Kazuyo Sejima and the Design Philosophy Behind Her Most Famous Works

Kazuyo Sejima and design philosophy go hand in hand because her buildings are the clearest expression of a single idea: architecture as a light, permeable structure that invites people in rather than imposing on them. Across more than three decades, from her early Tokyo houses to the Glass Pavilion in Toledo, Sejima has refined a vocabulary of transparency, non-hierarchical plans, and careful dialogue with the site.

Born in Ibaraki in 1956, Sejima trained at Japan Women’s University and apprenticed with Toyo Ito before founding Kazuyo Sejima and Associates in 1987 and, with Ryue Nishizawa, SANAA in 1995. In 2010 she became the second woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and in 2025 the same studio received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal.

Who Is Kazuyo Sejima? A Short Biography

Any serious Kazuyo Sejima biography starts with Toyo Ito, whose office she joined after graduating in 1981 and left in 1987 to open her own studio in Tokyo. Ryue Nishizawa, a Yokohama National University graduate, joined her practice early and, after several years of collaboration, she invited him into partnership. That partnership became SANAA in 1995, and both architects continue to run individual studios alongside the joint firm. For readers interested in how SANAA sits within its home ecosystem, this overview of leading Japan architecture offices discusses the studio alongside others shaping contemporary Japanese practice.

In 2004 she and Nishizawa won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for their curated exhibition Metamorph. In 2010 she became the first woman to direct the Venice Architecture Biennale, and in the same year shared the Pritzker with Nishizawa. As this profile of famous women architects notes, she was the second woman to win the Pritzker Prize and she received the 2023 Jane Drew Prize for her contributions to the profile of women in architecture.

What Is Kazuyo Sejima’s Architecture Style?

Kazuyo Sejima architecture style rests on a few operational moves that show up again and again in her plans. She favors thin columns and minimal structural frames, so interiors feel more like enclosed gardens than rooms stacked around a core. She uses clear and low-iron glass to erase the boundary between inside and outside, often combined with white surfaces that diffuse daylight evenly. Her plans avoid long axial corridors and replace them with loose sequences of spaces that visitors can move through in many orders.

“I have been exploring how I can make architecture that feels open, which I feel is important for a new generation of architecture,” she said on learning she had won the Pritzker, as recorded on the Pritzker Prize website. Openness here is not only visual; it is social. Her buildings assume that people will use them in ways she cannot predict, and the plans are designed to absorb that unpredictability.

7 Famous Kazuyo Sejima Buildings, Chronologically

The following Kazuyo Sejima buildings span three decades and five countries. Read in order, they show how a small set of ideas can scale up without losing their character.

1. Saishunkan Seiyaku Women’s Dormitory, Kumamoto (1991)

Often cited as the first building where Sejima’s mature sensibility is visible, the Saishunkan Seiyaku Women’s Dormitory moves the private bedrooms to the edges and places a large shared living area at the center. It established a recurring theme in her work: communal space over circulation, and the rejection of the corridor as the dominant organizing element.

2. Small House, Tokyo (2000)

Small House by Kazuyo Sejima sits on a 60 square meter infill lot in Aoyama, Tokyo. Its main move is to assign each floor to a single program element, then link those levels with a sloped exterior volume whose perimeter traces the outline of each different floor plate. The result is a small tower whose walls tilt in several directions and whose windows open views in every orientation.

3. 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2004)

The project that established SANAA as an international reference point. A low circular glass volume roughly 113 meters in diameter houses galleries of different sizes arranged inside like furniture in a room. Visitors can enter from any of four cardinal directions and compose their own path. The museum won the Golden Lion at the 9th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004, and it is often cited in surveys of modern Japanese architecture as a turning point for civic buildings in the country.

4. Glass Pavilion, Toledo Museum of Art (2006)

The Glass Pavilion Kazuyo Sejima designed with Nishizawa was SANAA’s first completed U.S. building. It contains the museum’s extensive glass collection plus working glassmaking studios, all wrapped in more than 360 glass panels roughly 8 feet by 13.5 feet, each weighing 1,300 to 1,500 pounds, as documented by the Toledo Museum of Art. Each interior program element sits in its own curving glass room, with cavity walls of roughly 30 inches between rooms acting as climate buffers, developed with the German climate-engineering firm Transsolar.

5. Rolex Learning Center, EPFL Lausanne (2010)

At the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, SANAA designed a single continuous floor that rises and falls across the site. Library, cafés, auditoriums, and study spaces are arranged across the slopes without internal walls. Students find a place to work by walking across the landscape of the floor rather than by choosing a specific room, and the project won the 2014 Daylight Award for its use of natural light. It is also one of the most discussed examples in contemporary debates about minimalism in architecture, precisely because it shows how a minimal plan can still produce a rich spatial experience.

6. Louvre-Lens, France (2012)

The Louvre-Lens extends the low, horizontal strategy of Kanazawa into a former coal mining landscape in northern France. Five connected volumes in steel and glass sit in a reclaimed 20-hectare park without dominating it. Inside, the Galerie du Temps displays several centuries of the Louvre’s collection in a single long hall on a continuous timeline rather than grouped by period.

7. Sydney Modern / Art Gallery of New South Wales (2022)

The Sydney Modern Project is SANAA’s first completed building in Australia. A series of interlocking pavilions step down toward Sydney Harbour, designed to sit alongside the 19th-century neoclassical Art Gallery of New South Wales without competing with it. The non-hierarchical plan of Kanazawa returns here at a much larger scale, and the project contributed to SANAA receiving the 2025 RIBA Royal Gold Medal. The same low-slung, pavilion-based strategy is visible in the Taichung Green Museumbrary, the studio’s largest recent cultural project.

Comparing the 7 Works at a Glance

The seven buildings cover residential, cultural, and civic programs across radically different sites. The table below summarizes the main design move in each.

Video: Kazuyo Sejima in Her Own Words

In the Japan House interview below, Sejima walks through her motivations across projects including the 21st Century Museum, the Louvre-Lens, the Rolex Learning Center, and the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art.

How Kazuyo Sejima Fits Into Contemporary Architecture

Sejima’s practice is often grouped with contemporary minimalism, alongside architects like John Pawson and Alvaro Siza. But her work has a distinct emphasis on social permeability that pulls it away from minimalism as a purely formal style. The goal is rarely a photograph of an empty white room; it is a building that feels different once people are moving through it. Her influence on a younger generation of Japanese architects, including Junya Ishigami and Sou Fujimoto, is visible in their shared interest in thin structures and landscape-like interiors, and it explains why her work is now a standard reference point for museums, universities, and civic clients across Europe, North America, and Asia.

Where to See Kazuyo Sejima’s Work

The 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa is a day trip from Tokyo by Shinkansen. The Glass Pavilion is part of the Toledo Museum of Art campus, the Louvre-Lens is about 75 minutes from Paris by train, and the Rolex Learning Center at EPFL is open daily as an active library. For current projects and upcoming openings, the practice’s own site at sanaa.co.jp is the authoritative reference.