MY MAGICAL ATTIC: A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND AT MoMA NEW YORK

April 19, 2016

A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND AT MoMA NEW YORK

March 13, 2016 - July 4, 2016

A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION FOCUSES ON A NETWORK OF CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE ARCHITECTS, FRAMING A RADICAL MODEL OF PRACTICE IN THE 21st CENTURY

A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND AT MoMA NEW YORK

March 13, 2016 - July 4, 2016

NEW YORK, February 26, 2016—A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond focuses on the work of architects and designers orbiting Pritzker Prize winners Toyo Ito and SANAA. MoMA’s first presentation dedicated solely to Japanese practitioners, the exhibition spotlights a small cluster of contemporary Japanese architects working within the larger field, exploring their formal inventiveness and close professional relationships to frame a radical model of practice in the 21st century. The exhibition’s 44 projects represent a diverse range of work, from small domestic projects to museums. Presented in models, drawings, and projected slideshows, the work highlights the architects’ significant structural innovations and use of transparent and lightweight materials, while foregrounding their commitments to the social lives of their buildings, reviving a social conscience that characterized earlier avant-gardes. Drawing on Japanese material traditions, the exhibition design uses soft partitions of semi-translucent fabric, which act as surfaces for multimedia and provide an immersive visual experience. A Japanese Constellation is organized by Pedro Gadanho, former Curator of Contemporary Architecture at MoMA, and current Director of the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, with Phoebe Springstubb, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA.

A Japanese Constellation offers a retrospective of recent works by three generations of internationally acclaimed designers, including Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, and Junya Ishigami. With its idea of a network of luminaries at work, the exhibition is intended as a reflection on the transmission of an architectural sensibility, and suggests an alternative model to what has been commonly described as an individuality-based “star-system” in contemporary architecture. Offering a panorama of established and up-andcoming architects, the exhibition reveals how shared architectural themes travel across generations of architects, creating a strong identity for a regional practice with global impact. As many of the featured architects have been involved in the reconstruction of Japan after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, the exhibition further reflects how the architecture field is responding to societal change with a combination of strong aesthetic positions and a commitment to users’ emotional needs.

A Japanese Constellation is separated into six intersecting spaces, but begins with a display of models, drawings, and digital films by the six architects in a space adjacent to the exhibition’s entrance.

TOYO ITO

The opening section of the exhibition is devoted to the work of Toyo Ito (b. 1941). Ito approaches architecture conceptually, in search of a fluid language capable of interpreting the complexities of contemporary life and overcoming what he sees as the limitations of 20th-century modernism. Born during the height of WWII in Japanese-occupied Seoul, as a young architect he worked in the offices of Kiyonori Kikutake, one of the founders of Japan’s postwar Metabolist group known for its visionary urban experiments. Establishing his own office in 1971, Ito’s early work drew on this lineage, exploring lightweight materials and ephemeral designs that could respond to the technological and social changes rapidly transforming Japan’s cities at the turn of the 21st century. His design for the Sendai Mediatheque (1995–2001), which opens this section, was a turning point in his conceptual thinking, developing a highly innovative approach to the building’s structure that blurred boundaries, creating unexpected spatial effects and altering the social experience of the building. This experimental approach to structure is representative of Ito’s mature approach to architecture, in which form and geometry are shaped through a response to social needs and a desire to impart aesthetic pleasure rather than to pursue a particular architectural style. This trajectory culminates in the National Taichung Theater (2005–16), on view, in which transformations to a generic grid create expressively curved organic spaces meant to suggest the vitality of nature.

KAZUYO SEJIMA

The following section is devoted to Kazuyo Sejima (b. 1956), an architect who creates designs attentive to the physical experiences of architecture, both as a relationship to time—the building’s transformation through use—and to the proportions of the human body. As a young architect in the early 1980s, she spent several formative years in Ito’s office during a period marked by Tokyo’s transformation through consumer culture and the technological products of the information age. Establishing her own office in 1987, her first built works unfolded in the precarious years following the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble, an environment that demanded a new, socially conscious architectural language. Sejima’s work, beginning with projects like the Saishunkan Seiyaku Women’s Dormitory (1991), has engaged this thinking in designs that critically examine both collective and private experiences of space. Her designs for residential and single-family houses develop nuanced, hybrid living spaces through an economy of means that incorporates details from the local surroundings, such as the House in a Plum Grove (1999–2004) that opens this section. Her larger projects are compelled by a civic understanding of architecture’s role in shaping and mediating public space, such as in the pavilions that compose the Art House Project at Inujima, where the synthesis of architecture and landscape creates settings for community engagement.

SANAA

SANAA (est. 1995), the collaborative Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates, operates in parallel to Sejima and Nishizawa’s individual practices. The three studios share one large

workspace allowing feedback and communication across projects. Focusing on larger cultural and international projects, SANAA works from simple, almost diagrammatic forms, using industrial materials like steel and glass in a language familiar to modern architecture. From these minimal components they generate an experientially complex, intentionally open-ended architecture. They organize space with acute attention to social dynamics and an emphasis on the phenomenal and sensorial effects of materials, such as the reflective and refractive properties of layered glass or the inordinate thinness of concrete walls. Their designs often modify boundaries—where the building meets the landscape, or where a private interior intersects with a public exterior—to create continuous spaces that multiply possibilities for spontaneous encounters. Lightness and transparency, which recur across their work, are used to express spatial proximity, movement, and the dissolution of the building’s physical presence vis-à-vis its context and social life. Many of these ideas are embodied in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (1999–2004), the early project opening this section, in which a circular plan creates a nonhierarchical continuity between the galleries and environment. Often likening their architecture to landscape and its ability to seamlessly integrate diverse experiences, the projects follow SANAA’s development of a flexible, inclusive architecture.

