Architecture Prizes 2024: the winners of the most prestigious awards

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Riken Yamamoto, Yokosuka Museum of Art - Ph. Tomio Ohashi

From the “Nobel of Architecture” to the EU Mies Award by way of the RIBA and Alvar Aalto Foundation Gold Medals, the most prestigious international awards assigned for the ability to combine technological performance and the human factor, circularity and care for the territor

A high-tech railway line, a pavilion designed according to the principles of "design for disassembly" and therefore ready right from their inception to become something different or to move elsewhere, a curator skilled like no other in giving voice and space to minorities and two designers such as Riken Yamamoto and Marie-Josée Van Hee who have eschewed spectacularity throughout their long careers, preferring to focus on intangible objectives such as social cohesion or the well-being of the inhabitants of the buildings they design: a look at the winners of the most important architecture prizes awarded during 2024 can help us understand in which direction the discipline and, more generally, society are moving. Here’s a roundup, in case you missed them.

Pritzker Architecture Prize 2024

The winner of the 53rd edition of the world's most prestigious category award was Japanese designer Riken Yamamoto. Born in Beijing in 1945 but brought up in his parents’ hometown of Yokohama, and against the difficult background of post-war reconstruction, he has designed buildings varying in scale and type, from private homes to public housing complexes and museums to university buildings in a career spanning five decades.

His work, less conspicuous than that of Arata Isozaki, for example, the last compatriot to be awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2019, are linked by more than simple aesthetic research. It is in fact the activation of connections between people living together or moving through the same spaces as an antidote to social isolation that lies at the heart of Yamamoto's work. The Saitama Prefectural University, for example, built in 1999, consists of nine buildings connected by a dense network of pathways, while the glass walls of the Nishi Fire Station in Hiroshima (2000), allow the public to view the work of the fire brigade from the outside and gain an understanding of the complex mechanisms that regulate the functioning of the fire station.

Even his residential projects are not simply creations of spaces in which their inhabitants can live but an endeavour to help them ‘create a community’ by encouraging encounters and exchanges. Alejandro Aravena, chair of the Pritzker jury and winner of the prize in 2016, had this to say: “One of the things we need most in the future of cities is to create conditions through architecture that multiply the opportunities for people to come together and interact. Yamamoto contributes positively beyond the brief to enable community. He is a reassuring architect who brings dignity to everyday life. Normality becomes extraordinary. Calmness leads to splendour”.

RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) Stirling Prize 2024

This award is assigned every year by the Royal Institute of British Architects to a particularly deserving project carried out in the United Kingdom (prior to 2014, the selection was open to buildings anywhere in Europe) and is one of the most prestigious in the world.

The winner of the 2024 edition was the Elizabeth Line, a 163-kilometre long transport network running from Reading or Heathrow Airport, both in west London, to the suburbs to the east of the capital. Inaugurated in 2022, the line is the result of a collaboration between a number of architectural practices - Grimshaw, Maynard, Equations and AtkinsRéalis – notable for its attention to inclusion and sustainability, thanks to systems such as passive cooling and motion sensors fitted to the escalators to reduce energy waste.

The chair of the jury, Muyiwa OK, described the Elizabeth Line as “a triumph in architect-led collaboration, offering a flawless, efficient, beautifully choreographed solution to inner-city transport. It’s an uncluttered canvas that incorporates a slick suite of architectural components to create a consistent, line-wide identity – through which thousands of daily passengers navigate with ease.”

RIBA Royal Gold Medal 2024

The Royal Institute of British Architects also awards the Royal Gold Medal each year, on behalf of His Majesty the King, to a person or group of people having made a significant contribution to the discipline. The winner in January this year was the curator of the last Venice Architecture Biennale, the Ghanaian-born Scottish architect and scholar Lesley Lokko. The jury praised her commitment to “democratising architecture” and “amplifying under-represented voices” in the design world. “I came into architecture seeking certainties, looking for answers. Instead, I found questions and possibilities, far richer, more curious, and more empathetic ways to interpret and shape the world,” said Lokko on hearing of her coveted award.

salonemilano, architecture, Marie-Josée Van Hee — House HdF, Zuidzande, Marie-Josée Van Hee - Ph. David Grandorge

Alvar Aalto Medal 2024

This medal, designed by Alvar Aalto and awarded every three years by the Foundation that bears his name, is assigned by a committee comprised of the Finnish Association of Architects SAFA, the MFA Museum of Finnish Architecture, the Finnish Architectural Society, the Alvar Aalto Foundation and the City of Helsinki. It was assigned for the first time in history to a woman this year, the Belgian architect Marie-Josée Van Hee.

The chair of the jury, the Irish architect and academic Yvonne Farrell, noted: “Van Hee´s work is universal and highly personal. It is beautifully understated, relevant, rooted in place. Her ability to translate a sense of place is rare. Her buildings contain sensitively choreographed spaces with carefully considered choices for movement. Her spatial intuition fuses with a forensic understanding of human needs. Central to her work is the constant recognition of the human scale spaces where people feel good.”