Kazuyo Sejima was born in the Ibaraki prefecture in 1956. After graduating in architecture in 1981, she began working in the studio of Toyo Ito. In 1987 she opened her own studio in Tokyo and in 1995 co-founded SANAA with Ryue Nishizawa, working in the fields of architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, exhibition design and industrial design. Since our first meeting in Crusinallo, when, lighting a cigarette after the other, Kazuyo presented her “Tea and Coffee Towers”, the original poetic designs from which the service we present today derives, I knew that hidden in those tenuous pencil sketches on simple sheets of plain paper was a new approach to design for the Alessi of the 21st century. I can think of no better way to present her work than with the words of her mentor, Toyo Ito: "Her way of conceiving architecture has no historical continuity whatsoever - indeed, to use her own words, a building is the equivalent of the diagram of space used to abstractly describe the daily activities that take place there. No lingering on complex and contradictory processes of design in the classical sense, no dependency on historical archetypes, not even unconsciously. The sense of a physical relation with space that we find in her work cannot be assimilated with the experience of traditional architecture, but with something that depends in the purest and simplest way on abstract spatial forms.” (T. Ito).
