Alex Brandon/Andrew Harnik/AP/File

President Joe Biden (left) speaks Aug. 10, 2023, in Salt Lake City, and former President Donald Trump speaks June 13, 2023, in Bedminster, New Jersey. Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are now set for a rematch in the 2024 presidential election.

Former President Donald Trump’s commanding performance on Super Tuesday and Nikki Haley’s subsequent exit from the Republican race bring to a close one of the shortest, most anticlimactic primary contests in modern U.S. politics – and kick off a general election campaign that promises to be anything but.

After winning 14 of 15 states yesterday, Mr. Trump stands on the cusp of capturing enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination for the third consecutive time, setting up a November rematch with President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee.

The 2024 general election campaign – featuring two of the oldest, most-disliked candidates ever, and a closely divided but deeply polarized electorate – will make history on a number of levels. For the first time in over a century, an incumbent president will be competing against a former president, both running as lame ducks in a rematch for which few Americans say they are excited.

Mr. Trump never conceded his 2020 loss, maintaining without evidence that the election was fraudulent and standing by as his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The first former U.S. president to be criminally indicted, he is campaigning for the White House while managing costly legal defenses in four separate cases featuring 91 criminal charges.

Mr. Biden, who entered office promising a return to normalcy amid the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, saw his approval ratings plunge as inflation spiked and huge numbers of migrants began streaming across the southern border.  

With such high levels of disapproval for both candidates, experts suggest November’s election could feature lower turnout than usual, with a higher percentage of votes going to third-party or independent candidates. Ultimately, the presidency may be determined by a relatively small group of voters deciding which major-party candidate they dislike less. This group, often referred to as “double haters” by pollsters, pushed Mr. Biden across the finish line in 2020, but may not do so this time around.

Chris Carlson/AP

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks during a news conference, March 6, 2024, in Charleston, South Carolina. Ms. Haley exited the race after being defeated by Donald Trump.

“It shouldn’t be on the voters to have to choose between the lesser of two evils,” says John Ruml, a supply chain manager, as he leaves a Richmond, Virginia, high school after casting his ballot in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Frustrated by Mr. Biden’s handling of the Middle East conflict and domestic issues such as health care, Mr. Ruml had planned to vote “uncommitted.” But he didn’t see that option on the ballot, so he voted for self-help author Marianne Williamson instead. Another long shot Democratic challenger, Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, dropped out of the race Wednesday after failing to win a single delegate.

Recent polling has put Mr. Trump ahead of Mr. Biden, with a New York Times/Siena College poll from late February showing Mr. Trump leading 48% to 43%. Notably, 40% of registered voters said Mr. Trump’s policies had “helped them personally,” compared with just 18% who said the same thing about Mr. Biden. In other polling, on a range of issues from the economy to immigration to crime, Mr. Trump leads Mr. Biden by double digits. Mr. Biden leads by a narrower margin on abortion, health care, and the environment. 

Mr. Biden’s position in the polls also reflects concerns over the president’s age – 47% of respondents in the New York Times poll “strongly agreed” that the 81-year-old is “just too old” to be effective, compared with 21% who said the same of the 78-year-old Mr. Trump. And the president has been facing sharp criticism from voters on the left, particularly younger Democrats, over the Israel-Hamas war. In last week’s Democratic primary in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States, 13% of voters cast a ballot for “uncommitted.” And in Minnesota on Tuesday, “uncommitted” earned almost 20%.

Biden allies note that the president has actually outperformed the polls in recent primary elections, while Mr. Trump has underperformed them, arguing that the best predictor of voter behavior is how voters actually vote. Indeed, when all is said and done, it’s possible 2024 could wind up looking a lot like 2020, with a key portion of Mr. Biden’s support being driven by strong antipathy to Mr. Trump.  

“If you’re not 100% for Biden, that’s OK – but are you for saving the Constitution?” says Roberto Ventura, an educator, after voting for Mr. Biden in Virginia’s Democratic primary. “There’s really only one way to vote, and that’s for Biden.” 

Mr. Trump faces clear political challenges, even beyond his ongoing criminal cases. While he had a victorious night Tuesday, the fact that he lost up to 40% of the vote to Ms. Haley in states across the country signals potential weakness in the fall. 

Ed Goeas, a Republican strategist who worked on presidential campaigns for both former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, says that 30% to 40% of GOP primary voters “is still a substantial group.”

