Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have won their profession’s top honor — the Pritzker Architecture Prize — praised for their use of light and transparency in buildings across the globe.
Sejima and Nishizawa, partners in the architectural firm SANAA, are the fourth Japanese architects to win the coveted annual award, which is sometimes described as the architectural world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
The Pritzker Prize jury described their work in Japan, Germany, England, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the US as delicate, powerful, precise, fluid and ingenious, yet not overly or overtly clever.
The architects were praised in a citation from the jury “for the creation of buildings that successfully interact with their contexts and the activities they contain, creating a sense of fullness and experiential richness.”
“The architecture of Sejima and Nishizawa explores the ideas of lightness and transparency and pushes the boundaries of these concepts to new extremes,” Martha Thorne, executive director of the prize, said in a statement.
The first SANAA project in the US began construction in 2004 in Ohio and was completed in 2006 — a Glass Pavilion for the Toledo Museum of Art — while they also designed the New Museum of New York City, which was completed in 2007.
The jury also mentioned two projects in Japan: the O-Museum in Nagano and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa.
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