It's an unlikely location, perhaps, for the creative hub of one of the planet's most cutting-edge architects: a dockside warehouse near Tokyo Bay hemmed in by dull concrete apartment blocks. Behind its cinder-block walls, young people toil over computers and diagrams in a cavernous open-plan office. Paper cut-outs crowd every desk. Ignore the atmosphere of beetle-browed intensity and it could be a giant origami convention for children.
'Oh, please don't show this - it's such a mess,' pleads Kazuyo Sejima, one half of the acclaimed duo behind Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates (Sanaa). 'People will think we're chaotic.'
A slight, wiry figure dressed in black, Sejima orchestrates Sanaa's swelling global empire of projects from behind her desk in this warehouse. She is just back from New York with partner Ryue Nishizawa to pick up the US$100,000 Pritzker Prize, the industry's equivalent of the Nobel, given to architects whose work has made 'consistent and significant contributions to humanity'.
Drawing on a string of innovative projects, perhaps the most famous of which is the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan, Pritzker singled out a collaborative process that is both unique and inspirational: 'It is virtually impossible to untangle which individual is responsible for what aspect of a particular project,' the judges concluded.
'Well, we've been together quite a long time,' says Sejima. She laughs at suggestions the pair have developed a sort of professional telepathy. 'Of course, there is sometimes friction and differences of opinion, although nothing like the fights we had before. I don't have the same energy.' Asked why they've lasted together for 15 years, the boyish Nishizawa says simply, 'Her charm as a person.'
Like their buildings, the relationship is more complex and finely balanced than its deceptively simple exterior. Both have swatted away speculation that their union is anything more than professional. Nishizawa, the younger of the two (and at 44 the youngest architect ever to win the Pritzker) is technically the junior partner having begun working for Sejima (54) while still a graduate student in the late 1980s. But the former prot?g?, who runs a separate practice within the same warehouse, reportedly generates most of Sanaa's creative ideas. Observers say he brings a vital logical and critical perspective to her more intuitive thought processes.
