Rooms With a View

Earlier this year, Kazuyo Sejima was bestowed the Jane Drew Prize, an award in recognition not only of her design excellence, but for raising the profile of women in architecture.

Words Jamie Christian Desplaces

It’s the latest in a long line of awards for the Japanese architect who has previously won the Pritzker Prize – considered the Nobel Prize of architecture – alongside Ryue Nishizawa with whom she founded Tokyo architecture studio, SANAA, in 1995. The pair have since designed buildings throughout Japan and around the world, including the Sydney Modern – the studio’s first Australia project – the Louvre-Lens in Lens, France, and New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art. Last year, SANNA was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for architecture – one of the highest honours among the arts in the world.

Sejima, who attained a Master’s in Architecture at Japan Women’s University before being named Japan’s young architect of the year, is renowned for her generous use of glass for buildings. Her profession, she believes is in part about using “space as a medium to express our thoughts”. Sejima’s designs, transparent and fluid and often with a nod to nature, both encourage bountiful natural light and connect visitors to the building, the surrounding environment, and each other. “I have a dream that architecture can bring something to contemporary society,” she says. “Architecture is how people meet in space.”

Verve takes a look at three of her most lauded works.

Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art SANNA’s architecture is generally “open in character”, because of their desire “to build relationships”. Few better exemplify this philosophy than the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, the studio’s first US commission. It serves as both an exhibition space for the museum's glass collection, and a glassmaking facility – highly symbolic seeing how there was once a thriving glassmaking industry in the city of Toledo.

The 5,000-strong glass collection, ranging from ancient to contemporary times, is considered among the world’s finest, while the annex is of course built predominantly from clear glass. Curving glass-walled zones and rooms sit within the building, their transparent structure simultaneously serving to contain and connect the spaces – and those that use them. Built in 2005, the innovative pavilion implemented previously unseen processes in glass design and fabrication that “could not have been realised a generation ago”.

The striking Sumida Hokusai is a four-storey structure situated in a small park in Tokyo’s Sumida ward and dedicated to Katsushika Hokusai, the artist responsible for the iconic woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, who lived in the area around two centuries ago. As well as serving a celebratory shrine to Hokusai’s work (there are 18,000 pieces inside, as well as works by his proteges), the building, a design by Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, truly stands as a work of art in its own right.

It’s so completely covered in a polished aluminium, that even the entrance isn’t obviously placed. The enclosed structure is akin to a shimmering monolithic block with strategically angular placed slits – in place of windows – cut into its metallic skin that look almost sliced by a giant axe to allow bursts of light to fall inside and encourage viewing out over Tokyo from the upper decks. The exterior walls themselves reflect the surrounding landscape whilst allowing the museum to blend within it.

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art

“A museum open to the city like a park”, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art was awarded the Golden Lion Award at the 9th Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition as well as the 2010 Pritzker Prize, lauded by the jury for its “remarkable properties of space, lightness, transparency, and materiality to create a subtle synthesis”. Rightly regarded as one SANAA’s most prestigious and visionary buildings, it sits at the centre of the city of Kanazawa, its museum zones punctuated by public and private areas like a library, a lecture hall, an eatery, and a children's workshop, all planned to provoke social interaction.

Like an eclectic collection of large Lego blocks, the individual roofs of the various zones pop from the main low-rise circular structure – which has no front or back and is adorned with glass and surrounded by lawns and trees – inviting exploration from anywhere. Adding to the airy, open feel, the scattering of galleries allow for ample unobstructed views that reach stretch for the 112.5-metre diameter of the disc-shaped complex. A smattering of glass ceilings – and more glass walls inside – allow natural light to pour in. A fitting contemporary “town square” for Kanazawa.