Sejima and Nishizawa at the Danish Architecture Center, Copenhagen

This year, the summer exhibition at the Danish Architecture Centre features the world-renowned and Pritzker Prize awarded Japanese architects, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, and their design studio SANAA.

In the course of the last few years, SANAA has become a major actor on the international architectural scene, and is on its way to becoming a super star with a series of remarkable buildings all over the world. The exhibition at the Danish Architecture Centre offers the public insights into SANAA’s unique approach – an architectural world that constantly expands and explores form, the play of light and materials, the tension between a building and its environment and the interaction between man and physical space.

Since it was founded in 1995, SANAA has designed trademark buildings in sizes right across the scale, using its own characteristic and unique design idiom, which revives salient features of the modernist tradition, interpreted from a Japanese angle. Their buildings provide extraordinary and unfamiliar experiences of space, and are likely to become new cultural reference points in the 21st century.

Rolex Learning Center
May 2010 will see the inauguration of SANAA’s latest building in Europe, the 'Rolex Learning Center' in Lausanne, Switzerland, an extension to the Technical Faculty, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Our exhibition will present the new 'Rolex Learning Center' to the Danish public, while offering insights into other prominent projects from SANAA and the poetic architectural idiom that is their trademark.

"SANAA is unquestionably one of the shining stars in the international architectural firmament, so we are really proud to be able to introduce them to the Danish public here at DAC. I am convinced that the Rolex Learning Center will set new standards for architecture in the coming decade. This building, which is a public institution of learning, presents a completely new and fluid concept of space, creating new frameworks for living, learning and community. It will become an international icon”, comments Kent Martinussen, Managing Director of the Danish Architecture Centre.

Sejima Director of the Venice Biennale of Architecture
Over and above this increasing international focus on SANAA’s buildings, Kazuyo Sejima has been selected for the prestigious task of Director of the 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture, which opens in August – the first woman ever chosen for this task. DAC is commissary of the Danish pavilion at this event. The Venice Biennale of Architecture is a major global event for architects and constructors and our exhibition is therefore a unique opportunity for the Danish public to get an inside view of Kazuyo Sejima's work and mindset before the Biennale.

Sejima and Nishizawa about their cooperation with DAC: “2010 is looking to be an extraordinary year for us with the completion of the Rolex Learning Center and the International Architecture Biennale in Venice. In between these two events we are looking forward to opening the exhibition at DAC and we are excited about working with the combination of the old, beautiful warehouse of DAC and the contemporary expression of architecture we are investigating at SANAA”.

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa work independently as architects, but run the SANAA design studio together, and together they have won several awards, recently the prestigious Pritzker Prize and earlier the 'Golden Lion' at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2004. SANAA's projects include: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2007) and The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2004), and boutiques for Christian Dior and Prada. Sejima designed the 'House in a Plum Grove', Tokyo (2003), one of the most interesting attempts to re- think the organisation and sequence of rooms in a house.

World Architecture
This exhibition forms part of DAC’s ongoing series, WORLD ARCHITECTURE, bringing global architecture to the Danish public. Previous exhibitions in the series have focused on Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, Norman Foster and Daniel Libeskind.

The SANAA exhibition runs from June 19th to September 15th 2010.

Photos from above:
O Museum. Photo Hisao Suzuki
New Museum. Photo Dean Kaufman
Zollverein. Photo Hisao Suzuki
Toledo. Photo Hisao Suzuki
Naoshima ferry Terminal. Photo Hisao Suzuki
Dior, Tokyo
21 Contemporary art museum. Photo Hisao Suzuki
Rolex Learning Center, Lausanne. Photo Hisao Suzuki