“Do they stay home? Do they vote for Biden? Or do they vote for Trump? That’s a huge question mark,” he adds.

In announcing her departure from the race on Wednesday, Ms. Haley notably did not endorse Mr. Trump and suggested that her voters could wind up in Mr. Biden’s column if the former president made no effort to win them back.

“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him, and I hope he does that,” the former South Carolina governor said. “Our conservative cause badly needs more people.”

Bennett Evans, a law student at Boston College who cast a ballot for Ms. Haley in Massachusetts’ Republican primary, says his vote was in part about supporting “an alternative to Donald Trump.”  

“[Haley]’s strong on the border and has a certain level of respect for the Constitution,” says Mr. Evans as he leaves an elementary school polling place in Brighton Tuesday evening. A registered Republican, he nevertheless voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Mr. Biden in 2020.

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Richie Rosenburgh, an unaffiliated voter in Colorado, said that he voted for Donald Trump in the state's primary in Lakewood, Colorado, March 5, 2024.

“Right now, neither [candidate] is getting the full support of their voters,” says Mr. Goeas, the GOP strategist. For Mr. Biden, the challenge is winning back “Democrats who are not happy about the war.” For Mr. Trump, it’s about persuading “Republicans who are not happy about [his] character” to overlook those concerns.

Outside a Lakewood, Colorado, library just west of Denver, Richie Rosenburgh, an unaffiliated voter who distributes forklift parts, says he cast his first-ever ballot for Mr. Trump on Tuesday, “not because he’s a perfect human being, but because his policies were much better.” The economy seemed to be booming under Mr. Trump, says Mr. Rosenburgh. 

“The economy still seems to be booming,” he clarifies. “It’s just 10 times as much to feed my kids.”

The economy is one of four central issues in which Mr. Biden will probably need to move voter sentiment in his direction in coming months if he wants to win reelection, says Jim Kessler, founder of the center-left think tank Third Way. The others are immigration, crime, and his age. On the last point, Mr. Kessler suggests Mr. Biden address it directly: “You have to run towards it.”

On Thursday, Mr. Biden will have one opportunity to reset, in what could be an unusually high-stakes State of the Union address.

“The general election begins this week,” says Mr. Kessler. “Every poll up to this point is meaningless. Most voters haven’t been paying attention, but they will start to now. The circus has begun.” 

Staff writers Sarah Matusek and Leonardo Bevilacqua contributed to this report from Lakewood, Colorado; and Boston.

Belinda Joyner has spent most of her life in Northampton County, North Carolina, near the Virginia border. She has raised a family, worked as a teacher’s assistant, and for more than a quarter of a century, fought against what she sees as polluting, outside industries trying to move into her mostly poor, Black community.

Ms. Joyner runs a small, grassroots environmental group called Concerned Citizens of Northampton County. Her group has worked to block a coal ash landfill, a liquid fertilizer plant, a hazardous waste incinerator, a private prison, and perhaps most prominently, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. But these days, she and her small band of activists have a new target – one that has proved both harder to defeat and far more complicated to oppose: the booming biomass, or wood pellet, industry.

The biomass sector is different from other foes. It bills itself as an environmentally friendly, clean energy climate solution, and is relied upon by regulators and legislators around the world to meet goals for reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

“We are part of a healthy and growing forestry industry in the U.S. South and source our biomass from sustainable, managed, working forests,” says Jacob Westfall, spokesperson for Enviva, the world’s largest wood pellet company. 

But Ms. Joyner and a growing number of critics say the wood pellet industry is just the latest in a generations-long trend of wealthy individuals and companies claiming green status while outsourcing their environmental pollution to marginalized communities.  

At the heart of this controversy are questions about both transparency and justice in the global fight to combat climate change – including whether the world’s efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions can be done in a way that alleviates instead of increases long-standing inequalities.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

An aerial view shows deforested land May 17, 2023, in Sampson County, North Carolina.

For decades, communities of color and other marginalized groups have disproportionately borne environmental burdens, whether because of resource extraction or the placement of hazardous facilities. These populations are also the most disproportionately impacted by climate change.

“The impacts of climate change that we are feeling today, from extreme heat to flooding to severe storms, are expected to get worse, and people least able to prepare and cope are disproportionately exposed,” said Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan in releasing a 2021 report on this pattern. 

To address this unfairness, advocates say that climate solutions should not only focus on lowering global emissions but also address environmental justice in communities.

