Ryue Nishizawa

Ryue Nishizawa was born in Tokyo in 1966. He completed a master's degree in architecture at Yokohama National University in 1990 and joined Kazuyo Sejima's office the same year. In 1995 he founded SANAA with her, and in 1997 he opened his own office. Since 2010 he has been a professor at the Y-GSA graduate school of architecture of Yokohama National University, and he was a visiting professor at EPFL (2005-2006), Princeton (2005-2008) and Harvard (2007).

Under the name SANAA, Sejima and he design museums, campuses and public places around the world: the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, a glass circle 113 m across with no front or back; the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, whose load-bearing structure is made of free-span reinforced concrete shells spanning up to 90 m; the Louvre-Lens, a long, low, single-level building whose anodised aluminium facades, alternating with glass, reflect the park laid out on a former mine site; and the 35 m cube of the Zollverein school in Essen, pierced by numerous openings. Sejima sums up how they work: "There is no division of work at all, we do everything together." The 2010 Pritzker Prize honoured them jointly, for architecture the jury called both delicate and powerful, interacting with its context. They also received the Praemium Imperiale in 2022 and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2025.

Under his own name, Nishizawa designs houses and museums. At Towada (2008) he scatters independent galleries, "houses for art", linked by glass corridors along an avenue of government offices. At Teshima (2010), asked for a place uniting art, nature and architecture, he and the artist Rei Naito create a museum set on a corner of rice terraces: a concrete shell about 40 by 60 m with no pillar at all, cast in a single pour on 11 and 12 March 2010; two openings let light, wind and rain in, and water wells up from the ground. He explains that he chose a free curve so as not to level the neighbouring hill. At Karuizawa (2011), the Hiroshi Senju Museum is a single room that follows the terrain's gentle slope, where deep eaves and glazing filter the light while letting in the surrounding greenery and views. The Teshima museum earned him the Architectural Institute of Japan prize and the Murano Tōgo Prize in 2012.