The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is hosting an exhibition dedicated to Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower from July 10, 2025, through July 12, 2026. Titled The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, the exhibition offers a retrospective on the building's 50-year lifespan. Constructed in Tokyo's Ginza district in 1972 and dismantled in 2022, the tower is presented through contextual materials, original drawings, archival recordings, and a fully restored capsule. The exhibition invites reflection on how cities address aging buildings and the rapid transformation of urban areas. The diverse materials documenting the tower's continuous evolution over five decades encourage viewers to consider how architecture might endure by taking on new roles and functions beyond its original purpose.

+ 11

Last week, Japanese architect and social advocate Riken Yamamoto was announced as the 2024 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate, becoming the 9th Japanese architect honored with the profession's most prestigious award. Throughout the 45-year history of the Pritzker Prize, Japan stands out as the nation with the highest number of laureates. While geography is not a criterion in the selection of the laureates, Japanese architecture consistently impresses with its interplay of light and shadow, the careful composition of spaces, soft transitions between interior and exterior, and attention to detail and materiality. An ingrained culture of building also celebrates diverse designs and encourages global dialogue and the exchange of ideas and best practices. Read on to rediscover the 9 Japanese Pritzker laureates and glimpse into their body of work.

+ 6

As one of the leading architects of Japan's increasingly highly-regarded architecture culture, 2013 Pritzker Laureate Toyo Ito (born June 1, 1941) has defined his career by combining elements of minimalism with an embrace of technology, in a way that merges both traditional and contemporary elements of Japanese culture.

+ 7

At 71, the 2013 Pritzker Prize winner Toyo Ito is not content with settling down just yet, at least not architecturally-speaking. Where many architects have established distinct styles, Ito is known for constantly shifting, experimenting, questioning and developing his approach to architecture. As one member of the Prtizker jury put it "he has been working on one project all along - to push the boundaries of architecture. And to achieve that goal, he is not afraid of letting go what he has accomplished before.”

In this video entitled Learning from Laureates - which comes courtesy of the good folks at ARCHITECT magazine - fellow experimentalist and Pritzker Prize recipient (not to mention 2013 AIA Gold Medalist) Thom Mayne gets to grips with Ito's motivation. The pair of laureates converse via Skype examining the drive behind Ito's evolutionary approach, before getting down to discussing how they think architecture is being affected by society's biggest change yet - the advent of the post-digital age.

See more of Ito's work along with some of our previous coverage after the break...

Until his third year of high school, Toyo Ito's passion was not architecture, but baseball. 

Fortunately for us all (and almost assuredly for the Pritzker laureate himself), he soon switched career paths.

Born in Seoul in 1941, Ito moved to Japan at the tender age of two. From the age of 12 (when his father died) to the time he went to University, Ito was part of the family business: making miso (bean paste). However, upon attending The University of Tokyo from 1965-1969, architecture became his life work. 

Read more on the life and work of Toyo Ito, the 2013 Pritzker Laureate, after the break...

+ 3

Text description provided by the architects. How might these units accommodating 110 entirely different families be conceived as a community? Riken Yamamoto gave that question a great deal of thought. The result was this arrangement of buildings organized around a central space. It was based on the idea of threshold. The open space in the center of the site cannot be accessed except through the units. The units serve as gates to the central open space.