interview with Tokyo architects SANAA

an interview with the most excellent SANAA by Edan Corkill:
Being an architect requires patience and endurance. For argument's
sake, let's just say it's 2002 and, as the highlight of your career to
date, you win the competition to design a new art museum in one of the
most prized locations in the world: Manhattan.
Time to crack open the champagne? Well, not quite. For architects,
winning a competition is like taking the first, nervous step into a
giant labyrinth — a labyrinth so vast and complicated that it might be
years before you emerge at the other end.

Japanese
architecture office SANAA — centered on its principals, Sejima Kazuyo
(born 1956) and her protege-turned-business-partner Nishizawa Ryue
(born 1966) — was set up in 1995. Old-timers? Well, after winning
several high-profile competitions around the turn of the century (the
New Museum in Manhattan included), it's only in the last three or four
years that they have finally begun to emerge from their labyrinths and
present the world with the tangible fruits of their amazing
architectural vision.

In 2004, the 21st Century Museum of
Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, a large circular glass structure encasing a
random sprinkle of square galleries, opened in that city in Ishikawa
Prefecture in rural west-central Japan — and was promptly bestowed with
the coveted Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale for architecture.