Riken Yamamoto Wins Pritzker Prize

Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto has been named the winner of the 2024 Pritzker Prize, architecture’s most prestigious honor. Riken is widely known for spare, elegant structures that center and facilitate social interaction. Often employing mundane, comparatively inexpensive materials, such as wood, aluminum, and glass, he has designed buildings ranging from a private summer house in a forest, to a massive set of window-studded office buildings, to a bayfront museum with a swooping rooftop walkway that allows views of the sea ahead and the mountains behind. Yamamoto’s structures are typically porous, permitting interactions between people, between people and animals, and between people and nature.

“Whether he designs private houses or public infrastructure, schools or fire stations, city halls or museums, the common and convivial dimension is always present,” said the prize jury in a statement. “His constant, careful and substantial attention to community has generated public interworking space systems that incentivize people to convene in different ways.”

Born in Beijing in 1945, Yamamoto was just a few years old when his father, an engineer, died. Yamamoto’s mother moved the family to Yokohama, where the future architect witnessed firsthand the rebuilding of Japan in the wake of air raids conducted by US forces during World War II. This process, coupled with a desire to imitate his father, drove him to pursue architecture. Graduating from Nihon University, he obtained his master’s degree at Tokyo University of the Arts before establishing his practice, Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop, in 1973. Among his most renowned designs are the Future University of Hakodate, in which glass classrooms and functional spaces encourage interaction and a sense of human scale within a larger structure; the Ecoms House in Tosu, which is made of aluminum and models a cheap and flexible method of prefabricated housing; and the transparent Hiroshima Nishi Fire Station, whose glass walls and floors allow passersby unobstructed views of firemen training inside.

The architect is frequently asked, “Why Yamamoto makes such a strange house?” he told the New York Times. “I explain the meaning every time: The community is the most important thing. Every family has a relation to community.”