a bustling airport center to a glass-walled fire station — and prizing a spirit of community in all spaces.
“By the strong, consistent quality of his buildings, he aims to dignify, enhance and enrich the lives of individuals — from children to elders — and their social connections,” the jury said, in part, in a citation released Tuesday. “For him, a building has a public function even when it is private.”
In an interview, the Yokohamabased Yamamoto said he was both proud and “amazed” to win the prize, seen as the Nobel of architecture, at this point in his career. “Soon I will be 79 years old,” he said. “This prize is a big moment for me.”
Believing that many people will listen to him very carefully, he can say his opinion more easily than before. Yamamoto has held numerous teaching positions.
Yamamoto explained that his craft is not simply to design buildings, but to design in the context of their surroundings, and hopefully to impact them as well. His virtually transparent Hiroshima Nishi Fire Station was designed in 2000 with a facade, interior walls and floors made of glass.
The building invites the public to experience the daily activities of firefighters, something it rarely sees. Passersby can engage with their protectors, leading to “a reciprocal commitment between the civil servants and the citizens they serve,” organizers said.
Open environments
Normally, Yamamoto said, a fire station would be built from concrete. However, his “radical idea” positioned the firehouse and its 24-hour public service as the center of the community. Firefighters training with ropes and ladders in a central atrium are visible from outside.
A more recent design with a similar concept is The Circle at Zurich’s airport, designed in 2020. For this commercial center with shops, restaurants, hotels and a convention hall, Yamamoto aimed to create an open, 24-hour environment to welcome city residents and travelers. His proposed “very open system” had “no gate, no entrance, no door.” Snow or rain sometimes enters the space via a partially open roof.
Another noted design is the Hotakubo housing project in Kumamoto, Japan, Yamamoto’s first social housing project in 1991, made up of 110 homes in 16 “clusters.” Most apartments, he noted, are boxes inside of a bigger box. He noted the ease in creating privacy, and the difficulty in making a community “because each house is independent.”
His solution: a tree-lined plaza at the center that can only be entered via a residence. In this way, he was able to combine the private with the public, giving individual families their privacy while promoting connections between them. Terraces also overlook the common space.
Yamamoto was born in China in 1945 and raised in Japan from early childhood. He said he first grew attracted to architecture while still in high school. He received a master’s degree in architecture from Tokyo University in 1971, and founded his own practice two years later.
Many of his ideas on community were inspired by three extensive trips he took early in his career — not to famous monuments but instead to villages around the world, he said, in Europe, North Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. In such villages, he examined the relationship of the family unit to the broader community and explored the idea of a “threshold” between public and private space.
He also said he was inspired by the writings of philosopher Hannah Arendt. Yamamoto’s book, “The Space of Power, The Power of Space,” will be published next month, an English translation of his 2015 work.
Yamamoto is the 53rd laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, established in 1979 by the late entrepreneur Jay A. Pritzker and his wife, Cindy. Winners receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion.