Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (respectively, born October 29, 1956, Mito, Ibaraki prefecture, Japan; born February 7, 1966, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan) Japanese architects who, as founding partners of the firm SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates), designed structures that were admired for their refined simplicity, spatial fluidity, and thoughtful integration into their surroundings. In 2010 they were awarded the Pritzker Prize, becoming only the second partnership to be so honoured. (The first was Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in 2001.)

Sejima earned a master’s degree in architecture in 1981 from Japan Women’s University. After apprenticing with architect Toyo Ito, she launched her own firm, Kazuyo Sejima and Associates, in 1987. Nishizawa, a student who had also worked for Ito, was one of her first hires. The office gradually developed a national reputation, with Sejima winning the Young Architect of the Year award from the Japanese Institute of Architects in 1992. Not long after, Nishizawa, who had completed a master’s degree in architecture from Yokohama National University in 1990, sought to open his own practice. Sejima, however, persuaded him to stay with her, and the two founded SANAA in 1995. Nishizawa eventually started his own firm two years later and Sejima maintained hers, but both individual offices were devoted to small-scale projects, in contrast to the ambitious commissions accepted by the partnership.

Most of SANAA’s early projects were in Japan, notably the O-Museum (1999), on a mountainside in Nagano. As with much of the duo’s work, the museum’s design was an elegant synthesis of the cerebral and the lyrical, and the closeness of their collaboration precluded attempts to assign responsibility for each element. Another major commission was the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (2004), a circular building with a glass facade. It was heralded for its panoramic views of the surrounding city and for its unconventional nonlinear floor plan, which encouraged visitors to create their own random paths through the museum. This concern with a space’s social use and its potential for adaptation was a hallmark of SANAA’s design philosophy, and, as a result, Sejima and Nishizawa did not consider a structure to be finished until it was inhabited.

In 2001 both Nishizawa and Sejima took up teaching posts, at Yokohama National University and Tokyo’s Keio University, respectively. About this time they also began to concentrate more on international commissions. SANAA’s first completed large-scale project outside Japan was the cubelike Zollverein School of Management and Design (2006) in Essen, Germany. It was quickly followed by the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art (2006), Ohio, a minimalist structure that, in its use of curved glass, quietly paid tribute to that city’s industrial history. Other notable international designs included those for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City (2007), the De Kunstlinie Theatre and Cultural Centre in Almere, Netherlands (2007), the Rolex Learning Center at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland (2009), and the 2009 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London. In 2005 the pair was selected to design a new branch of the Louvre Museum in Lens, France; the institution opened in 2012.

SANAA’s other buildings from the 2010s included a circular production hall (2013) in Weil am Rhein, Germany, for furniture brand the Vitra; The River (2015), a building with an undulating roof for Grace Farms, a community centre and nature preserve in New Canaan, Connecticut; a passenger terminal with a playful bulbous facade (2017) on Naoshima, a Japanese island renowned for its contemporary art; and the campus for Bocconi University (2019) in Milan, which includes a series of perforated-metal-clad buildings that surround a courtyard. The firm also renovated the historic La Samaritaine department store (2021), Paris, restoring some of the building’s Art Nouveau and Art Deco details and replacing parts of the facade with rippled glass skin. Their extension to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, opened in 2022. The building’s series of overlapping pavilions provided additional exhibition spaces and different types of galleries for new art forms.

In 2022 Sejima and Nishizawa were awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale for architecture by the Japan Art Association.