Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa; SANAA

SANAA, the collaborative office of architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa is a multidisciplinary practice that extends beyond traditional practice into the realms of landscape, interior, exhibition, furniture, and product design.

Internationally celebrated for what one critic terms its "luminous minimalism," the Tokyo-based partnership has built an award-winning oeuvre of buildings and projects that is unusually varied - from the circular maze of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, to the almost-dematerialized Christian Dior building in Tokyo's Omotesando shopping district.

Even though SANAA rejects a recognizable formal style, the firm reveals a thematic consistency that transcends site and program.

Light takes center stage in all of Sejima and Nishizawa's work: A small cafe in the midst of a park is constructed out of little more than glass and mirrors that make little distinction between interior and exterior spaces; a museum for traditional Japanese painting snakes along a wooded mountainside, glass walls etched by vertical lines that simultaneously obscure and frame views onto a historic structure. The staggered and stacked boxes of the New Museum of Contemporary Art on New York's rough-and-tumble Bowery, just being constructed, will feature 60,000-square-feet of usable space with only six windows - something that sounds claustrophobic before it becomes clear that its seemingly random stacking accommodates skylights that will flood the galleries with light during the daytime and the facade with artificial light at night.