While the awarding of the Pritzker Prize, the highest accolade in the field of architecture that is often compared to the Nobel Prize, always comes as a surprise, it can also sometimes be anticipated. Lists of names are rumored, some of them recurring every year, until they are drawn out of the hat. Riken Yamamoto was not one of them.

The 2024 winner, announced on Tuesday, March 5, falls into the category of those we didn't see coming. Japanese, like eight of his predecessors, this son of an engineer and a pharmacist was born in Beijing in April 1945. He is behind a prolific and varied but unspectacular body of work, focused on the question of hospitality. He has built clinics, universities, airport facilities, fire stations, single-family homes and numerous private and social housing projects, mainly in East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea).

The visual quality of his buildings, he claims, is subject to a higher standard, an anthropologically inspired method that nurtures a critical approach to space, with a propensity to dismember it, to stretch it in all directions, and a desire, in the field of housing in particular, to reconfigure typologies.

A study of Japan's demographic changes, which showed that the average number of people per household fell from four to two between 1960 and 2011, while the share of older people jumped from 10% to 23%, led him to disqualify the once intangible principle of "one house for one family" and to imagine a completely different organization for housing: aggregates of small units connected by walkways, pedestals or gardens, all semi-public spaces where various services (laundry, nursery, etc.) are offered to residents.

The Pangyo Housing project (2010), in Seongnyam, is a Korean variation of this thinking, linking together nine clusters of small vertical houses, each three stories high. The middle level, in transparent glass, opens onto a system of footbridges winding between the blocks, where private terraces blend harmoniously into a green public space.

"I like to consider the house in relation to the whole, as if it existed in a village. I think it's very important for there to be relationships," the architect told radio station France Culture in 1999, the year the French Institute of Architecture organized an exhibition about him in Paris.

Yamamoto's architecture is inextricably linked with urban planning and is imbued with memories of the villages of Tunisia and Morocco, as well as India, Nepal, Turkey, Spain and Peru, which he discovered during a series of journeys in the early 1970s, just before opening his own office in Yokohama, Japan.

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