RYUE NISHIZAWA

Ryue Nishizawa (b. 1966) worked in Sejima’s office as a post-graduate student for several years before the pair formalized their collaboration as SANAA and he established his own practice in 1997. In Nishizawa’s independent work, a recurring line of inquiry is the way in which architecture encounters its surroundings, whether the heterogeneous, unplanned urban fabric of the city or the uneven terrain of the landscape. He has explored this at both cultural and domestic scales in designs that reimagine the discrete enclosures of buildings, from the galleries of a museum to the rooms of a house, as a series of open volumes interspersed and in direct relationship to their context. In parallel to these compositions of linked buildings, his work explores irregular, organic forms that fold or knit the natural environment into the architecture, whether by sloping the floor plate to align to the topography or bringing a hillside into the interior by encapsulating it below a vaulted surface. Like the projects of SANAA, Nishizawa’s work is preoccupied with the immaterial qualities of light and transparency. He incorporates these effects into his designs as a way of reengaging place and the immediacy of perceptual experience in a contemporary context of increasingly global mobility.

SOU FUJIMOTO

Exploring indeterminate conceptions of space, Sou Fujimoto (b. 1971) seeks to create structures that transform everyday routines and influence the social interactions between people. His conceptual inspiration is drawn from archetypal natural forms such as trees, caves, gardens, and clouds. For him, the nonhierarchical spatial organizations embodied by these forms describe a “primitive future” for architecture—a means through which to recover architecture’s essential role in establishing relationships between the human body and space. In his designs he creates flexible spaces that break down conventional hierarchies between interior and exterior, private and public—whether by replacing traditional walls and floors with stepped platforms to create layered experiences of privacy in domestic projects like House NA (2007–11) or by configuring the walls of Musashino Art University Library (2007–10) into a continuous geometric spiral that brings the urban campus into the library. Rethinking the functions of architecture’s basic elements (stairs, walls, windows), his architecture offers critical commentary on the social role of architecture, advancing models for new experiences, needs, and ways of occupying the contemporary city.

AKIHISA HIRATA

Using mathematical algorithms and geometric patterns to mirror the organic complexity of the natural world, Akihisa Hirata’s (b. 1971) designs often start from observations of phenomena such as bubbles or smoke. He seeks to create what he describes as an “ecological” architecture. The sets of relationships that organize the living world are both a source for formfinding—the pleated surfaces of seaweed as a model for sculpted walls, for example—and a means to link a building to its surroundings. Simple operations such as folding, curving, or pleating— applied at different scales—allow for the creation of highly variable spaces that depart from the uniform spaces of modern architecture. Hirata’s use of natural motifs as the basis for the development of bold structural designs references his work in Ito’s office, where he was involved in the early designs for the National Taichung Theater (2005–16). In the projects on view, he explores this at both a domestic and urban scale, from Architecture Farm’s (2007–08) curved walls that extend the house into the landscape, to Foam Form’s (2011) intricate structural lattice that merges a series of buildings with a park.

JUNYA ISHIGAMI

Junya Ishigami (b. 1974) explores the physical limits of architecture—how thin a structure, how lightweight a material, how vast a space can be—in pursuit of novel perceptual experiences. His early work featured a series of installations that drew on artistic practices to test the material limits of what can constitute architecture. In Balloon (2007–08), a five-story metallic inflatable is designed to float effortlessly, appearing to defy gravity. These radical aesthetic ideas are combined with a sophisticated use of structural engineering in buildings that make ambiguous the boundaries between architecture and art, structure and landscape. At the Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop (2005–08), the precise orientation of hundreds of columns creates a forest-like space, while at House and Restaurant (2013–ongoing) the excavation of soil posits new ways of physically making architecture. Ishigami’s use of minimal and abstract elements are informed in part by his years in Kazuyo Sejima’s office, where he worked on projects including House in a Plum Grove (1999–2004), on view. His own work aspires to an extreme openness that foregrounds environmental or atmospheric effects and is rendered meaningful through the sense of wonder people bring to it.

The exhibition concludes with the Home-for-All initiative. In March 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake struck the northeastern Tohoku region of Japan’s main island, Honshu, devastating many of the small coastal towns and displacing thousands of residents. In the wake of the disaster, a group of five Japanese architects, led by Toyo Ito and including Kazuyo Sejima, proposed Home-for-All, an initiative to provide simple communal structures for meetings and social events in areas of temporary housing. Designed in conversation with local residents,

students, and builders, each project responds directly to a town’s particular needs—from providing spaces for children to play to establishing a base for the local fishing industry. The first was built in Miyagino, Sendai, in October 2011, and 15 have now been completed or are under construction. Conceived as not only a building project but as a means to revive the sense of community lost during the earthquake and tsunami, Home-for-All asks architects to take on a renewed sense of social responsibility and to design public spaces through public consensus over and above individual interests.
You may visit my blog to see Moma's past exhibitions news Conception of Space, Cut 'n' Paste From Architectural Assemblage to Collage City, Le Corbusier: Atlas of Modern Landscapes and Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive to click below links.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2014/09/conception-of-space-at-museum-of-modern.html

http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2013/08/cut-n-paste-from-architectural.html

http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2013/09/le-corbusier-atlas-of-modern-landscapes.html
https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2017/08/frank-lloyd-wright-unpacking-archive-at.html

TOYO ITO & ASSOCIATES, ARCHITECTS. SENDAI MEDIATHEQUE

MIYAGI, JAPAN 1995 - 2001

Model: Acrylic

Dimensions: 27 x 80 x 74 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

TOYO ITO, SENDAI MEDIATHEQUE, MIYAGI, JAPAN 1995 - 2001

TO CREATE ARCHITECTURE THAT BREATHES

‘’ I prefer soft objects to hard, curved lines to straight, ambiguity to clarity, spatial diversity to functionalism, and naturalness to artificiality. Humans came out of caves or climbed down from trees and created architecture using geometry. It was considered a human virtue to create geometric order in a naturally chaotic world. Ever since, architecture has been received and appreciated as distinct from nature. The same is true of the body. Humans believe that the beautiful body is separate from nature, a perfectly proportional form to be inscribed in circles and squares. The body, however, is connected to nature through the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Humans used to live by rivers and absorb their taintless water as if part of a stemming stream branch. Humans were part of nature. Ecology and sustainability are gaining importance today. It is evident that architecture must be part of nature, not separate from it. Most modern architecture is composed of euclidean geometry, although there is no perpendicular grid in the natural world. Branched trees display angles of varying degrees, for example, but no branch intersects precisely at a perpendicular. Trees merely repeat a simple rule of branching, and yet they are able to produce complicated forms that fit comfortably within the natural environment. Today we are able to create architecture based on the rules in the natural world by using computer technologies. However, we should use these rules not to make forms that imitate nature but instead to create architecture that breathes and is congruous with the environment. “

