Japanese Team Wins Pritzker Architecture Prize

Published: March 28, 2010
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, partners in the Japanese architectural firm Sanaa, have won the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the profession’s highest honor.


Denis Balibouse/Reuters
The Pritzker winners Kazuyo Sejima, left, and Ryue Nishizawa at their Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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“They explore like few others the phenomenal properties of continuous space, lightness, transparency and materiality to create a subtle synthesis,” the jury citation said. “Sejima and Nishizawa’s architecture stands in direct contrast with the bombastic and rhetorical. Instead, they seek the essential qualities of architecture that result in a much appreciated straightforwardness, economy of means and restraint in their work.”

The pair’s buildings include the acclaimed New Museum in New York, a sculptural stack of rectilinear boxes on the Bowery, which was completed in 2007. The first Sanaa project in the United States was a glass pavilion for the Toledo Museum of Art, completed in 2006. It holds the museum’s collection of glass artworks, reflecting that city’s history as a major center of glass production.

In The New York Times, the critic Nicolai Ouroussoff said that the pavilion — which featured an elegant maze of curved glass walls — “can reawaken” the “belief in the power of glass to enchant.”

The jury citation highlighted those projects as well as two in Japan: the O-Museum in Nagano and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. The pair formed their firm in 1995.

“I have been exploring how I can make architecture that feels open,” Ms. Sejima said in a prepared statement after winning the prize, “which I feel is important for a new generation of architecture.”

Mr. Nishizawa said: “Every time I finish a building I revel in possibilities and at the same time reflect on what has happened. Each project becomes my motivation for the next new project. In the same way this wonderful prize has given me a dynamic energy that I have never felt before.”

Although their work has been concentrated in Japan, Mr. Nishizawa and Ms. Sejima have designed projects in Germany, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the United States. Among their most recent projects is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne.

The firm’s first British project was the Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens, London, the ninth such commission in the Serpentine’s pavilions series. In Lens, in northern France, the firm is designing a 300,000-square-foot branch of the Louvre.

This is the third time in the prize’s history that two architects have been awarded the Pritzker. The first was in 1988 with Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil and Gordon Bunshaft; the second in 2001, with the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

The award ceremony will be on May 17 on Ellis Island in New York.