Junya Ishigami wins €100,000 architecture prize

摘要

The Japanese architect was announced as the inaugural winner of the confusingly named Obel Prize funded by an endowment left by Danish businessman Henrik Frode Obel at a ceremony at the Utzon Center in Aalborg, Denmark, today. Ishigami was the designer of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, a commission that sparked controversy when he was accused of benefiting from unpaid interns working long hours. He later claimed everyone was paid apart from “volunteers” on work experience. The Obel jury, chaired by landscape architect Martha Schwartz, picked Ishigami for his Art Biotop Water Garden in Tochigi, Japan, where he created a woodland landscape dotted with ponds. Ishigami transplanted hundreds of trees to a rice field after they were set to be chopped down to make way for a hotel.