Riken Yamamoto, whose understated buildings quietly emphasize community and connectivity, has been awarded this year’s Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor.
“Whether he designs private houses or public infrastructure, schools or fire stations, city halls or museums, the common and convivial dimension is always present,” the jury said in its citation announcing the award. “His constant, careful and substantial attention to community has generated public interworking space systems that incentivize people to convene in different ways.”
The desire to eliminate barriers between public and private realms was evident in Yamamoto’s first project, from 1977, a private open-air summer house in the woods of Nagano, Japan. “It has only a roof, no walls,” the 78-year-old architect recalled in a telephone interview from Yokohama, Japan, where he is based. “In the winter season, many of the animals are coming in.”
Similarly, a house in Kawasaki that Yamamoto designed the following year for two artists featured a pavilion-like room that could serve as a stage for performances, with living quarters underneath.
People continually asked, “Why Yamamoto makes such a strange house?” the architect said. “I explain the meaning every time: The community is the most important thing. Every family has a relation to community.”
Yamamoto’s public projects with his firm, Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop, have also been oriented around social interaction. Saitama Prefectural University, completed in 1999, features nine transparent buildings connected by terraces, allowing views from one classroom to another. “Distinguishing where one building ends and another begins is intentionally blurred,” the Pritzker says in its image book of Yamamoto’s work, “prompting an architectural language of its own.”
“His architecture clearly expresses his beliefs through the modular structure and the simplicity of its form,” the jury said in its citation. “Yet, it does not dictate activities, rather it enables people to shape their own lives within his buildings with elegance, normality, poetry and joy.”
The architect has combined transparency, functionality and accessibility in projects like the Future University, Hakodate (2000), whose underlying philosophy, “Open Space, Open Mind,” is reflected in Yamamoto’s open spaces. The classrooms, auditorium and library are lined with glass walls and open common areas are placed just outside of the transparent rooms on overlapping levels, encouraging students and teachers to work collaboratively.
For the Hiroshima West Fire Station (2000), Yamamoto constructed the facade, interior walls and floors out of glass and made the atrium where firefighters train central to the building, encouraging passers-by to view and engage with those who are protecting the community.
Born in 1945 in China and trained in Japan, Yamamoto graduated from Nihon University and three years later received a Master of Arts in Architecture from Tokyo University of the Arts. He founded his practice in 1973.Yamamoto was influenced by his mentor, the architect Hiroshi Hara, designer of the Umeda Sky Building in Osaka, which features two towers connected at the top by glass bridges and is now considered a landmark.
Yamamoto’s 2018 winning design for the Taoyuan Museum of Art in Taiwan comprises two buildings with green inclined roofs connected with an aboveground corridor. Inspired by the theories of Hannah Arendt, Yamamoto is committed “to the belief that all spaces may enrich and serve the consideration of an entire community,” the Pritzker jury said, “and not just those who occupy them. He moved from single-family residences to social housing, such as the Hotakubo project in Kumamoto (1991), with 16 housing clusters arranged around a tree-lined central square. The design drew on traditional Japanese “machiya” (townhouses) and Greek “oikos” (households) — living arrangements that foster collectivism.
He went on to create larger public projects, like Tianjin Library in China (2012), which incorporates bookshelves into an intersecting grid of wall beams. Stone louvers on the exterior mitigate dust and achieve transparency.
Yamamoto has also made an effort to personally give back, 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 caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. And in 2018 he instituted the Local Republic Award, to honor young architects.
