Japanese architect and social advocate Riken Yamamoto has been named as the recipient of the 2024 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the prestigious award that is regarded internationally as architecture’s highest honor.

Yamamoto is the 53rd Laureate of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, and ninth architect selected from Japan. He was honoured for his deep commitment to sustaining community life.

"For me, to recognize space, is to recognize an entire community,” said Yamamoto. 

"The current architectural approach emphasizes privacy, negating the necessity of societal relationships."

"However, we can still honor the freedom of each individual while living together in architectural space as a republic, fostering harmony across cultures and phases of life," he added.

The 2024 Jury Citation stated, in part, that he was selected "for creating awareness in the community in what is the responsibility of the social demand, for questioning the discipline of architecture to calibrate each individual architectural response, and above all for reminding us that in architecture, as in democracy, spaces must be created by the resolve of the people..."

Yamamoto has been praised for removing boundaries between public and private spaces, inspiring harmonious societies despite diversity in identities, economies, policies, infrastructures and housing systems.

As the Pritzker Prize statement writes, he asserts that the value of privacy has become an urban sensibility, when in fact, members of a community should sustain one another.

"He defines community as a “sense of sharing one space,” deconstructing traditional notions of freedom and privacy while rejecting longstanding conditions that have reduced housing into a commodity without relation to neighbors." 

"Instead, he bridges cultures, histories and multi-generational citizens, with sensitivity, by adapting international influence and modernist architecture to the needs of the future, allowing life to thrive."

2016 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Alejandro Aravena believes that what is needed most in the future of cities is to create conditions that will enable people to come together and interact through architecture.

"One of the things we need most in the future of cities is to create conditions through architecture that multiply the opportunities for people to come together and interact," explained Alejandro Aravena, Jury Chair and 2016 Pritzker Prize Laureate.

"By carefully blurring the boundary between public and private, Yamamoto contributes positively beyond the brief to enable community."

"He is a reassuring architect who brings dignity to everyday life. Normality becomes extraordinary. Calmness leads to splendor," he explained.

In his five-decade career, Riken Yamamoto designed numerous buildings, including private residences, public housing, elementary schools to university buildings, institutions, civic spaces, and city planning - which are located throughout Japan, People’s Republic of China, Republic of Korea and Switzerland.

Yamamoto, 79, was born in Beijing, and relocated to Yokohama, Japan shortly after the end of World War II.

He graduated from Nihon University, Department of Architecture, College of Science and Technology in 1968 and received a Master of Arts in Architecture from Tokyo University of the Arts, Faculty of Architecture in 1971. Only two years after, he founded his practice, Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop in 1973.

Transparency in terms of form, materials and philosophy have become indispensable elements of his projects.

He built his first project, Yamakawa Villa, in Nagano, Japan in 1977. The villa is exposed on all sides and situated in the woods, designed to feel entirely like an open-air terrace. Another of his early works is his own house, Gazebo House, in 1986 in Yokohama, Japan. 

Larger housing projects rely on the same relational elements, allowing even single residents to avoid living in isolation. 

One of his key housing projects is Pangyo Housing in Seongnam, Republic of Korea in 2010. The housing is comprised of a nine low-rise housing blocks, which are designed with non-prescriptive transparent ground floor volumes that catalyze interconnectedness between neighbors.

Yamamoto's first social housing is the Hotakubo Housing in Kumamoto, Japan in 1991. It was aimed to bridge cultures and generations through relational living.

Other key works of Yamamoto include Nagoya Zokei University (Nagoya, Japan, 2022), THE CIRCLE at Zürich Airport (Zürich, Switzerland, 2020), Tianjin Library (Tianjin, People’s Republic of China, 2012), Jian Wai SOHO (Beijing, People’s Republic of China, 2004), Ecoms House (Tosu, Japan, 2004), Shinonome Canal Court CODAN (Tokyo, Japan, 2003), Future University Hakodate (Hakodate, Japan, 2000), Iwadeyama Junior High School (Ōsaki, Japan, 1996) and Hotakubo Housing (Kumamoto, Japan, 1991).

Yamamoto is the 53rd Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and the ninth architect winning this prestigious prize from Japan. Arata Isozaki, Shigeru Ban, Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, Tadao Ando, Fumihiko Maki and Kenzo Tange are the Japanese architects who have won the Pritzker Architecture Prize so far.

He will be awarded the 2024 Pritzker Prize at a ceremony in Chicago, Illinois, United States of America this spring.

Read the full Jury Citation for the 2024 Pritzker Architecture Laureate Riken Yamamoto:

Jury citation

The Pritzker Prize is conferred in acknowledgment of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which have persistently produced significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture. In his long, coherent, rigorous career, Riken Yamamoto has managed to produce architecture both as background and foreground to everyday life, blurring boundaries between its public and private dimensions, and multiplying opportunities for people to meet spontaneously, through precise, rational design strategies.

By the strong, consistent quality of his buildings, he aims to dignify, enhance and enrich the life of individuals – from children to elders – and their social connections. And he does this through a self-explanatory yet modest and pertinent architecture, with structural honesty and precise scaling, with careful attention to the landscape of the surroundings.

His architecture clearly expresses his beliefs through the modular structure and the simplicity of its form. Yet, it does not dictate activities, rather it enables people to shape their own lives within his buildings with elegance, normality, poetry and joy.

Riken Yamamoto deliberately engages with the widest range of building types as well as scales in the projects he chooses. Whether he designs private houses or public infrastructure, schools or fire stations, city halls or museums, the common and convivial dimension is always present. His constant, careful and substantial attention to community has generated public interworking space systems that incentivize people to convene in different ways. The entire building space of the Saitama Prefectural University (1999), for instance, is conceived as a community.

Yamamoto suggests rather than imposes this shared dimension through understated, yet precise architectural interventions. By including spaces for common activities within, in addition to and even regardless of the main function of his buildings, he allows these to integrate into the quotidian life of the community, instead of being only experienced in exceptional circumstances. The two departments for the students and researchers to work together in the Future University, Hakodate (2000), or the transparent louvred glass facade to expose the inner workings of the department in the Hiroshima Fire Station (2000) both exemplify his belief in the concept of transparency as a reflection of the functionality and accessibility of the space for users and viewers alike.

As a young architect born in China and trained in Japan, he felt the urgency to complete his own education with a real understanding of the 'other than the self.' He extensively travelled not (primarily) to visit renowned monuments, but rather to experience at first hand the culture and everyday life of communities on other continents. From North to South America, across the Mediterranean to the Middle East and Asia, Yamamoto has investigated the roots and history of community life that he might bring his own contribution to the modernization of the contemporary city through architecture. For him a building has a public function even when it is private.

Riken Yamamoto is not an architecture historian, yet he learns from the past as well as from different cultures. As an architect, he does not copy from the past, rather he adapts, re-uses and evolves, showing that fundamentals persist in their relevance. Yamamoto has expanded the toolbox of the profession towards both the past and the future to be able to give each time, in very different modes and at very different scales, the most pertinent response to the challenges of both the built environment and of collective living.

For creating awareness in the community in what is the responsibility of the social demand, for questioning the discipline of architecture to calibrate each individual architectural response, and above all for reminding us that in architecture, as in democracy, spaces must be created by the resolve of the people, Riken Yamamoto is named the 2024 Pritzker Prize Laureate.

Last year, British civic architect, urban planner and activist, David Alan Chipperfield, has been named as the recipient of the 2023 Pritzker Architecture Prize. 

In 2022, Burkinese architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, principal and founder of Kéré Architecture, was named as the recipient of the 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Top image: Riken Yamamoto, photo courtesy of Tom Welsh. 

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