TOYO ITO

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615

TOYO ITO, SENDAI MEDIATHEQUE, MIYAGI, JAPAN 1995 - 2001

INSTALLATION VIEW OF A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 13 - July 4, 2016

TOD'S DESIGN BY TOYO ITO

BRUGGE PAVILION DESIGN BY TOYO ITO

TOYO ITO, MEISO NO MORI MUNICIPAL FUNERAL HALL, GIFU, JAPAN, 2004 - 2006

PRELUDE

As I was beginning work on this text in the spring of 2015, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announced the winners of a competition for a new museum in Helsinki with pomp and circumstance. According to a museum press release, the call attracted more entries than any of its kind in history, with 1.715 submissions from nearly eighty countries. Yet what captured my attention was the fact that the young French-Japanese firm awarded the commission, Moreau Kusunoki Architectes (est. 2011), is directed by disciples of Japan’s SANAA (est 1995), Kengo Kuma ( born 19549, and Shigeru Ban (born 1957), whose architecture has been met with wide acclaim. This was, to my mind, yet another sign of the influence contemporary Japanese architects wield over the discipline worldwide. Moreover, their impact was escalating as the work of global architects began to be received with a new mood. As the vice chairman of the city of Helsinki’ s executive board said to the New York Times on the occasion, ‘’ It’s not the fashion to create ‘ wow ‘ architecture anymore, ‘’¹ alluding to Frank Gehry’s design for the Guggenheim Bilbao almost two decades before. Cast against the expressive flamboyancy of the American museum’s first outpost, the submission by this virtually unknown duo of young architects was distinctly contextual, embracing local traditions and blending with existing city. Mark Wigley, jury chair and professor and former dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, told the Times that the proposal ‘’ kind of undoes the monumentality of most museums. ‘’² While the invariable, sometimes pharaonic styles of so- called starchitects – architects whose worldwide celebrity and acclaim have transformed them into idols of design – were gradually coming under attack, the subtle but influential sensitivity of some Japanese architects was emerging through the crevices of the previous establishment and flourishing.

ARCHITECTURE FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

'' Society I undergoing shifts that far more pragmatic and radical than we even imagine, so I harbor no frustrations concerning such a development, nor do I even think to despair over it. I have, therefore, but one interest: the question of whether architecture as architecture is feasible in such times. ''
Toyo Ito³

As was the case across various fields in Japan during the early twentieth century, architects, too, had looked to Western culture to inspire change within the country’s deeply ingrained traditions. As Terunobu Fujimore recounts elsewhere in this book ( p.73 ), in the first half of the twentieth century, a number of architects from Japan worked with some of Europe and the United State’s most important modernists. Eventually, these Japanese apprentices would bring home innovative materials and a novel interest in functionalism, borrowings that would in part serve to fulfill ambitions of modernization across Japanese society. But the influence wasn’t merely unidirectional: classical Japanese art and architecture had for some time generated considerable fascination among early modernists in the West.

For those architects privileging both clarity of design and functionality over ornament – including masters such as Frank Lloyd Wright ( 1867-1959 ), Bruno Taut ( 1880-1938 ), and Walter Gropius ( 1883 – 1969 ) traditional architecture from Japan offered a unique aesthetic, its undecorated geometric constructions and refined spatial qualities highly unusual. This mutual curiosity fomented prolonged exchange between Japanese and Western architecture throughout the twentieth century.⁴

The resulting architectural cross-pollinations, the products of a fruitful give-and-take between two distinct conceptions of space, assumed different forms in the postwar period. During the 1960’s, for instance, the Japanese Metabolists, as much as figures such as Kenzo Tange ( 1913-2005 ) or Arata Isozaki ( born 1931 ), absorbed impulses from the Western avant-garde. They rose to prominence in Japanese society and eventually captured the interest of many forward-thinking architects elsewhere. Two decades later, in the 1980’s, the country’s development of a local but significant variant of postmodernism not only aligned many Japanese architects with their Western counterparts; it also influenced architectural styles in the international arena.

In the 1990s, the circumtances were suited once again for Japanese architecture to become a reference for architects outside Japan. As an intensely metropolitan culture thrived in Tokyo and other major Japanese cities, the nation’s architects found themselves immersed in a global culture as much as in an urban society fronting numerous trends that would come to mark the start of the twenty-first century – from the explosion of consumer culture to the omnipresence of information to the increasing erraticism and instability of national and global economic cycles. ‘’⁶ Japanese architecture anticipated and explored the ways in which the discipline could mirror the problems and inspirations of a new social condition.

As the twentieth century transitioned into the twenty-first, a new crop of Japanese architects found international acclaim. The elegant restraint and precise materiality of Tadao Ando’s ( born 1941 ) ‘’ critical regionalism ‘’⁷ and the technical optimism and spatial innovation of Toyo Ito’s ( born 1941 ) conceptualism rendered Japanese architects influential once again in the global arena. Working at the crossroads of technological and social change, many of these architects intimated design languages that offered refuge from the frantic pace of urbanization; others, conversely, embraced the imaginative possibilities of ‘’ things to come. ‘’ The subsequent generation of architects, among theme Kuma, Kazuyo Sejima ( bor 1956 ) and Ban, respectively explored the renewal of tradition, of radical spatial possibilities, and of the innovative potential of sustainable design. The global recognition of Japan’s architects skyrocketed; in no other national context would a group of architects achieve such high acclaim for their regional characteristics. Shortly after earlier masters Tange and Fumihiko Maki ( born 1928, fig. 3 ) won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, each of the aforementioned architects became laureates of the profession’s highest ranking honor, with the exception of Kuma.⁸

Ito, in particular, was highly conscious of the socioeconomic transformations around him, and was keen to use this awareness to propel and sustain his architectural thinking. In the controversial yet essential manifesto quoted in this section’s epigraph – authored, it is worth noting, in the wake of the country’s 1980s asset price bubble economy – Ito foresees the media frenzy that would increasingly mark the reception of high-end architecture. Today, architecture is being constructed and consumed at a tremendous pace, ‘’ Ito wrote. ‘’ Thus, we have no choice but to stand before the sea of consumption, immerse ourselves, and swim through it to discover what lies on the far shore. ‘’⁹ Taking a critical stance toward the previous wave of Japanese avant-garde architects, who achieved national and international acclaim only to abandon their utopian ideals,¹⁰ Ito urged his contemporaries to retain experimentation as an essential trait of what he called a ‘’ vibrant and stimulating ‘’ architecture that is ‘’ generated at the margins ‘’, and thus distinguishes itself from mass processes of production and consumption. ‘’¹¹

Embracing postmodernism’s semiotic diversity rather than its style,¹² Ito’s proposals for a nonspecific architecture driven by an avant-garde impetus and a quintessentially modern agenda would mold the interests of a constellation of Japanese architects extending more than three generations. The premise of this book, and the related exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, is precisely that this lineage of architects both affirms and heightens the allure of Japanese architecture worldwide. Yet, the book also presents a set of architectural positions that may be considered an important model for the architecture of the twenty first century – not least for this model’s rearrangement of hierarchical relationships among architects themselves.

