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Riken Yamamoto receives the 2024 Pritzker Architecture Prize

The Pritzker Architecture Prize announces Riken Yamamoto, of Yokohama, Japan, as the 2024 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the award that is regarded internationally as architecture's highest honor.

Yamamoto, architect and social advocate, 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 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.

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..."

He has evolved influences from traditional Japanese machiya and Greek oikos housing that existed in relationship to cities, when connectivity and commerce were essential to the vitality of every family.

His career has spanned five decades and his projects, ranging from private residences to public housing, elementary schools to university buildings, institutions to civic spaces, and city planning, are located throughout Japan, People's Republic of China, Republic of Korea and Switzerland. Significant built works also 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 to hail from Japan. He was born in Beijing, People's Republic of China, and resides in Yokohama, Japan. He will be honored in Chicago, Illinois, United States of America this spring and the 2024 Laureate Lecture will be held at S. R. Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology, in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Center, on May 16th, open to the public in-person and online.



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