Architect Riken Yamamoto has won the 2024 Pritzker Prize—the highest award in architecture. Yamamoto’s work is known for its boxy forms, but this achievement acknowledges his significant contributions to social housing and community life, fostered through his designs.

Yamamoto founded his firm, Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop, in 1973. His work spans Japan, China, South Korea, and Switzerland and includes educational facilities, civic buildings, and mixed-use developments. But Yamamoto is largely recognized for housing that blurs the lines between private and public realms, utilizing careful planning to produce communal spaces.

His single-family residential work uses simple geometries and design moves that connect residents with the outdoors. The Dragon Lily home in Japan’s Gunma prefecture arranges five curved walls and arched portals to enclose dining and sleeping areas; each includes a view of the outdoors, while the spaces between act as lounges and family areas.

Yamamoto is often associated with his work in social housing, applying principles of communal living to higher-density projects. His first social housing project, Hotakubo Housing, finished in Japan’s Kumamoto prefecture in 1991, arranged 110 units around a tree-lined courtyard that can only be accessed through the apartments. And while these residential buildings adhere to a grid, even the densest housing blocks produce dynamic community spaces.

“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. 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,” reads the Pritzker jury citation, which was announced Tuesday.

His massive Shinonome Canal Court CODAN housing block, completed in Tokyo in 2003, injects double-height shared terraces throughout the complex. Each terrace is surrounded by “foyer rooms” that can be accessed through eight connected units—residents of these units can use the shared spaces as home offices or hobby rooms, carving communal space for activities often done in private. The development becomes, “a blend of homes and workplaces rather than homes next to workplaces,” as described on Yamamoto’s website.

Yamamoto’s award is part of the Pritzker Prize’s more recent, ongoing celebration of architects who are committed to housing for all: In 2021, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal were honored for their achievements in social housing, particularly their work preserving the 530-unit Grand Parc development in Bordeaux, France. Other recent laureates have devoted much of their work to addressing substandard housing and producing temporary homes after disasters, including 2016 winner Alejandro Aravena’s low-cost, “half-a-house” projects, and 2014 winner Shigeru Ban, whose Paper Log House provides material-savvy temporary housing after natural disasters.

For the First Time, Architecture’s Most Coveted Award Goes to Two Women

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Riken Yamamoto, Architect of Innovative Housing, Wins the 2024 Pritzker Prize