The wood pellet industry, say critics like Ms. Joyner, does neither.

The biomass rush began in the late 2000s, when the European Parliament passed what became known as the Renewable Energy Directive, a legal framework for boosting renewable sources to 20% of European Union energy by 2020. One way to do this, analysts suggested at the time, was to use biomass instead of fossil fuels.  

Regulatory agencies around the world generally consider biomass – or organic material from animals and plants, including wood pellets – as a renewable energy source. The idea is that byproducts from agriculture, wood factories, or other sources can be turned into fuel, as can wood pellets made from trees, which can be replanted.   

Rapid expansion of an industry

But for European policymakers there was a problem: There weren’t sufficient forests in Europe to supply a wood pellet industry of the size needed to meet decarbonization goals. 

Fairly quickly, European countries started looking toward an old Colonial stomping ground: the American Southeast, where ample privately owned forests and relatively lax environmental regulations paved the way for dramatic industry growth.

In a sign of things to come, a wood pellet facility opened in Ahoskie, North Carolina, in 2011. According to the industry publication Biomass Magazine, more than 100 wood pellet facilities are now scattered from Maine and New York to Washington and Oregon. By making wood biomass from American forests a centerpiece of its clean power revolution, the EU ballooned its wood pellet consumption from 9.8 million metric tons in 2009 to 23.1 million in 2021 – much of that sourced in the American South. 

One of the world’s largest wood pellet producers, Maryland-based Enviva, operates 10 wood pellet facilities in the United States – one each in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia; two in Mississippi; and four in North Carolina. All are located in lower-income communities of color.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

An aerial view of the Enviva wood pellet plant May 17, 2023, in Sampson County, North Carolina. Enviva is the world’s largest biomass company. It produces wood pellets in North Carolina and ships them to Britain where they fuel power plants.

Companies say their operations offer jobs while causing little environmental impact. Their impact on forestland is minimal because, they have claimed, they use only wood unsuitable for other purposes, such as tree limbs and leftover wood from timber harvests. Any trees that are felled are quickly replanted, they say.

But Derb Carter, senior adviser and attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, is skeptical of that claim.

“I thought there was no way to get a meaningful amount of energy from wood unless you substantially harvested forests all across the state,” Mr. Carter says. And when he visited one North Carolina plant, Mr. Carter says he was horrified by what he saw. “They were clear-cutting bottomland swamps to supply the pellet mill, and there were dozens of trucks carrying hardwood logs to the biggest log pile I'd ever seen,” he says. 

The impact on the communities near the plants has been substantial as well, according to many residents.

Debra David, for instance, has spent her whole life on family land in Hamlet, the Richmond County town of 6,000 best known as the birthplace of jazz legend John Coltrane. Ms. David had never heard of wood pellets until Enviva selected Hamlet as the location for its fourth plant in North Carolina.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Resident and activist Debra David stands in front of the Enviva wood pellet production plant May 18, 2023, in Richmond County, North Carolina. She claims that the wood dust created by the pellet production is causing health problems for the area residents.

She and others protested the plant, citing a 2018 report from the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project, which analyzed the environmental impact of 21 wood pellet processing plants across the South. More than half of those plants had either failed to keep emissions below permit limits or lacked sufficient pollution controls, the group found, and together they were emitting thousands of tons of particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and volatile organic compounds each year.

Still, after public hearings, the state allowed Enviva’s project to proceed. Ms. David says locals must now contend with constant noise from the pellet plant, wood chips and dust that fly off trucks, and a pervasive stench akin to rotten eggs. Many people worry about the impact of the poor air quality. 

Enviva, for its part, advertises its dedication to being a “good neighbor.” It has given financial support to local fire stations, schools, and environmental organizations. It also reports to have created around 1,300 jobs, many in the rural Southeast.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

The housing stock shows the precarious financial situation of residents May 18, 2023, in Dobbins Heights, Richmond County, North Carolina. This small town is about a mile from the Enviva wood pellet production plant in Richmond County.

Ryan Emanuel, associate professor at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, says there’s a familiar rhetoric, whether the topic is animal feeding operations, power plants, or wood pellets. 

“The script I’ve seen play out time and again is always, ‘Look over here at jobs. Don’t look over here at the pollution or over here at the health impacts.’ It’s as if you can throw out a number of jobs that will make it OK to expose people to a certain level of harm,” he says.

Climate solution?

