‘I am a salesman’: Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto on designing for connection and community

Beyond his built work under his practice, Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop, he has also held teaching appointments at several of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions. His most recent accolade was the 2025 Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum, recognising his outstanding contributions to community regeneration, sustainability, and design for social impact.

While at Archifest, Yamamoto shared his aversion to binary oppositions—inside versus outside, public versus private—warning that such dualities can limit how we imagine and inhabit space. The name of his practice, Field Shop, is itself a deft reconciliation of two seemingly incongruent ideas. “Field,” he explains, evokes openness and connection, while “Shop” speaks to his willingness to engage in value exchange. “I am a salesman,” he declares unapologetically. “I want to sell architecture. And add value—something good, something useful. Not just for the owner, but for everyone who lives around it.”

Rather than retreat from architecture’s commercial reality, he confronts it head-on, using it as a lever for more equitable, socially attuned design. One of his long-held critiques is reserved for the post-industrial housing paradigm that dominates most of the world: one house, one family, one fortified sense of privacy. “This model keeps only the inside,” he laments. “People no longer feel responsible for the outside.” The result is a built environment optimised for saleability, not solidarity.

But what about privacy, we ask—something that has become a commodity. Yamamoto was unbothered. “Many people believe that privacy belongs to one family,” he says. “But sometimes, privacy belongs to the village.”

In traditional communities, he explained, privacy is not about isolation, but rather about mutual respect and shared rhythms—especially when people work and live together in the same space. Rather than looking at visibility and privacy as opposing forces, Yamamoto suggests that they can coexist harmoniously within a communal structure.

He also acknowledged the emotional consequences of these spatial divides—particularly for ageing populations. “As people get older, they live alone,” he says. “They get lonely.”

Yamamoto believes architecture can help to counter that isolation, not by designing more buildings, but by recovering the idea of local area communities. “It’s the architect’s responsibility,” he adds, “to make that visible.” It is, in Yamamoto’s view, a global condition—and a profoundly isolating one.

He drew a parallel with his mother’s story—how, in the aftermath of the Second World War, his family fled to Tianjin and remained there for two years while awaiting repatriation to Japan. Yamamoto recalled how his mother told him that the local civilians, many of them Chinese, helped his family survive. A strong community, he believes, is more important than the nation. “It is always the community that endures,” he says.

To Yamamoto, this kind of solidarity isn’t just historical memory, but something still practised in many parts of Asia and the Global South. In Indonesia, he observed kampong life continuing in the heart of Jakarta. He saw similar dynamics in Venezuela and the Philippines, where informal communities operate with strong internal support systems and cooperative economies.

In Venezuela, where he is currently involved in community design efforts, Yamamoto observed how the late Hugo Chávez had legalised informal settlements known as barrios—home to 60 per cent of the population. While wealthy elites opposed the move, Yamamoto saw its promise: a model where strong communities formed self-sufficient systems. “If architects participate in that kind of change, our ideas can be useful.”

Singapore, too, he said, once thrived on the kampong spirit—something he believes remains latent in its cultural memory. The role of the architect, as he said on stage, is to uncover and support these inherited systems of living together, helping them to evolve rather than erase them.

Yamamoto’s keynote presentation focused on The Circle at Zurich Airport, a mixed-use complex completed in 2022 at the airport. Located between the small town of Kloten and the airport’s massive infrastructure, the building was designed to mediate between vastly different urban scales.

“The shape is like a banana,” he explained, describing the curve dictated by the site, which hugs a circular park that borders Kloten’s residential area. Within that footprint, he created a porous environment of narrow lanes and plazas typical of European countries—open yet covered, public yet adaptable—where visibility defines how space is experienced.

When asked on stage about the challenge of justifying public space to clients who are more focused on revenue, Yamamoto’s answer was clear: “Then we must sell it better—sell the value, sell the next 100 years.” He pointed to the building’s advanced double-skin facade system as a case in point. Although costly upfront, it was engineered to minimise long-term maintenance: two layers of glazing with filtered air circulating in between, keeping the inner surface clean for decades.

“Maybe 30 years, no need to clean inside,” he said, adding that the airport agreed because the design made financial sense over time. To Yamamoto, this is what good architecture does: it makes the case for value that lasts, to both people and clients.

At the close of his dialogue at Archifest, Yamamoto was asked what advice he would offer to younger architects. “Think about one hundred years. Or, even one thousand,” he replied.

This mindset runs through everything he has shared, from his critique of isolating housing to his insistence on visibility and his work supporting informal settlements across the Global South. And, of course, there is no exact formula: “Every time it’s a different answer,” he said. “The culture of the country and the material of the place—architects must find that hidden system that works.”

In this, Yamamoto positions the architect not just as designer, but as interpreter, negotiator, and advocate. Whether in Tokyo, Zurich, Caracas or Jakarta, his message is consistent: Build for people, not prestige. And always, think in centuries.

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