<
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/05/1232854692/riken-yamamoto-pritzker-architecture-prize>
'The bespectacled architect smiled from his white-walled office in Yokohama.
"I'm very proud," he said in English, of winning the 2024 Pritzker Architecture
Prize. Sometimes called "the Nobel of architecture," the award has gone to such
icons in the field as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas and
Zaha Hadid since it was established in 1979.
Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto was born in 1945 to civilian parents in
Beijing, China. His engineer father was part of an occupying workforce. When
the family moved back to Japan in 1947, it was to a Tokyo that had largely been
reduced to rubble in the last days of World War II.
"My father made my family house by himself because there [were] no houses ...
and many people made their own family houses by themselves in Tokyo," he
remembered. "Tokyo was nothing [after the] bombing by the Americans. This was a
double-story house, very small, very poor wooden house."
When the boy was only 4 years old, Yamamoto's father died. The family moved to
his mother's hometown of Yokohama, where she opened her own business, a
pharmacy. His postwar childhood spent watching a country rebuild, he says,
informed his fascination with the relationship between architecture and
community.'
Via Susan ****
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*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
