матрациRecently I have taken up with good company.

I began work as researcher and studio prof at Keio University last month and was able to take part in a two day conference held by my faculty that tried to join together environmental scientists with architects and planners from around the world.

I say tried because in the end there was not a lot of communication between the two groups.  I suppose I should not be surprised by that, but I am.  It is a pity too, because it seems to me that each of the fields has something to learn from the other.

Perhaps this is why progress on environmental issues is so numbingly slow.

Keio university is lucky to have Fumihiko Maki and Kazuyo Sejima on the faculty and they both took part in the conference, giving interesting lectures.

Fumihiko Maki + Kazuyo Sejima

There were many interesting presentations beside those offered by the star-architects, including a lecture on planning in China by James Brearley, and on designing schools in gang-ridden areas of Cape Town (South Africa) by Heinrich Wolff.

But for me personally the most interesting was a lecture from a Chinese  architect  named Wang Shu, who is one of the principals of an interestingly named office called Amateur Architecture Studio.  He is also the head of the Architecture school at the China Academy of Art, in HangZhou  -  where he has designed and seen built a number of  buildings created according to an idea about architecture that accepts modernity, but mixes in an appealing willingness to appropriate materials and ideas from the past without resorting to nostalgia.

Ningbo Historic Museum by Amateur Architecture Studio

New Academy of Art by Amateur Architecture Studio

At Chinese Architects dot com he describes his approach to architecture as being grounded in an amateur perspective, which allows a kind of wilful ignorance about correctness and allows him to take on a less formal approach to design.

“I design a house instead of a building. The house is the amateur architecture approach to the infinitely spontaneous order.
Built spontaneously, illegally and temporarily, amateur architecture is equal to professional architecture. But amateur architecture is just not significant.

One problem of professional architecture is, that it thinks too much of a building. A house, which is close to our simple and trivial life, is more fundamental than architecture. Before becoming an architect, I was only a literati. Architecture is part time work to me. For one place, humanity is more important than architecture while simple handicraft is more important than technology.
The attitude of amateur architecture, – though first of all being an attitude towards a critical experimental building process -, can have more entire and fundamental meaning than professional architecture. For me, any building activity without comprehensive thoughtfulness will be insignificant.”

I found his work particularly interesting because it avoids being overly pre-occupied with rejecting the deficiencies of modern design. Instead it is based in acceptance  -  of the past, of the future, of tradition, and of experimentation.  Appropriate to our current age of mashups, really.  The idea is happily and purposefully naive, and I think a nice way to get more out of the opportunities that he finds before him.  Even if a person disagrees with the aesthetic, the basic presumption is hard to argue with.

If only the climate scientists had shown up and joined in the discussions that took place in the morning workshops with the architects.  My hope is that the conference we put together next year will be arranged to do just that.
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We are great fans of Cecil Balmond, the engineer who makes the work of great architects possible.  So it is fantastic luck that he has put on a one man show at Opera City Gallery here in Tokyo.

The show was interesting, more or less a reprisal of the points he makes in his book, Informal.  The most compelling piece is an installation made of a collection of nothing but chains and plates of steel, collected into a porous group of walls that form a simple maze.  The jig used to make the walls was set outside the gallery and looks absolutely simple, but still amazes me that it works at all.  Even if the engineering makes sense, it still feels a bit like magic.  The chains and the steel form surprisingly rigid walls, even allowing for quite substantial cantilevers that do not quite seem possible.

Of course we are not really supposed to take photos in the gallery, but my i-phone was in my hand and quite by accident i did take a few shots while checking e-mail.  Such a fantastic piece.

I don’t know where the exhibition is travelling to next, but if  it comes to your area this alone is worth checking out.

the last few months we have been busy with lectures and travel, and otherwise things are just….happening.

Recenty we have been lucky enough to be invited to lecture at universities in Canada and Israel, and have been active writing papers for academic journals. I will post some of these in the future, once I figure out how to make them blog-friendly.

Somehow the Yoyogi house still seems to be interesting to people as well. Two weeks ago I gave a tour to a group of archi-cyclists, which was a great experience. Organised by a fellow who runs what I can only call an old-time “cultural salon” here in Tokyo, the theme of the tour was buildings by Dutch architects. Since we are half Dutch we were put on the list along with offices including MVRDV and others, which is awesome company.

The house also was published online at arch-daily, which is great considering the quality of work that usually appears on that site. Because its digital, we get to read the feedback of readers, which is sometimes odd, but fun to read nonetheless.

