Inside out is in: Pritzker Prize Laureate 2024—Riken Yamamoto

The text is a brief biography and philosophical observation of the subject's approach to his craft, whereas the images and captions consider his and other relevant works concretely. Most of the images are shown in chronological order of the subject's creation and most of the figure number references in the text are arbitrary. The Pritzker Architecture Prize, widely regarded as the Nobel Prize of Architecture, has tapped Riken Yamamoto to be the laureate for 2024 (Figure 1). As we go to press, Mr. Yamamoto is giving the Laureate Lecture, titled Community: The Architect as a Catalyst for Change at the College of Architects of the Illinois Institute of Technology. The lecture title is an apt motto for the architect whose career has embraced the theme of building community with buildings and encouraging edification through the edifice. As a boy Riken Yamamoto often sat between his mother's pharmacy in the front of their house and the living quarters in the back, between two thresholds, as he thought of it. Born in 1945 in Beijing, PRC, he and his family relocated to their home country in Yokohama, Japan when he was four years old (Figures 2 and 3). His childhood threshold experience prepared him for an epiphany he had as a young college graduate visiting traditional villages across the world. His group of travel companions included his professor, Hiroshi Hara, who was to become an eminent architect in his own right (e.g., Kyōto Station, Umeda Sky Building, Yamato International, Sapporo Dome) (Figures 4 and 5). From the Mediterranean countries to the Americas to the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent, Riken Yamamoto discovered a widespread theme in which traditional village homes conjoined public and private spaces, just as did the typical Japanese townhouse known as a Machiya in Yokohama, Japan, in which he grew up. Of these various village structures it was the Greek oikos housing and its innate inducement to community adhesion along with the machiya that influenced him the most (Figures 6 and 7). But before college he had what he described as his "first experience with architecture" as he looked up at the awe-inspiring five-story pagoda at the ancient Kôfuku-ji Temple, in Nara, Japan, illuminated only by the moon (Figure 8). During his college years Mr. Yamamoto visited Osaka Expo '70 and was transfixed by the simplicity of the United States exhibit with its moon rock display, and observed that the architecture was little more than "air and the small stone" (Figures 9 and 10). Another major influence upon his later works was one of his own earliest assignments, the 1977 Yamakawa Villa in Nagano, Japan. The work in turn appears to channel the Machiya of his childhood. The client provided only a handful of vague instructions for a summer house in the woods with which the unseasoned young architect formulated a brilliantly unique design. Several separate block-like rooms sit upon a deck with a single gable roof covering them all, but without common walls to contain all the rooms together (Figures 11 and 12). "For me, to recognize space, is to recognize an entire community." He has carried the openness and transparency of the individualistic Yamakawa Villa into the rest of his career, and many of Mr. Yamamoto's later projects continue to express his evolving philosophy on the responsibility of architects to encourage community. Riken Yamamoto himself best describes his design philosophy. He says, "For me, to recognize space, is to recognize an entire community." By way of elaboration he says, "The current architectural approach emphasizes privacy, negating the necessity of societal relationships (Figure 13). 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 has said that the writings of Hannah Arendt have inspired him. The philosopher did indeed explore the universal importance of the golden rule of neighborliness in her early essay Love and Saint Augustine, and the theme permeates her later writings (Figure 14). And so it is that the influences upon Mr. Yamamoto, whether they be the pagoda, the machiya, the oikos, or books and essays, are not so much directly evident in his designs as philosophically evident. Generally, his approach to architecture calls to mind the "responsive communitarianism" that was evolving in the late 20th Century and coalesced into the named movement in the 1990s and which encouraged a balance between individual rights and social responsibilities and engagement (Figure 15). Indeed, Mr. Yamamoto encourages social cohesion. As the Pritzker Prize's jury citation says, Mr. Yamamoto "suggests rather than imposes this shared dimension through understated, yet precise architectural interventions" (Figures 16 and 17). Mr. Yamamoto has received many prestigious accolades in addition to the Pritzker Prize, including appointment as Academician by the International Academy of Architecture, the Japan Institute of Architects Award, the Public Buildings Prize (twice), the Good Design Gold Award (twice), the Prize of the Architectural Institute of Japan (twice), the Japan Arts Academy Award, and the Mainichi Art Awards. His landscape and building works are found across Japan, and in the Republic of Korea, the People's Republic of China, and Switzerland (Figures 18 and 19).