Ryue Nishizawa studied architecture at Yokohama National University, joined Kazuyo Sejima's office as an employee in 1990, and became her full partner when they founded SANAA together in 1995. Since 1997 he has also run a separate solo practice, Office of Ryue Nishizawa, taking on smaller projects — houses, artist's studios — that the larger firm's museum-scale commissions don't allow; the Teshima Art Museum, a single unbroken concrete shell shaped like a drop of water resting on a hillside, is his best-known solo work. He shares SANAA's vocabulary of thin structure and unbroken glass but works at a more domestic scale on his own. He received the Pritzker Prize jointly with Sejima in 2010.
