Kazuyo Sejima y Ryue Nishizawa. Foto: Aiko Suzuki, cortesía de CDA

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the founding partners of the Japanese firm SANAA, have been distinguished with the Charlotte Perriand Award, an accolade given by the Créateurs Design Association. This is the fourth edition of the accolade, previously won by Frida Escobedo, Jeanne Gang, and David Adjaye.

Kazuyo Sejima (Ibaraki, 1956) and Ryue Nishizawa (Tokyo, 1966) work indistinctively together and separately, although much of their work outside Japan they have carried out jointly as SANAA, which they set up in 1995. Theirs is an ‘immaterial’ architecture that stands out for its seeming simplicity. Among their works are: the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, the Louvre-Lens Museum in Lens, the Urban Campus for Bocconi University in Milan, the refurbishment of La Samaritaine Department Store in Paris, the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and the extension of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.

Sejima and Nishizawa won the Pritzker in 2010 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2022. They will be handed the Charlotte Perriand Award at the Créateurs Design Awards ceremony set to be held in Paris on 18 January 2025.