But in addition to jobs, wood pellet companies boast another communal good: They say they are a solution to climate change.

The wood pellets created in Ms. David’s community are almost entirely shipped to the EU, where biomass as of 2019 accounted for about 60% of renewable energy.

But researchers are starting to take a closer look at the carbon accounting of wood pellets. Under a decades-old international agreement, carbon emissions from wood pellets are only counted at the point of combustion. In other words, the “climate friendliness” of biomass doesn’t take into account the loss of trees or the emissions connected to either processing plants or transportation. 

The industry insists it quickly reforests its properties, planting new trees to replace the old. But it takes decades for new trees to grow and absorb carbon on a par with the ones that grew before. Soil biodiversity, which plays a role in carbon sequestration, is also damaged by logging.

Last spring, the EU announced that it was considering changes to its climate policies to no longer classify wood pellets as renewable, carbon-neutral energy. Such a change would have eliminated billions in government subsidies for the wood pellet industry. 

Industry lobbyists and U.S. politicians came out in support of the subsidies. The war in Ukraine, and connected worries about energy sources, also pushed legislators, according to analysts. The European Parliament backtracked. And in North Carolina, Belinda Joyner’s fight goes on.

This reporting was supported by an environmental justice reporting grant from the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources. 

Flyover was facilitated by SouthWings, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that coordinates a network of volunteer pilots across the southeastern U.S. to provide an aerial perspective to help shed light on and solve pressing environmental issues.

Sandy Steers is on pins and needles. And so are more than 30,000 people around the world. They’re all glued to the live web camera that’s focused on two bald eagles in their giant nest high above Big Bear Lake in Southern California. 

The eagles, Jackie and Shadow, are taking turns sitting on three eggs that could hatch any day now.

“I’m excited – and, you know, not worried, but just want everything to be OK,” says Ms. Steers, a biologist and longtime director of Friends of Big Bear Valley, which is operating the solar-powered webcam around the clock.

The Jackie and Shadow show may not win an Oscar, but it made national news in February after Jackie put on a phenomenal performance, sitting a record 62 hours in blizzard conditions to protect her clutch of three eggs. This fledgling production has a worldwide crew of 10 volunteers providing updates, answering questions in real time, and identifying which bird is on the nest.

There are three camera operators – including one from Italy for night duty. International media have also taken notice as online fans pace the world’s most crowded, albeit virtual, delivery waiting room.

Since last week, everyone has been on “pip watch,” looking for the first bump or crack in a shell to indicate that a chick is pecking its way into the world. A chick can spend an entire day, or even longer, hammering away with its beak tooth for the big breakout. 

When hatched, it can take another day just to sit up, which is when the parents start feeding it.

The webcam chat is abuzz with anticipation. “Hello from Illinois 4 grade class watching. Super excited to meet the eaglets,” writes Theresa Cory. 

Jackie gave some viewers a scare on Tuesday, when she flew off at 4:30 p.m., leaving the eggs unguarded for more than five minutes. Comments flew by: “uhoh,” “come back!” and “My heart is racing!” 

The moderators urged calm. Shadow eventually showed up, and then Jackie returned. 

Phew.

The early days and weeks of an eaglet’s life are not without risks. 

“Jackie and Shadow are good at keeping ravens and hawks away,” says Ms. Steers. “The elements are the biggest danger.”

In the nearly 10 years that the webcam has been trained on the nest, Jackie has had five chicks. Three of them fledged. But the others perished when a big storm came up. About 6 weeks old, the eaglets had not yet grown their waterproof feathers and were too big to fit completely under their mother.

Last year, Jackie’s eggs failed to hatch. She was the first to give up, but Shadow sat resolutely on the nest for two more nights. When he left the next day, ravens feasted on the eggs, which had not developed at all. 

“When Shadow came back, he just stood there, looking at the eggs, just back and forth. He was obviously heartbroken,” recalls Ms. Steers.

These birds have personalities, she says. “Jackie is definitely the boss” – dedicated, determined. Shadow is respectful and adoring of his mate. He listens, but then he also “kind of does what he wants.” Like fulfilling his egg-warming duty longer than Jackie might like, to the point that she’ll bite him or sit on him to move him off the nest.

“They’re a lot of people who have a crush on Shadow and say they want a husband just like him,” Ms. Steers laughs. They like that he’s independent, and dedicated and loving. Who else would put up with chicks biting their ankles during feeding time?

