Kazuyo Sejima took her master's degree at Japan Women's University in 1981, spent six years with Toyo Ito, and opened Kazuyo Sejima & Associates in 1987; in 1995 she and Ryue Nishizawa founded SANAA. The work is easy to recognise and hard to imitate: thin white planes, structure reduced until it stops being read as structure, glass without visible frames, plans that keep circulation ambiguous so a visitor chooses a route rather than following one. Buildings such as the Kanazawa museum, the Zollverein school in Essen, the New Museum in New York and the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne treat lightness as a discipline rather than an effect. She received the Pritzker Prize with Nishizawa in 2010 and directed the Venice Architecture Biennale the same year.
