For a significant part of his childhood, Riken Yamamoto (b. 1945) lived behind the small, street-facing pharmacy run by his mother in Yokohama, Japan. “The threshold on one side was for family, and on the other side for community. I sat in between,” reminisces the veteran architect in an official release. Modelled after a 'machiya', a traditional Japanese wooden townhouse, it was within this building that the latest winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize would begin to understand the importance of the relationship between public and private space. The idea that a “threshold” between these two seemingly opposing spatial constructs was something universal became increasingly pertinent to Yamamoto as he moved through his illustrious career.

Born in Beijing, the architect relocated with his family to Yokohama at the end of World War II. Growing up, he had considered following in his father's professional footsteps with a career in engineering. A chief architectural awakening for Yamamoto happened at the age of seventeen, following a visit to the ancient five-storied Kôfuku-ji Temple, whose multiple storeys were constructed metaphors for the five elemental states in Buddhism. “It was very dark, but I could see the wooden tower illuminated by the light of the moon, and what I found at that moment was my first experience with architecture,” states the Japanese architect. In the 1960s, he went on to undertake architectural training at Nihon University’s Department of Architecture, College of Science and Technology, and received a further qualification from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1971. Yamamoto founded his prestigious and contemporaneously world-renowned architecture practice, Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop, in 1973, subsequently undertaking projects ranging from public housing to elementary schools and private residences across Japan, Switzerland, the People’s Republic of China and Korea, expanding both his renown and expertise across scales.

Yamamoto's proclivity of operating in the liminal space between the public and private spheres of a building – something that could be reduced to the interior-exterior binomial in the case of smaller buildings – was visible in his very first project, the Yamakawa Villa in Nagano, Japan, built in 1977. A single-family domestic structure that, by exposing all of its sides to its natural woodland site, gives the impression of an open-air patio or terrace happened to a fine reflection of his architecture philosophies, however nascent. The structure not only encouraged the union between built and natural environments – between outside and inside as proposed – but also materialised a somewhat conceptual relationship. The occupying family, guests, and passers-by were seemingly rendered equally welcome in this flexible and transparent space. Built ten years later, his own home, GAZEBO in Yokohama (1986), was conceived with such connectivity and fluidity in mind; its interplaying terraces and rooftops provided optimal sites for the invocation of interaction between neighbours and occupants.

Continuing to consider the boundary between private and public as a social as well as architectural opportunity, Yamamoto soon ventured into designing civic buildings with an expanded understanding. Through its wholly-transparent glass façade, his Hiroshima Fire Station built in 2000 dwelled on explicitly blurring the line between supposedly different spatial dimensions. Once again, he sought to enmesh the outside environment with that of the quotidien inside world, the inner workings of the civic space on show for all. The station’s glass surface works to impose as little restriction as possible to enable the “functionality and accessibility of the space for users and viewers alike”. While not entirely radical for the 21st century, Yamamoto's insistence on maintaining the same outlook across typologies indicated a scalar understanding of that threshold, and thus different ways to interact with it, perhaps even play with it. One could thereby look to an enhancement of a building's community-facing nature owing to similar precise and honest architectural features across his works.

The Pritzker Architecture Prize jury, chaired by Alejandro Aravena and comprising other stalwarts including Deborah Berke, Barry Bergdoll, Kazuyo Sejima, and André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, commended Yamaoto's "coherent" and "rigorous" career and his ability to “produce architecture both as background and foreground to everyday life, blurring boundaries between its public and private dimensions, and multiplying opportunities for people to meet spontaneously through precise, rational design strategies”, in an official release shared by the Pritzker Architecture Prize. “By the strong, consistent quality of his buildings, Yamamoto aims to dignify, enhance and enrich the life of individuals – from children to elders – and their social connections", they continue.

Atop Yamamoto’s shelf of awards sits the Japanese Institute of Architects Award (2010), along with the Building Contractors Society Prize (2010), and the Fukushima Architecture Culture Award (2007), amongst other top honours. Yamamoto has also been an active academic and writer, authoring multiple published books and articles that were later translated into other global languages - Local Community Area Principles from 2013 being his most recent one. His most sizeable pedagogical contribution, however, still remains in the field of housing, where his architectural philosophies, coupled with a semblance of a style rooted in people-centrism and his experiments with social thresholds have yielded his most definitive work. Ranging from entire city blocks to smaller settlements, Yamamoto's housing projects manifest with spaces that encourage chance encounters, interactions, and community activities, prompting livability and cohabitation among people of different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. The Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop firm continue to work on exciting projects, and The Taoyuan Museum of Art in Taiwan, is due for completion this year.

Laureate Riken Yamamoto will be awarded the Pritzker Prize on May 16th, 2024 at a ceremony hosted at the S. R. Crown Hall in Chicago, Illinois, in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Centre.