Like many dedicated watchers, Ms. Steers says that the bald eagle pair lift her spirits.

“Whenever anything is bothering me in my life, I just turn on Jackie and Shadow, and I smile again,” she says. “I love helping people to connect with them so that they can connect with nature and have that heartfelt connection that I feel.” 

Now, she concludes, “all fingers crossed for the eggs to happen this time, because they love being parents so much.”

You can view the eagle webcam here. 

Whenever I see a great movie actor interviewed on a talk show or film festival panel, I am always stunned at how these seemingly ordinary mortals can somehow entirely reshape themselves when wrapped up in a role. Many actors, I suspect, are equally confounded by what they do. It’s a mystery that can’t really be explained, and perhaps is best left that way.

The Oscars air March 10 on ABC, affording a perfect opportunity to contrast the nominated actors’ red carpet chitchat with their transformative work on-screen. As is my annual custom, here is my take on some of the standout acting nominees, as well as a few of the best performances of the year that went unrecognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

Best actress

Of the five nominees, Lily Gladstone, playing the beleaguered Osage wife in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” gives a soul-deep performance that is as eloquent in its silences as in its spoken passages. The catch here is that, if one goes strictly by screen time, Gladstone’s work qualifies as more of a supporting role. This is the main problem I had with the movie. There should have been much more of her. But it’s a tribute to her performance that one thinks of Gladstone as the film’s centerpiece. 

Her only real competition in this category is Emma Stone in “Poor Things,” portraying a woman who starts out with the mind of a toddler and ends as a free-living feminist. It’s quite a feat, although, like the movie itself – a steampunk cross between “Frankenstein” and “Pygmalion” – it strikes me as more of an audacious stunt than a reason to celebrate. 

Neon/AP

Sandra Hüller is nominated for best actress as a possibly murderous wife in “Anatomy of a Fall.”

The other three nominees – Annette Bening as the vehemently competitive long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad in “Nyad”; Carey Mulligan as Leonard Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre, in “Maestro”; and, particularly, Sandra Hüller as the novelist and suspected murderer in “Anatomy of a Fall” – are all commendable. Hüller, by the way, is equally good, in an entirely different tonal key, as the wife of the Auschwitz commandant in Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece and best picture nominee, “The Zone of Interest.” 

Among the deserving but overlooked, I would rate highly Leonie Benesch as the harried German middle school instructor in “The Teachers’ Lounge,” a nominee for best international feature. She conveys the expanding desperation of someone whose do-good efforts lead her into bad byways. Laure Calamy in “Full Time,” as a hard-pressed Parisian hotel worker, is an ardent wonder. And in A.V. Rockwell’s too-little-seen “A Thousand and One,” Teyana Taylor, in her first leading movie role, absolutely galvanizes as a mother who kidnaps her son from foster care.

Best actor

Of the five nominees, I like best Jeffrey Wright as the tetchy college professor and novelist in “American Fiction.” I have seen Wright in over two dozen movies and TV shows, and onstage. Never has he been less than terrific. Paul Giamatti, as a tetchy prep school teacher in “The Holdovers,” overdoes the Scrooge stuff early on, but then settles into someone recognizably human. (Giamatti ranks high on the All-Time-Most-Snubbed list for not having even been nominated for “Sideways.”)

Three of the best actor nominees are playing real people. In the misguided “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein is an energetic piece of mimicry. As civil rights icon Bayard Rustin in “Rustin,” Colman Domingo is better than the movie. Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in “Oppenheimer” captures the physicist’s ethereal, head-in-the-clouds side but not his dandyish, control-freak demeanor. The best unnominated performance for me is Benoît Magimel’s as the culinary connoisseur in “The Taste of Things.” Don’t watch while hungry.

Seacia Pavao/© 2023 Focus Features LLC

Da’Vine Joy Randolph, nominated for best supporting actress in “The Holdovers,” gives a master class as a grieving mom.

Best supporting actress

Da’Vine Joy Randolph, as the cafeteria manager in “The Holdovers” whose son has recently died in Vietnam, gives a master class in how to make the most of one’s screen time. Her every word, gesture, and glance contain so many dizzying emotional levels that I sometimes wished the entire movie had been about her. It’s almost preternatural the way she can combine funny and sad in the exact same moment.

Danielle Brooks is the powerhouse Sofia in “The Color Purple” – a role she first triumphantly played on Broadway. She goes from a fierce force of nature to an incarcerated woman in the pits of depression. In both embodiments, she compels our utmost attention.