TOYO ITO, MEISO NO MORI MUNICIPAL FUNERAL HALL, GIFU, JAPAN, 2004 - 2006

INSTALLATION VIEW OF A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 13 - July 4, 2016

NATIONAL TAUCHING THEATRE, TAUCHING TAIWAN

TAMA ART UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BY TOYO ITO

TOYO ITO ( BORN 1941 ) & ASSOCIATES, ARCHITECTS, TOKYO - 1971

Toyo Ito studied architecture at University of Tokyo before working at the office of Kiyonori Kikutake from 1965 to 1969. He opened his own studio Tokyo, known initially as Urban Robot in 1971, before establishing Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects, in 1979. His earliest projects were individual residences, including Aluminum House (1971), in Kanagawa, and White U (1976), in Tokyo. His practice gained international prominence following his critically acclaimed, technically innovative Sendai Mediatheque (1995-2001). Recent projects by Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects, include Minna no Mari Media Cosmos (2011 – 2015), in Gifu, Japan, and National Taichung Theater, currently under construction. Following the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Ito started Home-for-All, a reconstruction initiative to provide buildings for impacted communities. Ito has been a visiting professor at Harward Graduate School of Design, University of Tokyo, Columbia University, University of California, Los Angeles, Kyoto University, and Tama Art University. His writings have been widely published and his work broadly exhibited, including in Toyo Ito: Generative Order (2008) at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Ito has received numerous international awards including the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the eight International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezzia, the 2010 Praemium Imperiale, and the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2006.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615
You may visit Toyo Ito's project Tama Art University Library to click below link.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2014/03/the-pritzker-prize-2013-winner-toyo-ito.html

SERPENTINE SACKLER GALLERY, LONDON BY TOYO ITO

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY ART

MUSEUM & PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE BY TOYO ITO

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY ART

MUSEUM & PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE BY TOYO ITO

INSTALLATION VIEW OF A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 13 - July 4, 2016

TOYO ITO MUSEUM OF ARCHITECTURE, JAPAN

SERPENTINE SACKLER GALLERY, LONDON BY SOU FUJIMOTO

SOU FUJIMOTO, HOUSE NA, TOKYO, 2007 - 2011

INSTALLATION VIEW OF A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 13 - July 4, 2016

SOU FUJIMOTO, HOUSE NA, TOKYO, 2007 - 2011

SOU FUJIMOTO (BORN 1971) ARCHITECTS, TOKYO, 2000

Sou Fujimoto studied architecture at University of Tokyo before establishing his own studio, Sou Fujimoto Architects, in 2000. His projetcs include Children’s Centre for Psychiatric Rehabilitation (2003), in Hokkaido, Final Wooden House (2006-2008), in Kuma-gun, Musashino Art University Museum and Library (2007-2010), and the 2013 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, in London. Fujimoto’s recent work includes winning competition designs for Ecole Polytechnique at Universite Paris-Saclay and House of Hungarian Music in Budapest. Fujimoto has taught at Tokyo University of Science, University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, Keio University, and University of Wiskonsin-Milwaukee, and was a judge at the World Architecture Festival in 2015. His writings have been published widely and his work exhibited internationally, most recently in Sou Fujimoto: Futures of the Future (2015), held at Toyo Gallery and Shangai Museum of Contemporary Art. He was awarded a Royal Instıtute of British Architects International Fellowship in 2012, and received the 2014 WSJ Magazine Architecture Innovator Award, 2013 Marcus Prize, and 2008 Private House award from the World Architecture Festival for Final Wooden House. He was corecipient of the Golden Lion at the thirteenth International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di venezi, in 2012. In 2008, Fujimoto published Primitive Future (INAX, Tokyo), which became the year’s bestselling architecture book.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615

You may visit Sou Fujimoto's Project of Serpentine Pavilion London to click below link from my blog.

http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2013/06/serpentine-pavilion-design-by-sou.html

SOU FUJIMOTO, HOUSE N, OITA, JAPAN 2006 - 2008

PRIMITIVE FUTURE HOUSE BY SOU FUJIMOTO

MUSASHINO ART UNIVERSITY MUSEUM & LIBRARY, TOKYO BY SOU FUJIMOTO

BLOOMBERG PAVILION MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART,

TOKYO BY AKIHISA HIRATA

BLOOMBERG PAVILION MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART,

TOKYO BY AKIHISA HIRATA

AKIHISA HIRATA, FOAM FORM, KAOHSIUNG, TAIWAN, PROJECT, 2011

INSTALLATION VIEW OF A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 13 - July 4, 2016

ARCHITECTURE FARM, TAIWAN BY NAKIHISA HIRATA

TREE-NESS HOUSE, TOKYO BY AKIHISA HIRATA

AKIHISA HIRATA, SHOWROOM H MASUYA, NIIGATA, JAPAN, 2006 - 2007

AKIHISA HIRATA ( BORN 1971 ) ARCHITECTURE OFFICE, TOKYO – 2005

Akihisa Hirata studied architecture at University of Tokyo and completed postgraduate studies at Kyoto University Graduate School of Engineering. He worked for Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects, from 1997 until 2005, when he founded Akihisa Hirata Architecture Office in Tokyo. Hirata’s recent work includes the Higashi Totsuka Church (2015), in Yokohama, and Kotoriku Meguroku Collective Housing (2012 – 2014), in Tokyo. He has lectured at Harvard Graduate School of design, Bauhaus Dessau, and the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College, London. He is currently a part time lecturer at Tohoku University, Kyoto University, University of Tokyo, and Tama Art University. In 2015, his work was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow and the Triennale di Milano. An exhibition of his work, Akihisa Hirata: Tangling, was held at London’s Architecture Foundation Project Space, in 2012, and at Grand Hornu Images, in Hornu, Belgium, in 2013. Hirata was a corecipient of the Golden Lion at the thirteenth International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezi, in 2012, and has also been awarded the 2015 Colored Concrete Works Award, the 2012 Elita Design Award, Elle Deco’s Young Japanese Design Talent Award, in 2009, and the Japan Intıtute of Architect’s 2008 New Face Award.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

Founded in 1929 as an educational institution, The Museum of Modern Art is dedicated to being the foremost museum of modern art in the world.

