This year’s Pritzker Award for Architecture Goes to Japan’s Sejima and Nishizawa

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Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, partners of the Tokyo-based Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates, better known as SANAA, have been awarded this year’s Pritzker Prize. The annual award is given by the Hyatt Foundation to a living architect or architects who have consistently produced important work. Nishizawa is the youngest architect ever to win the Pritzker, while his partner Sejima is only the second female laureate in the competition’s history. The pairs’ first masterpiece, according to McGraw-Hill’s Architectural Record magazine, was the 21st-Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. Located in the center of an urban park, the circular building opens on all sides to its surroundings, which offers discrete gallery spaces with varying floor areas, while the walls are set in a grid that mirrors the cityscape, says Architectural Record. In recent years, the firm has completed a string of acclaimed international projects, including last year’s opening of the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. That single-story building was conceived as an interior landscape, with hills and valleys demarcating different zones.