Pritzker Architecture Prize for Riken Yamamoto’s “Extraordinary Normality” | Culture

“Extraordinary normality, dignity of everyday life.” With these words, the Chilean Alejandro Aravena – President of the jury of the Pritzker Prize, which he himself received in 2016 – defined Riken Yamamoto (Beijing, 78 years old), winner of the award in the 2024 edition announced this Tuesday. The Japanese is an architect who defends users against buildings. Also the memory of the properties, especially their profitability. That is, an activist, a supporter of building communities – both people and architecture -, an opponent of the privatization of the city and a champion of meeting spaces between citizens. A true 21st century designer, but he only established his ideas in the 1970s. How is it possible?

Yamamoto was born at the end of World War II and grew up in Yokohama in a traditional country machiya, a house on the ground floor where his mother – who had been widowed since Riken was five – had a pharmacy. The family lived in the back of the house while the business served the public in the street-facing facade. Yamamoto translates this logic, which mixes the public and the private, into architecture. After graduating, he focused on defending the sharing of infrastructures, opposing his predecessors, the Metabolists, who led the separation of infrastructures in the 1960s under the leadership of Kenzo Tange – who also received the Pritzker Prize in 1987 and buildings defended. For Yamamoto it doesn’t matter. And everything must be small and on a human scale, prioritizing the lives of citizens over construction. Therefore, the in-between space, the initiator of mixtures and builder of bridges, is the late Pritzker’s preferred typology. The space, whose users and not the architect decide according to their needs, has shaped his concerns from the beginning. Because?

He was 28 years old when he opened his own studio in Yokohama. He was educated in engineering (Nihon University) and architecture (University of Tokyo). However, before he started his work, he dedicated himself to traveling around the world for a year. He traveled through 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 stood against the Metabolists and announced one of the postmodern revisions and defended the updating of the tradition.

Hara himself has reimagined the city with neighborhood buildings – like the iconic one Umeda Sky Building– which he built in Osaka in 1993. He challenged his students, both Yamamoto and Kengo Kuma, who chose to travel through Africa, to look for the opposite of the global architecture that modernism represented. Yamamoto examined what is common in local responses in cities around the world. “The cities were very different, but the worlds were similar,” he explains. He analyzed what cultures had repeated over the centuries. He noticed the elements and construction techniques that responded to the materials, the climate and the available budgets and only later formed an identity.

Both Kuma and Yamamoto concluded that modernity had reversed this course. And that identity, aesthetics, formalism or even the supposedly democratic ideology decided on the architecture, for logical reasons. Yamamoto has often quoted Hannah Arendt to criticize the brutal modern enforcement of “ideology over needs.” He also turns to the philosopher to justify the human quality contained in the memory of buildings. And he criticizes the disregard for this heritage through the short-termism that dominates real estate speculation.

An author of schools, universities, public housing complexes, and museums built primarily in Japan but also in Korea, China, and Switzerland, Yamamoto defends architecture as a framework for social connection. Places that do not specify use, but on the contrary are offered to users for reinvention. This occurs in the landscaping that surrounds the building Fussa town hall, built in 2008 in Tokyo, where the park between office buildings serves citizens for rest or meetings. In the Nishi fire station in Hiroshima from 2000, the transparency of the facades also allows passers-by to reflect on the daily routine of the firefighters’ physical preparation.

In the real world (In the Real World) was the title of the exhibition that was shown in the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2014. This exhibition made this architect’s work known to a wider world. There, photographs, drawings and plans bore witness to the alternative proposal to modern rigidity that several experts put forward in the 1970s. It was recognized that it was Hara who pushed his students to travel the world and ask themselves what was missing or lacking in the savagery of modernity. When Norihito Nakatani curated this exhibition, Yamamoto had been at the helm of the Local Republic Labo for three years. He founded it because he wanted to both help victims of the 2011 tsunami and Tohoku earthquake and prevent future tsunamis and earthquakes through architecture and landscaping.

Yamamoto claims an architecture that transcends 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 trumps the architect. We need properties that improve over time,” he told Portuguese architect Grao Serra a decade ago. Speaking at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, he also talked about his fondness for Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s teacher and author of the Auditorium – a three-front building containing a hotel, theater and offices. various streets in the city loop – beyond Mies’ purism, “too rigid and imposing”.

It is precisely in Chicago that he will receive the Pritzker on May 16th. He will do this 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 now Milenium Park. In 1998, another Pritzker Prize winner, Italian Renzo Piano, expanded the original Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge building, which houses more than 300,000 works of art, including windows by Frank Lloyd Wright. night owls, by Edward Hopper, and the Old Stock Exchange designed by Sullivan in 1894. You couldn’t ask for a more diverse building. A curiosity is that Yamamoto receives the Pritzker and not his teacher Hiroshi Hara, who led him to question modernity and who is now 87 years old. Yamamoto has spoken for 100 years about the duty of buildings to make people smile. It’s his way of resisting the short-termism of the architectural business. Hannah Arendt also wrote that the city must endure beyond human life.

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