Pritzker Prize Winner 2010: SANAA

We must be onto something this year, because the laureates for the 2010 Pritzker Prize are Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Japanese practice SANAA, featured in our April issue for their magnificent Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne, Switzerland. The duo received their $100,000 grant and bronze medallions at the official award ceremony on May 17, held on New York’s historically iconic Ellis Island.

Often considered architecture’s highest honour, the Pritzker Architecture Prize is awarded to a living architect whose built work demonstrates a rare combination of talent, vision and commitment, and who has – through the art of architecture – demonstrated a consistent and significant contribution to humanity and the built environment.

In the words of the Pritzker jury chairman, Lord Palumbo, Sejima and Nishizawa were selected for precisely this reason: “For architecture that is simultaneously delicate and powerful, precise and fluid, ingenious but not overly or overtly clever; for the creation of buildings that successfully interact with their contexts and the activities they contain, creating a sense of fullness and experiential richness; for a singular architectural language that springs from a collaborative process that is both unique and inspirational; for their notable completed buildings and the promise of new projects together”.

The Pritzker family established the architecture award partly because of their longstanding involvement in the worldwide development of Hyatt Hotels, and partly in recognition of the fact that there is no Nobel Prize category for architecture. And so, just like the Nobel Prize has its annual honourees, so does the Pritzker Prize. As with the Nobels, the Pritzker is chosen by an international jury in a secret vote; nominations are continuous from year to year; and the jury has to choose from hundreds of nominees from countries all around the world, all of whom have made a truly worthwhile contribution to the international built environment.

As well as a body of work within their native Japan, Sejima and Nishizawa have also contributed to the broader international built environment, having designed projects in Germany, England, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the United States. Their first US project was the Toledo Glass Pavilion, completed in 2006 as a special addition to the Toledo Museum of Art designed to house the city’s vast collection of glass artworks, a reminder of its history as a major centre for glass production. And SANAA’s pavilion perfectly reflects this specific purpose: a fine white flat-topped roof atop almost invisible sheer glass walls. Then in 2007, SANAA really broke onto the world architecture scene, with the completion of the New Museum in New York City at 235 Bowery. The building – a staggered stack of six irregularly-sized stark white boxes – is so dramatically juxtaposed with its gritty city surroundings that it was destined to send the world wondering ‘who designed that?’, firmly placing SANAA in the global architecture limelight.

Alongside these two American museum designs, the Pritzker jury also made special mention of Sejima and Nishizawa’s most notable projects on home soil: the O-Museum in Nagano, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. The former, in true traditionally-inspired SANAA style, is a long single-storey oblong box, apparently made of nothing but glass; the latter takes a surprising circular format, but inside are the familiar sheer vertical glass façades that have become a SANAA trademark of sorts.

Other notable works from the combined minds of Sejima and Nishizawa include, within the local Japanese realm, the Naoshima Ferry Terminal, the Christian Dior Building and Issey Miyake Store by Naoki Takizawa, both in Tokyo. Further afield, the Zollverein School of Management and Design in Essen, Germany was inaugurated in 2006, and can be considered a forerunner to their Rolex Learning Centre: an oversized cubelike form that is quite unique among their designs, but with a smattering of irregularly placed and sized windows, not unlike the patio apertures in the Rolex Learning Centre.

The Serpentine Pavilion in London was SANAA’s first built project in the United Kingdom, and though – true to the Serpentine Gallery’s style – it only existed for three months on the gallery’s front lawn, it was a very highly-attended and widely lauded installation, its glass curves curling through the London parkland like the bends of a silently frozen river. SANAA also lead the architecture team behind the Louvre- Lens – joining American museum architects Celia Imrey and Tim Culbert, and landscape designer Catherine Mosbach. With SANAA at the helm, it is guaranteed that this new addition to Paris’s Louvre Art Museum, due to open in 2012, will be another groundbreaking yet subtle architectural statement. And after the controversy surrounding I.M. Pei’s dramatic love-it-or-hate-it glass pyramid, added in 1989, it’s not like the world’s art and architecture enthusiasts needed another reason to keep an eye on this latest addition to Louvre. But now they have one: for the next few years at least, all eyes will be firmly fixed on Pritzker Prize-winning architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa – a title they must surely be proud to bear.

Even further down the pipeline, SANAA are working on a unique yet-to-be-built extension of IVAM, the Valencian Institute of Modern Art in Valencia, Spain. Here, Sejima and Nishizawa plan to encase the entire museum and the eight galleries within it in a translucent perforated metal skin, thereby creating a completely new interstitial indoor/outdoor public space between the existing building and the new skin. Construction has not yet begun on this ambitious project, but as with the Louvre-Lens, we’ll definitely hear about it when it’s done. +

IMAGES Courtesy of SANAA

1. Pritzker Prize recipients Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa 2 & 3. The Pritzker judging panel made special mention of SAANA’s O-Museum in Nagano: an early home-soil example of their simple, glazed aesthetic. 4. The New Museum in New York City at 235 Bowery was SANAA’s first international breakthrough project: a daring tower of staggered blocks that secured the pair’s reputation for edgy, modern architecture. 5. Punctured by irregular apertures, the Zollverein School of Management and Design in Essen, Germany is similar in theme to SAANA’s recently completed Rolex Learning Centre.