Viola Davis, as Michael Jordan’s don’t-mess-with-me mother in “Air,” was typically wonderful, and should have been nominated. I also admired the unnominated Scarlett Johansson in “Asteroid City.” She plays a self-infatuated movie star, and she does so without a trace of condescension or a wink to the audience. A whiff of melancholia wafts through her performance. 

Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures

Mark Ruffalo is a best supporting actor contender for his role as a cad in “Poor Things.”

Best supporting actor

Lots of good, nominated work in this category. Sterling K. Brown’s partying plastic surgeon livens up “American Fiction” whenever he swaggers on-screen. Robert De Niro, who I imagined would be miscast as an early-20th-century Southwestern cattle baron in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is entirely believable. As Ken, Ryan Gosling is both hilarious and, of all things, touching in “Barbie.” Mark Ruffalo, as the insufferable dandy in “Poor Things,” gives one of the most obstreperously funny performances I’ve ever seen.

Best for me is Robert Downey Jr. as Atomic Energy Commission Chair Lewis Strauss, the chief nemesis in “Oppenheimer.” Downey has been so identified with the Marvel and Sherlock Holmes franchises that for many moviegoers it’s understandable his intensely focused work here would come as a revelation. (Some viewers didn’t even recognize him.) But one has only to look at his performances in everything from “Less Than Zero” and “Chaplin” to “Two Girls and a Guy” and “Wonder Boys” to recognize just how extraordinary he can be. And how versatile. Downey’s harrowing, real-life history of drug usage, which he has successfully overcome, makes him the sentimental favorite to win in this category. But sentiment needn’t play a part in tipping the scales. He deserves the honor regardless.

And finally, hats off to the unnominated John Magaro. He plays the novelist husband in Celine Song’s marvelous, best picture-nominated “Past Lives,” co-starring the also excellent Greta Lee and Teo Yoo. It’s not always easy playing a good guy. Villains are easier. Magaro portrays an essentially decent man who fears the love of his life is drifting away, and that there is nothing he can do to prevent it. You need a tremendous fund of empathy to give the kind of performance Magaro gives here.

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. 

Photo courtesy of Kouichi Satake and the Pritzker Architecture Prize

The Pangyo Housing in Seongnam, South Korea, designed by Riken Yamamoto

In a poll of some 1,500 global leaders last year, nearly half said societal polarization will present a major crisis in 2024. And in a new book on “social poverty” in the United States, Seth Kaplan – an expert on fragile societies – wrote that “the social decay we are experiencing in neighborhoods across America is unlike anything I have seen elsewhere.” Perhaps with that bleak picture in mind, the jury for the Pritzker Architecture Prize gave the world’s highest award in the field this year to Japan’s Riken Yamamoto. His five decades of designs, from homes to museums, are known for inviting people to connect and create a spirit of community.

“One of the things we need most in the future of cities is to create conditions through architecture that multiply the opportunities for people to come together and interact,” said Alejandro Aravena, head of the prize’s jury and himself a Pritzker winner. Mr. Yamamoto “brings dignity to everyday life. Normality becomes extraordinary. Calmness leads to splendor.”

One of his most famous designs is of a fire station in Hiroshima. Its walls and floors are largely transparent. The public can see the daily activities of firefighters, enabling trust in their work. In South Korea, he designed nine clusters of houses with common decks as well as ground floors that are virtually transparent. The complex helps counteract loneliness and encourages interaction.

His designs for schools are known for their open common areas and glass walls that break down isolation and foster collaboration. For a new city hall in Fussa, Japan, he had the outside walls slope gently into grass and brick areas, making the building inviting for residents. A commercial center at the Swiss airport in Zurich was designed to welcome local residents to mingle with air travelers.

At a young age while globe-trotting, Mr. Yamamoto focused on how cohesive societies carefully manage the “threshold” between private and public spaces, preserving individual privacy yet enhancing neighborly bonds. Front porches on homes – an African idea brought to the U.S. by enslaved people – is one example.

“We can still honor the freedom of each individual while living together in architectural space as a republic, fostering harmony across cultures and phases of life,” he said.

The Pritzker jury stated that his designs do not dictate activities but rather enable “people to shape their own lives within his buildings with elegance, normality, poetry and joy.” They make a community visible to itself, as Mr. Yamamoto puts it. They are also a reminder of what qualities it takes to repair polarized societies.