SANAA

The Rolex Learning Center (2010), located on the EPFL campus in Lausanne, Switzerland, is the work in which SANAA realized its philosophy at the largest scale. This building has no interior walls — 20,000 square meters of continuous space are covered by an undulating concrete slab, whose ground waves form courtyards, gentle slopes, depressions, and rises. One does not “walk” inside the building but “wanders” over its topography — in some places the ground swells into a lounge area, in others it sinks into a quiet reading nook.

How was this “wall-less” miracle achieved? The building consists of two enormous prestressed concrete arch shells (upper and lower), touching the ground at 14 points. These 14 support points required extremely precise load calculations — the arch shells are only 60 cm thick, cantilevering over spans of 20 meters. SANAA collaborated with structural engineer Mutsuro Sasaki (SAPS) to push the design to the limits of material and mathematics. Light diffuses from beneath the arch shells along the curved surfaces; inside, neither columns nor walls are visible — only people, the sloping ground, and transparent glass.

The Rolex Learning Center is a library, social space, classroom, café, and landscape all at once. It refuses to zone architectural functions — on the same gentle slope where you are reading, a student might be eating lunch, and someone else might be lying on the grass sunbathing. This “floating of function” is SANAA’s spatial politics: not designing a dictatorial mode of using space, but providing a background gentle enough that people can invent their own ways of using space. Architecture steps aside, ceding place to life itself.

SANAA’s white is not a color choice but a philosophical stance. In an oversaturated visual culture — billboards, screens, garish consumer spaces — white is not “nothingness” but “bringing attention back.” Sejima has said that she uses white in design because white allows the changes of light and shadow themselves to become the protagonist of the space — on a white surface, morning light and afternoon light are different colors, cloudy-day light and sunny-day light are different temperatures. Architecture acquires a temporal dimension in ever-changing light.

SANAA’s architecture shares lineage with their mentor Toyo Ito but is decisively different. Ito’s architecture is more “liquid” — the flow and continuous deformation of form is his signature. SANAA, by contrast, is more “flat” — their form is closer to the Japanese aesthetic concept of Ma: it is not the objects themselves but the voids and intervals between them that carry meaning. In the Kanazawa Museum, meaning lies not in those white circular galleries but in the indefinable “in-between” zones between them, where sunlight falls.

The 2010 Pritzker Prize citation reads: “SANAA’s architecture is simultaneously dissolving into and coexisting with its surroundings.” Their work has influenced a younger generation of architects — such as Junya Ishigami and Sou Fujimoto — forming the “lightweight” lineage of Japanese contemporary architecture. In an era of climate crisis and resource scarcity, SANAA’s architecture offers a visionary paradigm: not building more but building less; not occupying space but liberating space; not competing to be the protagonist but becoming the background.