Finally, on the PR front, Terri Peters wrote a very flattering article on our office that was published in Clear Magazine this month.

Other things also in the works, so looks like we will have lots more to write about here in the next months.

So, I wrote an op-ed for Archinect, that mixes up the topics of big bangs, slums, and suburbia.

Check it out here.

last week i was playing translator again, this time live into the earphones of a group of visitors from princeton (see poster).

the lectures and discussions were interesting in a casual way.   the topic nominally was about the 1960′s Japanese answer to Archigram, which became the movement we now call metabolism.  I am not sure what the connection was for many of the presentations to be honest, which is i suppose not so uncommon for meetings of this sort.

The Japanese contingent were able to make a direct claim of course, since they are almost all current professors at the University of Tokyo and knew the main players personally.  My PhD adviser, the architect Dr. Hidetoshi Ohno, was for instance assistant to Fumihiko Maki, and much of his current work can be connected directly to that relationship (Maki was one of the Metabolist group members).

Whether the connections were strong or not, there were some interesting things said.

The main point from the Japanese side was that Metabolism might look like the work of Archigram in a lot of ways, yet in fact is fundamentally different.  Different because while Archigram unapologetically looked to the future, Metabolism had a strong continuity with the past.  Much of its stylistic imbelleshments are direct copies of traditional Japanese buildings.  Why this was so is hard to say, but Suzuki made an intersting observation about post war Japan that shed some light for me a least.  He spoke of the transformations brought to Japan by the occupying army, but the one that sticks in my mind is the arbitrary and mechanical naming of streets in Tokyo.  This stuck in my mind because most Japanese streets don’t have names now, and I assumed they never did.  The very idea is in opposition to the way cities are organised here (areas have names, streets don’t), but for about 15 years they all had names.  The way Suzuki explained it once the army had left it was as if they had never been and many of the changes they imposed evaporated.  The older patterns returned as soon as the pressure for change was removed.  The implication was that Metabolism never was reactionary in the way of Archigram.  The Japanese architects were not trying to do away with the past, only shifting the trajectory of their history and culture.  Which pretty much sums up the way things are today too, as far as I can tell.

There were lots of other interesting observations from both sides of the aisle, but it would take an essay to get it all down, so I will just throw down a few snapshots:

Jeff Kipnis said:

Architecture in urban planning is the icing on the cake.  The actual cake is formed by mundane things like the sewage system.  Without that base much of the architect-designed urban plans seem rather fake.  When Kenzo Tange proposed a city built over Tokyo Bay, where did he think the shit would go?

Metabolism was/is a problem of the role of the individual vs the collective.    In contemporary architecture the subgroup is acknowledged, but it is the collective that dominates, even in work that seems to be overtly individualistic like Frank Gehry.  For example, comparing the Disney Concert Hall by Gehry with a similar work by the expressionis architect Hans Scharoun -  on the outside they share similar forms, but the interior of Gehry’s hall reveals his desire to bring everyone together.  In contrast, Sharoun’s design of the interior is fragmented and allows for expression of the individual.

Stan Allen said:

Contemporary architecture deals with a different question when it comes to the collective versus the individual (as a result of the effect of post-modernist theory?) – while it used to be the case that big architecture projects struggled with how to bring together a collection of individuals ( metabolism, etc), the problem now is how to bring together a collection of realities.  How to do that remains an open question.

That is a pretty interesting observation, and since Stan Allen is the man of Landscape Urbanism, I expected he would offer it up as one of the alternatives.  Instead he started off by admitting that Landscape Urbanism hits its limits when it takes on density and verticality, which pretty much rules out any modern city in Asia. By implication a new look at metabolism may offer more fruitful results.  That was actually pretty refreshing, although he had nothing more to say about what that might actually mean.

Hitoshi Abe said:

The megastructure used to be something that architects would construct.  But the CITY is the new megastructure, a system that people tap into.  In Tokyo, in fact, the city is treated by its inhabitants as an enormous extended home, with convenience stores (insanely ubiquitous in Tokyo) working like the fridge and medicine cabinet.  The home just plugs in. In other words metabolism is still here and very real.  It is just not so eassy to see.

Kengo Kuma said:

The monolithic presence of architecture comes from the landscape rather than from the buildings.

So, what does that all mean?  It is hard to say.  I guess it means we will be hearing a bit more about metabolism in the near future.