Pritzker Architecture Prize for Riken Yamamoto's “extraordinary normality” | Culture | EUROtoday

“Extraordinary normality, dignity of the everyday.” With these phrases, the Chilean Alejandro Aravena – president of the Pritzker Prize jury, which he himself obtained in 2016 – has outlined Riken Yamamoto (Beijing, 78 years previous), winner of the award within the 2024 version, which has been introduced this Tuesday. The Japanese is an architect who defends customers over buildings. He additionally takes into consideration the reminiscence of the properties, above their profitability. That is to say, an activist, an advocate of the development of communities – each folks and structure -, against the privatization of town and defender of assembly areas between residents. A real twenty first century designer who, nevertheless, established his concepts within the Seventies. How is it attainable?

Born on the finish of World War II, Yamamoto grew up in Yokohama in a conventional machiya, a home on the bottom ground of which his mom – widowed since Riken was 5 years previous – had a pharmacy. The household lived behind that home, whereas the enterprise served the general public within the façade that confronted the road. This logic that mixes the general public and the non-public is what Yamamoto interprets into structure. Once graduated, he targeted on the protection of the shared use of infrastructures, thus opposing his predecessors, the metabolists, who, led by Kenzo Tange ―who additionally obtained the Pritzker in 1987―, defended within the sixties the separation between infrastructures and constructing. For Yamamoto, it's all the identical. And every little thing have to be small, and on a human scale, to prioritize the lives of residents over development. Thus, instigator of mixtures and builder of bridges, the intermediate area – the one which mixes inside and exterior and the one which, as a result of its ambiguous nature, is simpler to share – is the favourite typology of the late Pritzker. That area whose consumer, not the architect, decides in line with his wants, has marked, from its beginnings, his issues. Because?

He was 28 years previous when he opened his personal studio in Yokohama. He had educated in Engineering (Nihon University) and Architecture (University of Tokyo). However, earlier than beginning to work he devoted a yr to touring the world. He toured Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Iraq, India, Nepal, Morocco, Tunisia, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain and France, inspired by his instructor, Hiroshi Hara. Barely 10 years older than Yamamoto, it was Hara who, opposing the metabolists and saying one of many postmodern revisions, defended updating the custom.

Hara himself rethought town with neighborhood buildings – like the long-lasting Umeda Sky Building– which he inbuilt Osaka, in 1993. He urged his disciples, each Yamamoto and Kengo Kuma – who selected to journey by means of Africa – to search for the alternative of the worldwide structure that represented modernity. Yamamoto studied, within the cities of the world, what’s frequent in vernacular responses. “The towns were very different, but the worlds were similar,” he explains. He analyzed what cultures had repeated over the centuries. He wrote down the weather and development methods that responded to the supplies, local weather and obtainable budgets and that, solely later, ended up constructing an id.

Both Kuma and Yamamoto got here to the conclusion that modernity had reversed this course. And that id, aesthetics, formalism and even the supposedly democratic ideology had come to determine structure forward of logical causes. Yamamoto has incessantly cited Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) criticizing the fierce fashionable imposition of “ideology above needs.” She additionally turns to the thinker to vindicate the human high quality contained within the reminiscence of buildings. And she criticizes the disregard for that heritage by the hands of the short-termism that governs actual property hypothesis.

Author of colleges, universities, social housing complexes and museums constructed principally in Japan, but in addition in Korea, China and Switzerland, Yamamoto defends structure as a setting for social connections. Places that don’t dictate makes use of, however, quite the opposite, are supplied for customers to reinvent. This occurs within the landscaping that surrounds the Fussa City Hall, erected in Tokyo in 2008, the place the park between workplace buildings serves for residents to relaxation or for his or her gatherings. Also within the Nishi Fire Station in Hiroshima, from 2000, the transparency of the facades permits passers-by to ponder the every day routines of the firefighters' bodily preparation.

In the Real World (In the Real World) was the title of the exhibition that, in 2014, occupied the Japanese pavilion on the Venice Biennale. That exhibition made the work of this architect identified to the broader world. There, pictures, drawings and plans spoke of the choice proposal to fashionable rigidity that a number of professionals launched within the seventies. It was acknowledged that it had been Hara who pushed his disciples to journey the world and ask themselves what was lacking, or what was left over, in fierce modernity. When Norihito Nakatani curated that exhibition, Yamamoto had been on the helm of the Local Republic Labo for 3 years. He based it as a result of he wished to assist each these affected by the tsunami and the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, and within the prevention, by means of structure and landscaping, of future tsunamis and earthquakes.

Yamamoto claims an structure that is still past folks's lives. “A place that reminds you of your father when he is no longer there.” “We design the architecture. The city belongs to the people. The memory of the building itself is above the architect. We need properties that improve over time,” he instructed the Portuguese architect Grao Serra a decade in the past. In dialog on the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, he additionally spoke of his desire for Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright's instructor, creator of the Auditorium – a constructing that incorporates a resort, a theater and workplaces with three facades. totally different streets within the metropolis's Loop – above Mies's purism, “too rigid and imposing.”

Precisely in Chicago he’ll obtain the Pritzker on May 16. He will do it in a constructing that nicely represents his ideology: the Art Institute, a museum inbuilt 1893, after the good hearth, within the coronary heart of what’s in the present day known as Milenium Park. In 1998, one other Pritzker laureate, the Italian Renzo Piano, expanded the unique Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge constructing, which shows greater than 300,000 artworks, together with home windows by Frank Lloyd Wright, Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper, and the previous Stock Exchange, designed by Sullivan in 1894. You couldn't ask for a extra combined constructing. A curiosity is that Yamamoto receives the Pritzker and his instructor Hiroshi Hara doesn’t, who instigated him to query modernity and who’s now 87 years previous. Yamamoto has talked about buildings' obligation to make folks smile for 100 years. It is his manner of insisting in opposition to the short-termism of the architectural enterprise. Hannah Arendt additionally wrote that town should endure past human life.

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