Through the leadership of its Trustees and staff, The Museum of Modern Art manifests this commitment by establishing, preserving, and documenting a collection of the highest order that reflects the vitality, complexity and unfolding patterns of modern and contemporary art; by presenting exhibitions and educational programs of unparalleled significance; by sustaining a library, archives, and conservation laboratory that are recognized as international centers of research; and by supporting scholarship and publications of preeminent intellectual merit.

Central to The Museum of Modern Art’s mission is the encouragement of an ever-deeper understanding and enjoyment of modern and contemporary art by the diverse local, national, and international audiences that it serves. You may read more about MoMA’s entire information to click below link.

http://press.moma.org/about/

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

DIRECTOR GLENN D. LOWRY

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

DIRECTOR GLENN D. LOWRY

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

KAZUYO SEJIMA ( BORN 1956 ) & ASSOCIATES, TOKYO – 1987

Kazuyo Sejima studied architecture at Japan Women’s University before working in the offices of Toyo Ito. Sejima established her own studio, Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, in Tokyo in 1987. Her significant early projects include Saishunkan Seiyaku Women’s Dormitory (1990- 1991), in Kumamoto, Villa in the Forest (1992 – 1994), in Chino, and Police Box (1994), in Tokyo. With Ryue Nishizawa, Sejima founded SANAA ( Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates ) in 1995. SANAA’s recent projects include Grace Farms, in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Okayama University Café, in Japan, both completed in 2015. Both Sejima and Nishizawa maintain individual practices parallel to SANAA, which have achieved international recognition and are often sites of intensely experimental work. Sejima’s recent work includes Inujima Art House Project (2008-2010) and Nakamachi Terrace Community Center and Library ( 2010 – 2014). She has taught at Princeton Iniversity and Ecole Polytechnique federale de Lausanne, and is currently a visiting professor at Tama Art University, Japan Woman’s University, Kanazawa College of Art, Okayama University, Keio University, and University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. In 2010, Sejima and Nishizawa were corecipients of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. They have also been awarded the Golden Lion award at the ninth International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, in 2004, the Kunstpreis Berlin from the Berlin Academy of Arts, in 2007, and the Rolf Schock Visual Arts Prize, in 2008.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615

NAKAMACHI TERRACE COMMUNITY CENTER BY KAZUYO SEJIMA

KAZUYO SEJIMA, HOUSE IN A PLUM GROVE, TOKYO, 1999 - 2004

INUJIMA ART HOUSE PROJECT, JAPAN BY KAZUYO SEJIMA

KAZUYO SEJIMA, INUJIMA ART HOUSE PROJECT, INUJIMA, JAPAN, 2008 - 2010

A-Art House with Haruka Kojin’s reflectwo, 2013

KAZUYO SEJIMA, NISHINOYAMA HOUSE, KYOTO, JAPAN, 2010 - 2014

ROLEX LEARNING CENTRE, ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE

FEDERALE DE LAUSANNE BY SANAA

REINSTATING THE ARCHITECTURAL AVANT-GARDE

Architecture that is modern in style only no longer has the power to change society. Arrchitecture that is recognized only by architects and not by the public has no future. I believe that an architecture that truly has the power to reform society today must channel its critical power into a different from of proposal.

Toyo Ito¹³

The international influence of contemporary Japanese architecture in the 1990s followed on postmodernist debates that polarized around a regression of architecture to its more concervative stylistic roots and a contrasting desire to prolong the modernist project. Althought in Europe and the United States postmodernist architects embraced either historicism or its nemesis, deconstructivist architecture,¹⁴ in Japan architects responded instead to the increasing omnipresence of popular urban culture. As architectural

Theorist Charles Jencks said of Ito and other Tokyo practitioner during this era, their embrace of the city as a ‘’ theatre of signs and symbols ‘’ reiterated the emergence of semiotics during the 1970s.¹⁵ In an interview conducted shortly after the turn of the century, Ito suggested that architecture must act as a ‘’ media suit ‘’ by which he means, in his own words, as a ‘’ figuration of information to adjust vortex. ‘’¹⁶ Following Marshall McLuhan’s theory that clothes and shelter act as an extention of our skin – that is, as a means to adjust to the natural environment -Ito claimed that contemporary architecture should serve as ‘’ a means to adjust oueselves to the information environment. ‘’¹⁷

What began as a spontaneous response to a fast-changing urban environment would soon prompt a return to avant-garde ideals in Japan, an updated version of the radicalism found in early twentieth-century modernism. To be sure, the transformation wasn’t immediate. There was, for instance, a period in which these architects were it, ‘’ attracted to the idea of ‘’ with drawal ‘’ from urban intensity.¹⁸ As Ito put it, ‘’ the act of carving out discrete points of space – beautifully untouched and devoid of inscribed meaning – in cities seemed very fresh at the time. ‘’¹⁹ Projects such as Ito’s White U, of 1976, in Tokyo ( see fig. 2, p.189 ), and even Sejima’s much later Saishunkan Seiyaku Women’s Dormitory, of 1991, in Kumamoto City (fig. 4), created an enclosed architectural universe that, following on the legacy of Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006) and of the oil crisis of 1973, rejects the surrounding urban chaos. In a recent interview, Ito emphasized that these buildings – which, as he described them, ‘’ turned their backs to the city ‘’ – correspond to an ‘’ era of introspection, ‘’ each an attempt to be ‘’ in touch with the changing circumtances of society. ‘’²⁰

