Pritzker Architecture Prize for “Extraordinary Normality” by Riken Yamamoto

“Extraordinary normality, dignity of the everyday.”

With these words, the Chilean Alejandro Aravena - president of the Pritzker Prize jury, which he himself received in 2016 - has defined Riken Yamamoto (Beijing, 78 years old), winner of the award in the 2024 edition, which has been announced this Tuesday.

The Japanese is an architect who defends users over buildings.

He also takes into account the memory of the properties, above their profitability.

That is to say, an activist, an advocate of the construction of communities - both people and architecture -, opposed to the privatization of the city and defender of meeting areas between citizens.

A true 21st century designer who, however, established his ideas in the 1970s.

How is it possible?

Born at the end of World War II, Yamamoto grew up in Yokohama in a traditional

machiya

, a house on the ground floor of which his mother – widowed since Riken was five years old – ran a pharmacy.

The family lived in the back of that house, while the business served the public in the façade that faced the street.

This logic that mixes the public and the private is what Yamamoto translates into architecture.

Once graduated, he focused on the defense of the shared use of infrastructures, thus opposing his predecessors, the metabolists, who, led by Kenzo Tange - who also received the Pritzker in 1987 -, defended in the sixties the separation between infrastructure and building.

For Yamamoto, it's all the same.

And everything must be small, and on a human scale, to prioritize the lives of citizens over construction.

Thus, instigator of mixtures and builder of bridges, the intermediate space – the one that mixes interior and exterior and the one that, due to its ambiguous nature, is easier to share – is the favorite typology of the late Pritzker.

That space whose user, not the architect, decides according to his needs, has marked, from its beginnings, his concerns.

Because?

More information

Yamamoto: "We have to rethink the house"

He was 28 years old when he opened his own studio in Yokohama.

He had trained in Engineering (Nihon University) and Architecture (University of Tokyo).

However, before starting to work he dedicated a year to traveling the world.

He toured Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Iraq, India, Nepal, Morocco, Tunisia, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain and France, encouraged by his teacher, Hiroshi Hara.

Barely ten years older than Yamamoto, it was Hara who, opposing the metabolists and announcing one of the postmodern revisions, defended updating the tradition.

Hara himself rethought the city with neighborhood buildings - like the iconic Umeda Sky Building - that he built in Osaka in 1993. He urged his disciples, both Yamamoto and Kengo Kuma - who chose to travel through Africa - to look for the contrary to the global architecture that represented modernity.

Yamamoto studied, in the towns of the world, what is common in vernacular responses.

“The towns were very different, but the worlds were similar,” he explains.

He analyzed what cultures had repeated over the centuries.

He wrote down the elements and construction techniques that responded to the materials, climate and available budgets and that, only later, ended up building an identity.

Both Kuma and Yamamoto came to the conclusion that modernity had reversed this course.

And that identity, aesthetics, formalism or even the supposedly democratic ideology had come to decide architecture ahead of logical reasons.

Yamamoto has frequently quoted Hannah Arendt criticizing the ferocious modern imposition of “ideology over needs.”

She also turns to the philosopher to vindicate the human quality contained in the memory of buildings.

And she criticizes the disregard for that heritage at the hands of the short-termism that governs real estate speculation.

Yamakawa Villa in Nagano, 1977. In his first work, Yamamoto investigated the space in between in this house in the forest with four closed rooms in which life is done on the porch.Tomio Ohashi (Courtesy of Tomio Ohashi)

Gazebo, Yokohama, 1986. The architect's own house took advantage of the regulations - which allowed it to grow from 4 to 26 meters and allow businesses and housing to coexist - to connect neighboring rooftops.Ryuuji Miyamoto

Hotakubo Homes in Kumamoto, 1991. The architect repaired the modern rigidity with semicircular cantilevered roofs and terraces that expand the home and update the traditional Japanese machiya with collective spaces.Tomio Ohashi

Iwadeyama High School in Osaki,1996.

A curved façade to mitigate the winds and an atrium so that students, in addition to studying, talk, interact and make friends.Shinkenchiku Sha

Shinonome Canal Court CODAN in Tokyo, 2003. Minicity formed by six mixed-use buildings - with housing on the upper floors and shops and services on the ground floors - connected by terraces, roofs and patios to make the facilities profitable. Tomio Ohashi (Courtesy of Tomio Ohashi)

Yokosuka Museum of Art, 2006 Facing Tokyo Bay, a transparent museum supports a viewing platform converted into a landscape.Tomio Ohashi (Courtesy of Tomio Ohashi)

Tianjin Library, China, 2012. Six million books in an open, flexible and very bright building lined with local stone for easy maintenance over time. Courtesy of Nacasa & Partners

The Circle at Zürich Airport, 2020. A facade closed to the airport entrances unfolds into a human-scale town with different alleys and heights. Courtesy of Flughafen Zürich AG

Author of schools, universities, social housing complexes and museums built mostly in Japan, but also in Korea, China and Switzerland, Yamamoto defends architecture as a setting for social connections.

Places that do not dictate uses, but, on the contrary, are offered for users to reinvent.

This happens in the landscaping that surrounds the Fussa City Hall, erected in Tokyo in 2008, where the park between office buildings serves for citizens to rest or for their gatherings.

Also in the Nishi Fire Station in Hiroshima, from 2000, the transparency of the facades allows passers-by to contemplate the daily routines of the firefighters' physical preparation.

In the Real World

was the title of the exhibition that, in 2014, occupied the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

That exhibition made the work of this architect known to the wider world.

There, photographs, drawings and plans spoke of the alternative proposal to modern rigidity that several professionals launched in the seventies.

It was recognized that it had been Hara who pushed his disciples to travel the world and ask themselves what was missing, or what was missing, in the ferocity of modernity.

When Norihito Nakatani curated that exhibition, Yamamoto had been at the helm of the Local Republic Labo for three years.

He founded it because he wanted to help both those affected by the tsunami and the Tohoku earthquake of 2011 and the prevention, through architecture and landscaping, of future tsunamis and earthquakes.

The Ishii House project, in Kawasaki, by Yamamoto. Courtesy of Shinkenchiku Sha

Yamamoto claims an architecture that remains beyond people's lives.

“A place that reminds you of your father when he is no longer there.”

“We design the architecture.

The city belongs to the people.

The memory of the building itself is above the architect.

We need properties that improve over time,” he told the Portuguese architect Grao Serra a decade ago.

In conversation at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, he also spoke of his preference for Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright's teacher, author of the Auditorium - a building that contains a hotel, a theater and offices with three facades. different streets in the city's Loop - above Mies's purism, "too rigid and imposing."

Precisely in Chicago he will receive the Pritzker on May 16.

He will do it in a building that well represents his ideology: the Art Institute, a museum built in 1893, after the great fire, in the heart of what is today called Milenium Park.

In 1998, another Pritzker laureate, the Italian Renzo Piano, expanded the original Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge building, which displays more than 300,000 works of art, including windows by Frank Lloyd Wright,

Nighthawks

, by Edward Hopper, and the former Stock Exchange, designed by Sullivan in 1894. You couldn't ask for a more mixed building.

A curiosity is that Yamamoto receives the Pritzker and his teacher Hiroshi Hara does not, who instigated him to question modernity and who is now 87 years old.

Yamamoto has talked about buildings' duty to make people smile for 100 years.

It is his way of insisting against the short-termism of the architectural business.

Hannah Arendt also wrote that the city must endure beyond human life.

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