Riken Yamamoto, whose understated buildings quietly emphasize neighborhood and connectivity, has been awarded this 12 months’s Pritzker Prize, structure’s highest honor.
“Whether or not he designs personal homes or public infrastructure, colleges or fireplace stations, metropolis halls or museums, the frequent and convivial dimension is all the time current,” the jury stated in its quotation asserting the award on Tuesday. “His fixed, cautious and substantial consideration to neighborhood has generated public interworking area techniques that incentivize folks to convene in several methods.”
The need to remove boundaries between private and non-private realms was evident in Yamamoto’s first undertaking, from 1977, a private open-air summer house in the woods of Nagano, Japan. “It has solely a roof, no partitions,” the 78-year-old architect recalled in a phone interview from Yokohama, Japan, the place he’s primarily based. “Within the winter season, most of the animals are coming in.”
Equally, a home in Kawasaki that Yamamoto designed the next 12 months for 2 artists featured a pavilion-like room that would function a stage for performances, with dwelling quarters beneath.
Folks frequently requested, “Why Yamamoto makes such a wierd home?” the architect stated. “I clarify the that means each time: The neighborhood is a very powerful factor. Each household has a relation to neighborhood.”
The distinguished Pritzker award could also be most carefully related to “starchitect” recipients similar to Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. However in recent times the jury has additionally acknowledged lower-profile designers, similar to Francis Kéré of West Africa (2022), Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal (2021) and Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara (2020).
Yamamoto’s public tasks together with his agency, Riken Yamamoto & Discipline Store, have additionally been oriented round social interplay. Saitama Prefectural College, accomplished in 1999, options 9 clear buildings linked by terraces, permitting views from one classroom to a different. “Distinguishing the place one constructing ends and one other begins is deliberately blurred,” the Pritzker says in its picture e-book of Yamamoto’s work, “prompting an architectural language of its personal.”
“His structure clearly expresses his beliefs by the modular construction and the simplicity of its kind,” the jury stated in its quotation. “But, it doesn’t dictate actions, relatively it allows folks to form their very own lives inside his buildings with magnificence, normality, poetry and pleasure.”
The architect has mixed transparency, performance and accessibility in tasks just like the Future University, Hakodate (2000), whose underlying philosophy, “Open Area, Open Thoughts,” is mirrored in Yamamoto’s open areas. The school rooms, auditorium and library are lined with glass partitions and open frequent areas are positioned simply exterior of the clear rooms on overlapping ranges, encouraging college students and lecturers to work collaboratively.
For the Hiroshima West Fire Station (2000), Yamamoto constructed the facade, inside partitions and flooring out of glass and made the atrium the place firefighters practice central to the constructing, encouraging passers-by to view and interact with those that are defending the neighborhood.
When designing Jian Wai SOHO in 2004, 9 residential towers and 4 small house places of work simply east of Tiananmen Sq. in Beijing, Yamamoto stated he efficiently resisted the developer’s efforts to make the neighborhood gated. “I attempted to make it open to the town,” the architect stated.
In 2020, Yamamoto designed the Circle at Zurich Airport, an indoor-outdoor complicated of motels, eating places and shops that includes glass partitions, windowed ceilings and skinny concrete columns.
Usually airports “have solely memento retailers, however that is fully totally different,” Yamamoto stated in 2016, including that his complicated “shouldn’t be for the airport itself. The deliberate metropolis is for native residents of the Zurich area.”
Born in 1945 in China and skilled in Japan, Yamamoto was 5 when he misplaced his father, an engineer, whose profession he sought to emulate, finally discovering his approach to structure. On the age of 17, he visited Kohfukuji Temple, in Nara, one among Japan’s most well-known Buddhist shrines, with a historical past relationship to the seventh century. There he was captivated by the five-story pagoda symbolizing the weather of earth, water, fireplace, air and area.
“It was very darkish, however I may see the picket tower illuminated by the sunshine of the moon,” he stated within the Pritzker biography, “and what I discovered at that second was my first expertise with structure.”
In 1968, Yamamoto graduated from Nihon College and three years later obtained a Grasp of Arts in Structure from Tokyo College of the Arts. He based his apply in 1973.
Yamamoto was influenced by his mentor, the architect Hiroshi Hara, designer of the Umeda Sky Constructing in Osaka, which options two towers linked on the high by glass bridges and is now thought of a landmark. Yamamoto’s 2018 winning design for the Taoyuan Museum of Artwork in Taiwan includes two buildings with inexperienced inclined roofs linked with an aboveground hall.
Impressed by the theories of Hannah Arendt, Yamamoto is dedicated “to the assumption that every one areas might enrich and serve the consideration of a complete neighborhood,” the Pritzker jury stated, “and never simply those that occupy them. He moved from single-family residences to social housing, such because the Hotakubo project in Kumamoto (1991), with 16 housing clusters organized round a tree-lined central sq.. The design drew on conventional Japanese “machiya” (townhouses) and Greek “oikos” (households) — dwelling preparations that foster collectivism.
He went on to create bigger public tasks, like Tianjin Library in China (2012), which includes bookshelves into an intersecting grid of wall beams. Stone louvers on the outside mitigate mud and obtain transparency.
Yamamoto has additionally made an effort to personally give again, collaborating with the architects Toyo Ito and Kazuyo Sejima on disaster-relief community housing following the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that struck Tohoku in 2011 and precipitated a meltdown on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. And in 2018 he instituted the Native Republic Award, to honor younger architects.
“For some purpose, we’re educated to simply accept that an architect should be good and boastful, main us to wrongly imagine conceitedness is a situation for goodness,” Graham McKay, an architect and professor, wrote in his “Misfits’ Structure” weblog in 2021. “I’d like to make use of Riken Yamamoto and his profession for instance that that’s not true.”
Typically composed of important, on a regular basis supplies like aluminum, glass, concrete and wooden, Yamamoto’s buildings don’t name consideration to themselves. However their priorities come by loud and clear. “My structure is a robust message,” Yamamoto stated, “to make one thing in relation to different folks.”