Nonetheless, he would soon recognize that ‘’ architecture’s attempts at autonomy or artistry, ‘’ while valid in the 1970s, were no longer justifiable.²¹ Sejima, on the other hand, rejected the hierarchical thinking inherent in conventional approaches to architecture. Her Women’s Dormitory reinvented the city ‘’ outside ‘’ in a living space that, as Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, noted, destabilized the ‘’ idea of borders between private and public domains ‘’ and critically examined ‘’ concepts such as personal space, identity, society and public. ‘’²²

Ito upheld as essential to his vision a critical stance he inherited from the modern avant-garde: that architecture should serve as a ‘’ rejection of the existing social system ‘’ and as a form of social critique. This belief could be seen as problematic when worldwide the architect’s mission was increasingly recognized as the simple delivery of functional artifacts. Yet, following the reception of Ito’s groundbreaking 2001 Sendai Mediatheque (fig. 5), a cultural resource center in Sendai, the architect confessed he felt heartened that his most radical proposal to date was also the one audiences met with the most delight. One of Ito’s main objectives for the center, whose holdings include film, books, magazines, and visual art, was to do away with the ‘’ fixed barriers ‘’ that have traditionally divided various mediums, and to propose a model for ‘’ how cultural facilities should be from now on. ‘’²³ The building’s ecstatic reception, both within the architectural milieu and among everyday users, affirmed that a transformative design concept can in fact influence social perceptions and that, as held by the early modernists, architecture’s ‘’ critical spirit had the power to change society. ‘’²⁴

This affirmation not only encouraged Ito to invent novel architectural languages with each new project but also yielded an intellectual context in which the generations that followed could chase their own radical visions. Thus, SANAA, a firm founded by Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (born 1966), persistently reinvents avant-garde strategies. They employ abstract functional diagrams to create distinctive spatial experiences that, above all, privilege unexpected discovery and sensorial pleasure on the part of their users. Thus, Sou Fujimoto, an architect of the following generation, aspires to ‘’ create fundamental or new relationship between people ‘’²⁵ by advancing architectural strategies with indeterminate conceptions of space. He dares to promote artistic statements that, despite invalidating architectural functionalism, captivate clients nonetheless, offering them a different kind of everyday life.²⁶ Thus, Akihisa Hirata (born 1971), who envisages transcending the limitations of late modern architecture in ‘’ an era without ethics, ’’ adopts radical formal and ecological trategies that privilege architecture’s ‘’ interdependent relationship with its surroundings. ‘’²⁷ Thus, Junya Ishigami (born 1974) investigates the physical limits of architecture, artistically exploiting lightness, structure, and scal (fig. 6). His pursuit of ‘’ pure possibilities ‘’²⁸ afforded his work the impetus of an avant-garde disconnected from the contingencies of an increasingly conservative environment.

Early in the twenty-first century, Toyo Ito, SANAA, and their younger affiliates thoroughly questioned every conceivable architectural rule and premise. Their architectural explorations resisted the shortcomings of neomodernist designs emerging elsewhere, while simultaneously remaining true to the destabilizing stances of the first modern avant-gardes. Moreover, these architects sought out exquisite, unexpected beauty, charging their work – and that of the Japanese architects they have influenced – with a mix of ethics and aesthetics that in order architectural contexts was slowly disappearing.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615

ROLEX LEARNING CENTRE, ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE

FEDERALE DE LAUSANNE BY SANAA

GRACE FARMS, NEW CANAAN, CONNECTICUT BY SANAA

INSTALLATION VIEW OF A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 13 - July 4, 2016

NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, NEW YORK BY SANAA

SANAA, 21st CENTURY MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Kanazawa, Japan, 1999 - 2004

INSTALLATION VIEW OF A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 13 - July 4, 2016

ZOLLVEREIN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMANT & DESIGN, GERMANY BY SANAA

TAUCHING CITY CULTURAL CENTER, TAIWAN BY SANAA

RYUE NISHIZAWA, TOWADA ART CENTER, AOMORI, JAPAN 2005 - 2008

RYUE NISHIZAWA, HIROSHI SENJU MUSEUM, NAGANO, JAPAN 2007 – 2010

RYUE NISHIZAWA, TOWADA ART CENTER, AOMORI, JAPAN 2005 - 2008

GARDEN & HOUSE, TOKYO, JAPAN BY RYUE NISHIZAWA

MORIYAMA HOUSE, TOKYO, JAPAN BY RYUE NISHIZAWA

OFFICE OF RYUE NISHIZAWA ( BORN 1966 ), TOKYO, 1997

Ryue Nishizawa studied architecture at Yokohama National University while working in the office of Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects. After graduation, he worked with Kazuyo Sejima at Kazuyo Sejima & Associates in Tokyo. With Sejima, Nishizawa founded SANAA in 1995. In 1997, he founded Office of Ryue Nishizawa, maintaining this practice in parallel with SANAA. SANAA’s proposal for Taichung City Cultural Center in Taiwan is currently in design and the firm has recently been selected to extend both the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and the Shiga Museum of Art near Kyoto. Nishizawa’s recent work includes Roof and Mushroom Pavilion, in Kyoto, completed in 2013, and Ikuta Church, in Kanagawa, completed in 2014. Nishizawa has taught at Princeton University, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne. He is currently a professor at Yokohama Graduate School of Architecture and a visiting professor at Kanazawa College of Art and Okayama University. In 2010, Nishizawa and Sejima were corecipients of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. They have also been awarded the Golden Lion award at the ninth International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, in 2004, the Kunstpreis Berlin from the Berlin Academy of Arts, in 2007, and the Rolf Schock Visual Arts Prize, in 2008.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615

RYUE NISHIZAWA, TESHIMA ART MUSEUM, KAGAWA, JAPAN, 2004 - 2010

JUNYA ISHIGAMA, KANAGAWA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP

Kanagawa, Japan, 2005 - 2008

JUNYA ISHIGAMA, KANAGAWA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP

Kanagawa, Japan, 2005 - 2008

INSTALLATION VIEW OF A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 13 - July 4, 2016

JUNYA ISHIGAMA, KANAGAWA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP

INSTALLATION VIEW OF A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 13 - July 4, 2016

