Riken Yamamoto is the 2024 Pritzker Prize winner

Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto is the winner of the 2024 Pritzker Prize.

Born in 1945, the architect and social advocate has built a career that establishes kinship between public and private realms, in pursuit of harmonious societies that overcome diverse identities, economies, politics, infrastructures, and housing systems.

“For me, to recognize space, is to recognize an entire community,” Yamamoto notes. “The current architectural approach emphasizes privacy, negating the necessity of societal relationships. 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.”

Yamamoto was chosen by the Pritzker jury for his championing of a profession that creates awareness in the community, "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."

"By the strong, consistent quality of his buildings, he aims to dignify, enhance and enrich the life of individuals—from children to elders—and their social connections," said the jury citation. "And he does this through a self-explanatory yet modest and pertinent architecture, with structural honesty and precise scaling, with careful attention to the landscape of the surroundings."

"His architecture clearly expresses his beliefs through the modular structure and the simplicity of its form," the jury added. "Yet, it does not dictate activities, rather it enables people to shape their own lives within his buildings with elegance, normality, poetry and joy."

In particular, Yamamoto's larger housing projects are shaped to embody relational elements, designed to ensure that residents can live alone without living in isolation. Exemplifying this approach is Seongnam's Pangyo Housing, a complex of nine low-rise housing blocks designed with "nonprescriptive transparent ground floor volumes that catalyze interconnectedness between neighbors." On the second floor, a communal deck encourages interaction, featuring spaces for gathering, playgrounds, gardens, and bridges connecting the various housing blocks.

"Riken Yamamoto is not an architecture historian, yet he learns from the past as well as from different cultures," the jury added. "As an architect, he does not copy from the past, rather he adapts, re-uses and evolves, showing that fundamentals persist in their relevance. Yamamoto has expanded the toolbox of the profession towards both the past and the future to be able to give each time, in very different modes and at very different scales, the most pertinent response to the challenges of both the built environment and of collective living."

On the eve of the announcement, Archinect asked various AI models to predict the 2024 Pritzker Prize winner. However, no models accurately predicted this year's winner.

As the 53rd laureate, Yamamoto will join the Pritzker's honorary list of winners, which in recent years included David Chipperfield (2023), Francis Kéré (2022), Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal of Lacaton and Vassal (who collectively won the 2021 prize), Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects (who collectively won the 2020 prize), Arata Isozaki (2019), Balkrishna Doshi (2018), RCR Arquitectes co-founders Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramon Vilalta (2017), Alejandro Aravena (2016), the late Frei Otto (2015), Shigeru Ban (2014), Toyo Ito (2013), and Wang Shu (2012).