DESIGNING SPACES

0.cached.png

By Cathleen McGuigan

See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.

Kazuyo Sejima is sitting in a New York City sidewalk cafe, smoking a cigarette and talking about her far-flung design projects. She is dressed in a black Issey Miyake skirt and a Murakami T shirt with a cartoon space girl printed on it. Like that little doppelganger, the architect is futuristic in her thinking and deeply concerned with space, though of the earthbound sort. If you haven't heard of her or her design partner Ryue Nishizawa--their Tokyo firm is called SANAA--you soon will: they are about to make their mark on cities from Amsterdam to Valencia, New York to Basel. Their first project outside Japan, a glass pavilion for the glass collection of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, is set to open in early 2006. Their theater in Almere, near Amsterdam, is under construction and their New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan will break ground in late 2005.

Don't expect to see a signature style in their cutting-edge designs. Sejima, 48, and Nishizawa, 38, don't like to repeat themselves. "One of our most important philosophies is that we're always trying to create something new," says Nishizawa. Just look at their recently opened, prize-winning museum in Kanazawa, Japan--a sleek, low-slung building of layers of glass--and compare it with the design for the New Museum in New York. That structure is an uneven stack of boxes, each floor set back or cantilevered out to allow natural light inside. But all their designs share a lightness and elegant simplicity. And they like to connect the inside with the outside, often using transparent or translucent materials. "We want to make architecture that keeps some independence but relates to its surroundings," says Sejima.

Sejima traces her interest in architecture to "a picture of a house that intrigued me when I was a small child." Years later, she came across the same image, learned it was designed by a well-known architect, and so chose her field of study. After several years' working for architect Toyo Ito, she founded her firm in 1987; Nishizawa became her partner in 1995. After Japan's economic bubble burst in the late '90s, they began to win more design competitions abroad. Sejima and Nishizawa "have an intense passion for the work," says Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum. Their buildings may look effortlessly light, but that passion lies behind all of them.

Read More on News