PORT OF KINMEN PASSENGER SERVICE CENTER, TAIWAN BY JUNYA ISHIGAMA

JUNYA ISHIGAMA, HOUSE WITH PLANTS, JAPAN, 2009 - 2012

JUNYA ISHIGAMI ( BORN 1974 ), TOKYO – 2004

Junya Ishigami studied architecture at Tokyo University of the Arts, receiving an MFA in 2000, before working at Kazuyo Sejima & Associates from 2000 to 2004. In 2004, he established Junya.Ishigami + Associates. Ishigami’s acclaimed first building, Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop, received the 2009 Architectural Institute of Japan Prize. Recent work includes a commission for a public sculpture in Sydney, Cloud Arch, and a winning competition proposal for House of Peace (2014), a structure for Copenhagen’s Nordhavn harbor. His work has been the subject of multiple publications and exhibitions including, most recently, the monograph Junya Ishigami: How Small? How Vast? How Architecture Grows ( Hatje Cantz, 2014 ). Ishigami is currently an associate professor at Tohoku University in Sendai. In 2015, he taught at Princeton University School of Architecture, and in 2014, at Harvard Graduate School of Designn. Ishigami’s installation work includes Balloon (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and Architecture as Air: Study for Chateau la Coste (2010) at the Twelfth International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di venezi, which was awarded the Golden Lion and the Global Award for Suistainable Architecture and was exhibited in 2011 at the Barbican’s Curve, a gallery space in London.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615

CURATOR PEDRO GADANHO

Pedro Gadanho Director of the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, and the former Curator of Contemporary Architecture at The Museum of Modern Art Pedro Gadanho is a curator, a writer, and an architect. Previously he was a curator of contemporary architecture at The Museum of Modern Art, where he was responsible for the Young Architects Program, and curated exhibitions such as 9+1 Ways of Being Political, Uneven Growth, Endless House, and A Japanese Constellation. Gadanho holds an MA in art and architecture and PhD in architecture and mass media. He was the editor of BEYOND bookazine and the Shrapnel Contemporary blog, contributes regularly to international publications, and is the author of Arquitetura em Público, a recipient of the FAD Prize for Thought and Criticism in 2012.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615

AESTHETIC STATEMENTS & SOCIAL COMMITMENT

As a philosopher I have approached architecture from the phenomenological viewpoint and have always argued that architectural experience entails a wide variety of factors and [can-not] exist without them. I felt that Ito too… [knew] that architecture is inseparable from the experiences of the people who live in it and that it cannot be understood solely in terms of visual styles.

—Koji Taki 29

In a 2001 curatorial project, I examined the work of a group of contemporary Dutch architects and proposed that their approach, which relied heavily on functional diagrams, attempted to surpass the apparent randomness of aesthetic decisions in the architectural design process. These diagrams, which translate directly into architectural space, were presented by the architects as a rational and inescapable legitimation

for design decisions in which aesthetic intuition, not to say dubious notions of beauty, no longer played a role.30 After this broader, international diagrammatic turn and the faux pragmatism that ensued from it—few architects would dare say they sought only to make beautiful buildings.

Yet, this is precisely how Ito has described some of his more important projects. Of the

Sendai Mediatheque he has said that he wanted “to create tubes of light so blindingly beautiful it would be difficult to tell if they were structural.” ³¹ Reemerging alongside Ito’s own approach to diagrammatic design was a notion of architectural experience tied to aesthetic impact to the tactile and, in Ito’s words, the “enjoyable” reception of new kinds of space.³² What for Ito had begun as a kind of withdrawal from the contemporary city, or an “ideological refusal of [its] obnoxious banality,” as he has also called it, soon turned into a conceptual investigation of architecture that, while refusing formalism, celebrated “the discovery of a new urban reality” in aesthetic terms. ³³

In any case, an architecture that reflects changing urban contexts need rely on more than superficial effects. As Ito recognized early in his career, in a society decidedly “pre-packaged and hermetically sealed,” architecture risks turning into a fiction, with architects “beautifully [visualizing] the wrapping rather than [attempting] to make the content look real.” ³⁴ Ito’s radical aesthetic, common also to Sejima’s early works, took

inspiration from generic building types, such as the convenience store, whose hierarchical and uniform spaces he would then overturn, positing changed social organizations and novel perceptual experiences.³⁵ Ito married a dramatic sense of beauty with a commitment to respond to new social needs and modes of spatial consumption.

Remarkably, Ito’s pledge to both aesthetics and ethics accompanied his return to core aspects of the architectural discipline. The centrality of structure to Ito’s work following Sendai be it in his use of exoskeletons to define a building’s image or his interest in interiors derived from complex geometries ³⁶ was soon matched by Sejima’s and later SANAA’s profound questioning of established functionalist blueprints, their innovative organization of clients’ needs, and their sophisticated use of materials such as glass

and metal. Architecture in Japan would from then on leave behind languages based on signs and symbols, and with them, any simplistic version of architectural beauty. Although terms such as kawaii (cute) have been used in analyses of contemporary Japanese architecture,³⁷ such descriptions, as with characterizations founded on the structures’ apparent simplicity, are profoundly misleading when considering the built

achievements of SANAA.³⁸ The firm’s aesthetic feats, beyond their defining lightness and effortlessness, have been described as “inclusive” and “democratic,” owing to their innovative, nondeterministic spatial organizations.³⁹ Ito has offered that Sejima’s conceptual freedom “liberated from social conventions and restrictions” gave her “greater insight into social realities.” ⁴⁰

Architects such as Fujimoto and Ishigami have been similarly praised for their architectural commitment to both radical aesthetics and the production of social change. Fujimoto’s work has been described as taking “the elements of architecture apart,” only to reassemble them in a leisurely yet critical commentary on privacy in contemporary society. ⁴¹ And while Ishigami’s architectural quests may seem obsessive and focused almost exclusively on abstract disciplinary issues, he counts on users and their experiential sense of wonder to render meaningful his artistic endeavors.

