Context:

• Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto recently declared winner of the 2024 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the highest international award in the field, which is sometimes referred to as the “Architecture Nobel”. 

The Nobel of Architecture

• The Pritzker Architecture Prize was instituted by Jay A Pritzker, the late founder of the Hyatt Hotels chain, and his wife Cindy, “to honour a living architect whose built work demonstrates talent, vision and commitment, who has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture”.
• The award comes with a purse of $100,000, a citation, and a bronze medallion based on designs by Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect known as the father of the skyscraper, which bears the words firmness, commodity, and delight, recalling the Roman architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius’s prescription for a well-built structure.
• The winner is picked from a field of more than 500 on average, nominated by experts including past laureates, academics, and professionals, by a jury who make visits to sites of the projects. 
• The prize is awarded in May, at a ceremony that is modelled on the Nobel Prizes.
• Architects from Japan have won the largest number of Pritzkers, followed by the United States (eight laureates, including a shared prize and two architects with dual nationality). 
• The only Indian laureate is the late Balkrishna Doshi (2018).

Uniqueness of Yamamoto

• The 79-year-old Beijing-born Yamamoto privileges family and community, the seen over the unseen, above all else in his projects. 
• Over a five-decade career, he has built private and public spaces, and led numerous initiatives to encourage local talent and construction. He is often called the “Misfit” architect. 
• He has shown a commitment to working in villages, with designs that have people at their centre.
• The Hiroshima Nishi Fire Station (2000) has a transparent façade and glass walls and floors that allow passersby to look inside. Yamamoto’s idea was to keep the fire house at the centre of the community, making it “a reciprocal commitment between civil servants and citizens”. Firefighters training on ropes and ladders in the central atrium are visible from outside.
  • The principle of being visible is part of Yamamoto’s prescription to remedy society’s isolation malaise. 
• His other notable projects include Koyasu Elementary School (2018), Hotakubo Housing (1991), Yokosuka Museum of Art (2006).