It is not often as an architecture critic that you find yourself referring to the dimensions of a building in millimetres. But then few buildings are as slender, stripped back and meticulously honed as those designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, founders of the Japanese practice Sanaa, who have been announced as this year’s recipients of the RIBA royal gold medal for architecture.
They have built a house in Tokyo with the delicacy of a cardboard model, where the internal walls are just 16mm thick. Their outpost of the Louvre museum in northern France, which shimmers on the horizon like a foggy apparition, features 25-metre- long steel roof beams that are just 12mm wide. Over the last 30 years, the pair have scattered the world with glass structures as fine as soap bubbles, and wafer-thin concrete canopies held up on toothpick columns, creating light-flooded, transparent enclosures that look as if they could float away on the breeze.
