The Wolf Prize 2022

Momoyo Kaijima with her partner Yoshiharu Tsukamoto are that rare combination of architect, urban designer, artist, researcher and teacher all at the same time. Since the beginning of their collaboration in 1992, in the office Atelier Bow-Wow, their work has had a broad impact on a global scale, be it through their small urban detached houses; their investigation into the urban metabolism of Tokyo and beyond; through their numerous installations, so-called micro-public spaces, in museums and biennales; their research around the world on architectural elements or public spaces; and their long-lasting teaching activities in leading universities around the world. Throughout their more than 30-year-long collaboration, as partners and co-teachers, they engaged, long before the topic came onto the recent political agenda, with the environmental challenges posed to modern societies and the crises caused by them. Yet, what makes the contribution of Kaijima and Tsukamoto outstanding and unique is an understanding of the environment that combines both the natural and the artificial givens – those that make any environment and effect those who live in it – while responding to these challenges as architects and through architecture.
Two books both published in 2001, Made-in-Tokyo and Pet-Architecture, profoundly challenged the existing – postmodern – urban and architectural theories, stressing on the one side the deep entanglement between architecture and infrastructure in the shaping of any urban environment, and on the other side the key role that smallest urban units play in the appropriation of the city by its inhabitants. These two studies reflect the questions that Atelier Bow Wow had been addressing in around the same time in a series of small urban detached houses, that both proposed to re-establish the city as a space for living while investigating the conditions of contemporary housing. Widely published houses, like the Gae House, the Mini House, the Nora House or the architects’ own house and atelier, all in or around Tokyo, showed, despite their small scale, the outstanding agility of Atelier Bow Wow in dealing with the very specific conditions of any environment, reaching from the individual needs of the inhabitant, to the constraints of building laws, and to climatic conditions (wind, humidity, temperature, etc.). In parallel, with a series of art installations, so called “micro-public spaces”, Bow Wow expanded their research into the urban realm by investigating the close relationship between local habits and public space, proposing through their intervention a new understanding of aesthetics as a shared experience.
That these lines of investigation could be expanded in their historical and trans-scalar dimensions was to be demonstrated throughout the next years. In several concurrent publications and projects on so called “urban metabolism” and “urban flux,” Atelier Bow Wow showed their rare capacity to both engage with contemporary theory from such diverse fields as social geography, philosophy or history, and respond to it in architectural terms. Thus, the restauration of the small urban Machiya in Kanasawa (2007) was the result of a close analysis of the city and the conditions of its urban transformation though centuries, while the Guggenheim-BMW-Lab, a moving public space, or the urban Miyashita Park (2011) built on a parking garage engaged with changing uses over time. What unites these approaches – summarized in the book-manifesto Architectural Behaviorology (2010) – was a common reading of the environment, through the different durations between which the architect has to mediate: the built and the unbuilt, the climate and the territory, the humans and non-humans, etc. More than any other architects of their generation, Atelier Bow Wow was able to give an architectural answer to the contemporary challenge of “Umwelt-Design”.
In the aftermath of the Tohoku Earthquake of 2011 Atelier Bow Wow, who co-founded then the NGO ArchiAID, showed their outstanding capacity to respond as architects to the most far-reaching environmental challenges of the 21th century, acting as citizens, teachers, designers or policy makers. Confronted with an environment of bare necessity, the challenge was – in collaboration with the inhabitants – to layout the different actors and networks involved in architecture, to be able to respond to the precise needs of inhabitation. The so-called public drawings invented as a collaborative and interactive work between students, teacher and citizens, became a central tool for investigating these conditions. This trajectory found a theoretical expression in Architectural Ethnography (2018), both a book and the exhibition held in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Since 2000 Momoyo Kaijima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto have been teaching as guest-professors at the most prestigious schools worldwide, while acting as full faculty at Tsukuba University and ETH Zurich (Kaijima) and at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tsukamoto).
As outstanding architects and leading public intellectuals, that have been engaged both through their practical work and their theoretical writings in a fundamental rethinking of our understanding of the living environment, the two partners count without doubt as the most important and influential figures in the field of their generation. To award the Wolf Prize to Momoyo Kaijima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto would be a strong sign to the future of architecture.