Riken Yamamoto, of Yokohama, Japan, has been awarded the 2024 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the award that is regarded internationally as architecture’s highest honour.
Architect and social advocate, Yamamoto establishes kinship between public and private realms, inspiring harmonious societies despite a diversity of identities, economies, politics, infrastructures, and housing systems.
Deeply embedded in upholding community life, 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 neighbours.
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.
“For me, to recognise space, is to recognise an entire community,” Yamamoto says.
“The current architectural approach emphasises privacy, negating the necessity of societal relationships.
“However, we can still honour the freedom of each individual while living together in architectural space as a republic, fostering harmony across cultures and phases of life.”
The 2024 Jury Citation states, 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...”