It is not often as an architecture critic that you find yourself referring to the dimensions of a building in millimetres. But then few buildings are as slender, stripped back and meticulously honed as those designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, founders of the Japanese practice Sanaa, who have been announced as this year’s recipients of the RIBA royal gold medal for architecture.
They have built a house in Tokyo with the delicacy of a cardboard model, where the internal walls are just 16mm thick. Their outpost of the Louvre museum in northern France, which shimmers on the horizon like a foggy apparition, features 25-metre- long steel roof beams that are just 12mm wide. Over the last 30 years, the pair have scattered the world with glass structures as fine as soap bubbles, and wafer-thin concrete canopies held up on toothpick columns, creating light-flooded, transparent enclosures that look as if they could float away on the breeze.
“European people always think that is one of our unique points,” says a deadpan Nishizawa, speaking from the Sanaa office in Tokyo. “But it is part of our culture. Japan is surrounded by the ocean, the weather is always changing, it’s very humid and subject to earthquakes. So it’s best to make architecture as lightweight and open to the breeze as possible.”
His pragmatic answer belies the poetry of the spaces they build. In Lausanne, Switzerland, Sanaa’s Rolex Learning Center, located on the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s campus, is an undulating lunar landscape, where spaces are defined not by walls but by carpeted hillocks and valleys. Students scatter themselves on beanbags and curl up with books in its nooks. Sanna’s modern art museum in Kanazawa, central Japan, comprises a maze of cubic white spaces contained within a diaphanous halo of glass, with no clear single visitor route. You are left to wander, as if in a forest glade. Their Grace Farms community centre in Connecticut, USA, takes the form of a snaking promenade, sheltered by a delicately curved canopy hovering above the rolling hills, housing a constellation of rooms that can take on any role.
“We like to create non-hierarchical space, where people can decide how to use it themselves,” says Sejima. “We don’t want to just define one way, but also allow people to find their own way.” Nishizawa compares their projects to the natural landscape: “Sometimes people build settlements in the valleys, or sometimes on top of the hill. I think of it as multicentred architecture.”
The floor plans of their buildings can look like biological cell diagrams. Amoebic shapes float in seas of cytoplasm, dotted with mitochondrial pods and clusters of furniture, areas defined by delicate membranes of glass. It looks like what may happen if you left the contents of a petri dish to evolve on its own. The geometries of their buildings are organic, as if drawn by hand: a cylindrical storage depot for the Vitra furniture factory in Weil am Rhein, Germany, is actually a wonky oval; their looping campus at Bocconi university in Milan, Italy, could be part of an intestinal tract. Why not opt for simple geometric shapes that would be easier to build?
“If you make a perfect circle, it doesn’t fit in nature,” says Nishizawa. “There is very little flat land in Japan, so you have to use free curves to avoid cutting the mountains. Even if there are no mountains,” he adds gnomically, “the message is still there: human activity and nature are on the same side.”
Sanaa’s method of practice is as unusual as the buildings they create. Born in 1956, Sejima founded her own office in 1987, after six years working for Toyo Ito (who received the gold medal in 2006). Nishizawa, 10 years Sejima’s junior, joined her three years later, and in 1995 they formed Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates (Sanaa), primarily so they could enter major international competitions – which they soon won by the shedload. The pair continue to run their own separate practices from the same office, mainly for smaller domestic projects and galleries, as well as working under the Sanaa brand, which now has a team of 60. “For me, it is a very great opportunity to work with her,” Nishizawa once said of Sejima in an interview. “But if I could do only this, I would be very depressed. What is wonderful is, I can also suffer from my own projects, losing my way and finding my own way back.”
Peers say their success comes down to the combination of their very distinct temperaments. “She has the ability to decide, ‘This is what I like’, the correct form, almost telepathically,” said one Japanese magazine editor. “And he can understand and critique her. She needed to have a critical person.” As another Tokyo-based architect put it: “Their combination is very good, because Sejima is a very good player and Ryue is a very good coach.”
For all of Sanaa’s perfectionism, their designs sometimes get lost in translation overseas. Their theatre in the Dutch city of Almere has none of the refinement of their buildings in Japan – in part because their involvement didn’t continue beyond the detailed design stage. “Those are nice drawings,” a Dutch contractor said, according to someone who worked on the project. “But that’s now how we build in the Netherlands.” In the UK, a spectacular glass greenhouse planned for Auckland Castle in County Durham sadly hit the buffers of cost, complexity and Covid. And sometimes reality can make Sanaa’s ethereal ideas seem a little naive. Visiting the Rolex centre in Lausanne is to encounter a world of handrails, accessibility ramps and wedges used to hold up the furniture on the awkwardly sloping floors.
Like many architecture firms that experience this level of fame and success, Sanaa is powered by an intense work ethic. When a journalist once asked to make a film of Sejima at her home, she directed them straight to the office. “It’s a bit like joining a convent,” one former employee tells me. “Your life becomes entirely devoted to architecture. You give in to it completely – but in a very positive way. They give you a lot of responsibility early on, so it feels like everyone can contribute. People say you work for some star architects out of fear, but for Sejima out of love.”
What about work-life balance? What do they make of the recent demands by architects in Europe and the US for unionisation and better working conditions? There is a long pause. “I find that working, enjoying and resting, eating, living, sleeping – these things are not so clearly separated,” says Sejima. Are long hours essential to making the best buildings? “Working hard is really important for us to create good architecture,” says Nishizawa. “But I imagine there must be a peak. Time is changing and we are getting old. When I think of a sculptor, they must work very hard to sculpt. But beyond some point, if you work very much the stone disappears, I think.”