The Pritzker Architecture Prize: A Male Affair
The Pritzker Prize stands as the highest global annual architectural honor and is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Architecture.” This year, the award was granted to Riken Yamamoto, the eighth architect from Japan to claim the title in the institution’s fifty-year history. According to the awarding organization, each year the prize is bestowed upon a living architect whose built work demonstrates vision, talent, and dedication, having consistently contributed through architecture to humanity and the built environment.
Interestingly, this year’s jury president, Alejandro Aravena, highlights in Yamamoto’s architectural work the intention to create conditions for human interaction and communication in modern cities. A characteristic example is an early work of the architect, his personal residence, Gazebo, in Yokohama (1986), where semi-outdoor spaces are organized with the purpose of facilitating communication with neighbors on different levels or floors. In contrast to the usual demand for privacy in residences, these semi-outdoor areas open to neighboring terraces and balconies, inviting communication among residents that has been lost at ground level in the city.
Yamamoto’s work over fifty years of his career includes public and private buildings of every category and typology, such as educational buildings, museums, libraries, as well as residential complexes and houses. In most of these, both through spatial organization and façade treatment, there is a need for contact and interaction with the broader urban or landscape environment, as well as support for human communication across all age and social groups. If the most significant feature of his work is the “transparency” and “opening to the community,” as many international articles observe, then this year’s award has symbolic significance.
However, it remains noteworthy that only four women have won the prize to date: Zaha Hadid in 2004, almost two decades later Grafton Architects (Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara) in 2020, while in 2021 Anne Lacaton, of Lacaton-Vassal, was honored not independently but in collaboration with her male colleague. Is the internationally limited number of worthy female architects of the prize true? If so, what could this mean in terms of the difficulties in producing recognized work by the female gender, which in no way lacks “vision, talent, and dedication”?
In a recent article in the digital architectural magazine Dezeen, it is stated as a fact that, even today, men dominate in large, significant projects worldwide. However, good architecture is not only found in large and significant projects that attract media attention.
Ariadni Vozani
