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Watch Riken Yamamoto's remarks from the 2024 Pritzker Prize ceremony

2024-11-14T15:35:00-05:00

Video from this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate Riken Yamamoto’s May lecture and award presentation ceremony in Chicago has been shared with Archinect to celebrate the 46th edition of architecture’s most important individual honor.

The documentary-style film provides a behind-the-scenes look at the festivities, featuring commentary from Norman Foster and Yale School of Architecture dean Deborah Berke, among several others.

Berke tells us "I think the most important thing about it is how subtle it is and how willing he is as an architect to let the buildings be background in order to foreground human interaction" in deference to Yamamoto's deep understanding of both relational aesthetics and the art of the urban form.

Video courtesy of The Hyatt Foundation/The Pritzker Architecture Prize

More commentary from jurors Barry Bergdoll, Stephen Breyer, André Corrêa do Lago, Kazuyo Sejima, and Wang Shu provided an additional spotlight on Yamamoto’s legacy of social advocacy th...

Riken Yamamoto receives the 2024 Pritzker Prize in Chicago

2024-05-20T15:16:00-04:00

A celebration of Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto as the 53rd official Pritzker Prize laureate was held in Chicago over the weekend. Yamamoto was joined by past winners Francis Kéré (2022) and Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal (2021) on stage at the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture for a special presentation of his life and work, which began in Beijing in 1945 and has seen designs realized in Japan, Switzerland, China, and the Republic of Korea, through a lens considering 'The Architect as a Catalyst for Change.'

Yamamoto is the ninth Japanese winner of the Pritzker Prize, after his countrymen Arata Isozaki (2019), Shigeru Ban (2014), Toyo Ito (2013), Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (2010), Tadao Ando (1995), Fumihiko Maki (1991), and Kenzō Tange (1987). He said during the ceremony that he felt pride at being a "member of the Pritzker family." His win follows David Chipperfield, who spoke from the Ancient Agora in Athens last year.

The full remarks fro...

Seven defining projects by the 2024 Pritzker Prize winner Riken Yamamoto

2024-03-05T17:40:00-05:00

This morning’s announcement of Riken Yamamoto as the 53rd official laureate of the Pritzker Prize has come with praise for the Beijing-born Japanese designer whose community-minded approach to architecture has impacted countless lives. Many outside of Asia were surprised by his selection, which is being received as a win for rational design principles, relational aesthetics, and the democratization of architecture.

He is particularly well-known for placing emphasis on the boundaries and periphery spaces inherent in his designs, as well as for having an equal competency in transfusing landscapes within their natural environments and urban context. To date, completed works include projects in Japan, Switzerland, China, and the Republic of Korea.

“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 envi...

Riken Yamamoto wins the 2024 Pritzker Prize

2024-03-05T09:00:00-05:00

Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto has been awarded the 2024 Pritzker Prize.

Born in 1945, the architect and social advocate has built a career that establishes kinship between public and private realms, in pursuit of harmonious societies that overcome diverse identities, economies, politics, infrastructures, and housing systems.

Yamakawa Villa, photo courtesy of Tomio Ohashi

“For me, to recognize space, is to recognize an entire community,” Yamamoto notes. “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.”

Jian Wai SOHO, photo courtesy of Mitsumasa Fujitsuka

Yamamoto was chosen by the Pritzker jury for his championing of a profession that creates awareness in the community, "questioning the discipline of architecture to calibrate each individual architectural ...

AI models predict the 2024 Pritzker Winner

2024-03-04T08:10:00-05:00

As the architecture community anticipates the official Pritzker Prize announcement this Tuesday, our team at Archinect has been fully immersed in the whirlwind of predictions and speculations. A few days ago we published a roundup of forecasts from the Archinect community, highlighting potential winners such as Moshe Safdie, Barclay Crousse, Eyal Weizman/Forensic Architecture, Thomas Heatherwick, H arquitectes, and Johnston Marklee, to name just a few. This curiosity led to an idea for a fun experiment: consult with various Artificial Intelligence models to gauge their insights on the prestigious award's 2024 recipient. Initiating conversations with four leading LLM models—ChatGPT 4, Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude 2, and Perplexity—I navigated the sometimes hilariously clumsy, but mostly very interesting "thoughts" from our AI frenemies. Each of the models ended up predicting different winners, but there's a common theme with all of the selections that you'll notice.

I conducted...

Archinect readers predict the 2024 Pritzker Prize winner

2024-03-01T14:05:00-05:00

Our annual Archinect readers’ predictions for this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize have once again spurred a lively discussion forum thread full of guesses as to which architect will become the 53rd official laureate when the prize is announced on Tuesday, March 5.

Last year, our social media polls had the eventual winner, David Chipperfield, over a group of frontrunners that mostly carried over to 2024, namely Jeanne Gang, Kengo Kuma, and Bjarke Ingels.

Alejandro Aravena (also the 2016 Pritzker laureate) is the jury chair for the sixth consecutive year, joined by the prize’s Executive Director Manuela Lucá-Dazio; Columbia GSAPP professor Barry Bergdoll; Yale SoA dean Deborah Berke; retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer; the critic and Brazilian Ambassador to India André Aranha Corrêa do Lago; and the 2010 and 2012 laureates Kazuyo Sejima and Wang Shu.

Here's what some of the commenters in the discussion thread predicted:

ae_0 listed "H arquitectes, Centro de Colabora...