Ito has described his aesthetic pursuits as a search for “places that are free of institutional constraints.” He has strived not only to probe “the meaning of public buildings” but also to interrogate “the excessive importance architects attach to expression.” Convinced that local governments and architects conceived architecture “according to a manual and with little consideration of the people who use them,” he realized that “the social significance of architecture [needed] to be reconsidered.” ⁴² Ito displaced the discipline’s emphasis on design, preferring instead to attend to audience reception—as he did with Sendai Mediatheque—thereby shifting the inflection of

his work. Sendai was a manifesto against what Ito has called “ready-made ideas,” but it was also indicative of the “struggle between the respect for a powerful idea and all technical constraints and legal regulations.” ⁴³ In parallel, while Ito’s architectural ideas constituted the fundamental driving force in overcoming constraints and captivating people, his design approach increasingly relied on his discussions with residents, local communities, and clients—that is to say, on those who would in fact be using the buildings. ⁴⁴

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake only reinforced this changing attitude. In the wake of the disaster, architects in Japan developed a new consciousness, recognizing that their work must extend beyond the immediate urban context and support emergent social needs. As Ito described it, architecture should move “beyond delight,” “refrain from criticism,” and seek “self effacement.” ⁴⁵ And yet, the 2012 Venice Biennale

Golden Lion winning project, Home for All in which Ito together with SANAA, Fujimoto, Hirata, and other architects created simple, lodge-like structures in rural areas, enabling residents of temporary housing to gather for meetings and social events—retained an experimental edge.⁴⁶ It pointed to contemporary Japanese architecture’s ability to maintain an avant-garde attitude in face of everyday requirements,⁴⁷ and confirmed that in Japan’s network of established and emerging architectural luminaries, shared core values superseded individual interests.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615

ANOTHER KIND OF ARCHITECTURAL STAR SYSTEM

To embody in architecture that which has never been architecture before - I wish to explore this possibility. The scales of space engendered by the natural environment. The liberating feeling of a landscape extending seemingly for ever, the vastness of the sky, the lightness of the sky, the lightness of a cloud, the fineness of rain drops.

—Junya Ishigami ⁴⁸

In the early twentieth century, like-minded artists disposed to upset social conventions and produce radical critiques of the period’s social transformations collectively formed avant-garde movements. The quest for personal artistic success came as an afterthought, if it emerged at all. By the end of the century, however, the art market, and the dramatically increased financial value of individual works of art, incentivized art-

ists to pursue solo careers, and their concomitant rewards, and led to the appropriation of the formal accomplishments of successive avant-garde programs. In parallel, the artist’s newfound creative autonomy from everyday needs buried art’s commitment to social change.

In the world of architecture, which from the 1980s onward embraced neoconservative

politics and the free-market economy, these developments converged in a newly formed “star system.” The term, imported from the Hollywood studio system, refers to a group of globally praised professionals that replaced the avant- garde. And even if, much like the term “starchitect,” the designation has many detractors - namely among those who meet the definition the classification has become usual currency and, consequently, an effective tool to analyze contemporary architectural production.⁴⁹

For one, the celebrity status of architects is not historically unprecedented. Also, contrary to the instant fame of many contemporary media celebrities, the recognition of today’s internationally acclaimed architects emerged from con-crete achievements. Most of those who are now called “starchitects” have, on account of hard won technical aptitude, led long careers and made important contributions to their profession, often developing idiosyncratic and influential architectural visions. Their success is typically

well-deserved; but, like a double-edged sword, it can also attract hasty attacks. Criticism of today’s starchitects tends to reprimand their share of important international projects; condemn their supposed indifference to local values; or, as lately, outright blame them for the upsurge in distended skylines across contemporary metropolises.⁵⁰ More pointedly, one could say that any star system tends to trap its protagonists in formulaic and predictable responses to any given demand. Out of conviction for personal style, many starchitects repeat formal and technical models while remaining indifferent to the context in which they are intervening. And while they may celebrate distinctive individualism on a global scale, at home their popularity, and

corresponding cultivation of an uncritical following, often contributes to a lack of architectural diversity and even hinders the flourishing of new talent.⁵¹

The constellation of architects that eventually diverged from mainstream architecture in

Japan, and now gravitates around Ito and Sejima, testifies to a different scenario. Ito, in particular, exemplifies at once an ethic of public responsibility and an unparalleled virtuosity, having responded to diverse challenges with a variety of architectural languages, thereby opening the field to new positions. As the Pritzker Prize committee wrote of Ito on its website, “It is evident that while innovating and pushing the boundaries of architecture forward, he does not close the road behind him.” ⁵² Of course, when Japan’s star architects favor cross-fertilization and cross- generational mutual support that move beyond mere competition and self-aggrandizement, they

are observing a Japanese tradition that maintains as essential mutual respect between master and disciple. Yet, it must be noted that, by returning to the avant-garde values described earlier, these architects have also reverted to a notion of collective endeavor in which the desire to impact society supersedes singular will. That these aspirations were reciprocally reinforced as exemplified by prominent figures like Ito consistently praising younger colleagues and paving the way for their achievements ⁵³ surely

allowed these architects to continue wedding vigorous aesthetic exploits with both a profound architectural integrity and a renewed sense of social responsibility.

The potential difference between a star system and a constellation is that in the latter

major and emerging stars are tied by gravitational pulls that render their aggregation of interests recognizable, if partially imagined. In contrast to shooting stars, single entities doomed to fade spectacularly, constellations evoke a very different image: each individual star, of course, carries its own significance, but so too does the stars’ collective arrangement; their relative proximities and distances, and their combined brilliance, suggest more than a sum of parts. Since ancient times, constellations have offered direction to those looking to the skies for guidance.

One certainly hopes that the lightness celebrated in the work of this particular constellation of architects begets a legacy that surpasses its formal and material tropes.⁵⁴ The material transparency and elegant fluidity emanating from their work demands appreciation to be sure; but, even more so does the belief they uphold in architecture’s ability to alter cultural perceptions and induce social change for the better.⁵⁵ This they do with what can only be deemed a graceful lightness of being as they avoid dogmatic manifestos and egotism. Amid the glimmer and incandescence of their aesthetic pursuits, this particular constellation of Japanese architects offers an ethical reference to the world of architecture at large. Beyond the fascination of appearances, this is why their work should remain influential.

Tokyo, July 2015

NOT: You may read all the statement's notes to click below link from exhibition book of '' A Japanese Constellation '' MoMA from pdf format. You may find out whole knowledge in exhibition book which available in Moma Store.

http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1615

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PAGES

April 19, 2016

A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION: TOYO ITO, SANAA & BEYOND AT MoMA NEW YORK