Kazuyo Sejima: The Woman Who Made Walls Breathe

Cities weighed the earth down with stone shoulders until a woman came carrying a white eraser, and this book follows Kazuyo Sejima's quiet world, much of it built with Ryue Nishizawa as SANAA, from project to project. At Kanazawa a transparent circular museum opens to the city from several directions and a child approaches the glass without fear, while at the Glass Pavilion of the Toledo Museum of Art the wall nearly disappears and the garden passes through. In Essen windows of varied sizes scatter light across a concrete cube, in New York the shifted boxes of the New Museum rise above the noise of the Bowery, and at the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne the ground lifts into a white wave on which reading becomes a journey. At Grace Farms in Connecticut a continuous roof follows the land like a river carrying shade, and at the Sumida Hokusai Museum in Tokyo a silver façade shelters Hokusai's painted wave. The book concludes that Sejima's philosophy can be read as hospitality for light, footsteps and other people, as the weight of the building recedes and the lives within it expand.