Community: The Architect as Catalyst for Change, the 2024 Laureate Lecture and Panel Discussion

The Pritzker Architecture Prize and Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture, in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Center, present Community: The Architect as Catalyst for Change, the 2024 Laureate Lecture and Panel Discussion, taking place at the university’s historic S.R. Crown Hall on Thursday, May 16th at 6:00pm CDT.

Riken Yamamoto, 2024 Laureate of the Pritzker Prize, will uncover his personal journey in the discovery of communities throughout the world, inspiring his socially-driven architecture that blurs the boundaries between public and private dimensions. “Every house exists within a town and every family exists within the community of townspeople. The relationship between community and family—the threshold of space between the town and a house—is what allows a community to exist forever,” explains Yamamoto.

“Whether he designs private houses or public infrastructure, schools or fire stations, city halls or museums, the common and convivial dimension is always present,” states the 2024 Jury Citation, in part. “His constant, careful and substantial attention to the community has generated public interworking space systems that incentivize people to convene in different ways.”

Following the lecture, Yamamoto will be joined by recent Laureates, Sir David Chipperfield CH (2023), Francis Kéré (2022) and Anne Lacaton (2021), who will engage in a personal conversation about their very different paths of life. Sharing a deep commitment to the value of the social system, they will discuss the responsibility of the architect as a catalyst for change and debate the respective challenges of creating and bridging communities as they shape new approaches to the design of the built environment.

“Riken Yamamoto has managed to create a body of work that is consistently ambitious and responsible,” comments Chipperfield. “The buildings manage to be both elegant and meaningful, always looking to have an architectural and physical presence while at the same time celebrating ideas of community and social purpose.”

The event is free and open to the public but capacity will be limited and registration is required: bit.ly/2024-laureate-lecture. The program will also be livestreamed to audiences at Yokohama Graduate School of Architecture, Japan, and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and viewable worldwide at bit.ly/laureate-lecture-livestream.