Hiroshi Senju is famous for his large paintings of waterfalls executed in the nihonga (Japanese-style) tradition with mineral pigments on mulberry paper. Here are some alluring human-free photographs of a new museum dedicated to his work in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture. The building is by Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, who does wonderful things with untreated concrete, curved glass and natural light.

Incubated cities are destined to self-destruct

Ruins are the style of our future cities

Future cities are themselves ruins

Our contemporary cities, for this reason,

are destined to live only a fleeting moment

Give up their energy and return to inert material

All our proposals and efforts will be buried

And once again the incubation mechanism is reconstituted

That will be the future

On show at the new Misa Shin Gallery in Tokyo until the end of this month are early works by Arata Isozaki, including a series of etchings, his Incubation Process model of Tokyo (1962) (below), and a large-scale silkscreen print of his Re-ruined Hiroshima (1968) (above). Also on the wall in the first image below is the model of the inflatable concert hall he is currently working on with Anish Kapoor for Tohoku.

My two previous posts were about Isozaki’s compulsive fascination with destruction and decay. In the early 1960s he had pictured layered cities with platforms for living suspended above classical ruins and highways weaving between crumbling Doric columns. When Incubation Process was shown in the 1962 Metabolism exhibition This Will Be Your City, it was captioned with the less-than-utopian poem cited above. He was weary of the Metabolists’ optimism about the future and recalls (in an interview with Rem Koolhaas in his new book Project Japan), “they had no skepticism towards their utopia; they represented only a form of progressivism.”

Also in 1962, Isozaki published his infamous text City Demolition Industry, Inc. in Japan Architect magazine, where he constructed a schizophrenic split between being a city planner/architect, and being a killer. The article (which is reprinted in Project Japan, where Koolhaas comments that he considers it one of the most interesting texts ever written by an architect) is an enigmatic rumination on the running theme that “construction in its full sense is always destruction as well” (Isozaki, ‘On Ruins’).

Images ©MISA SHIN GALLERY

“Once the buildings collapsed, the meaning that used to organize urban space instantly vanished, and the elements of both structure and symbol were reduced to sheer materiality. Signs disappeared and all became substance. The composition of buildings, whose substance had been carefully hidden in order to smooth the flow of urban activities, was now revealed in its bare materiality. As objects fell from the hierarchy of significance they occupied in the construction, debris formed everywhere, amorphously battleground, devoid of meaning. Forced out of the loop of urban signification, the buildings faced us, stripped naked.”

(Arata Isozaki)

In 1995, the Great Hanshin Earthquake caused the collapse of 200,000 buildings in Kobe. Never one for knee-jerk optimism, Arata Isozaki, as commissioner of the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale the following year, decided to represent the state of contemporary Japanese architecture by showing ruins:

The architect Katsuhiro Miyamoto (who lost his own home in the earthquake), had proposed to the city of Kobe that their monument to the catastrophe be made by piling up the rubble in the city centre. Responding to this idea, Isozaki shipped architectural debris from the actual disaster site to Venice, to be piled up in the Japan Pavilion. He also lined the walls with Ryuji Miyamoto’s photographs of destructed buildings in Kobe (some of them reproduced above) and said: “I thought that returning to the point at which all construction is nullified, and using such a reference as a springboard, could make possible the planning of future construction.”

Seven months have now passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake, the first major disaster since Kobe in ‘95 and the most powerful earthquake to have ever hit Japan. The tsunami that came after it flattened cities and towns along four hundred kilometres of Japan’s coast; sweeping away homes, schools, hospitals, highways, trains and airplanes, and leaving behind twenty-five million tons of debris that will take years to deal with. Reproduced below are eleven photographs I took around Kesennuma, Rikuzentakata and Ofunato in Tohoku last month.

All Isozaki quotes are from his essay ‘On Ruins’, which was distributed at the 1996 Venice Architecture Biennale and reprinted in Lotus International, June 1997. More in Isozaki’s ruins here and here.

“It is neither nature not art – traditionally, ruins have not only collapsed, the have been overrun by a nature they no longer exclude. It is neither past nor present: it is a past that has never been present, a presence that is not of the present it inhabits. A ruin is a distempering of times, that puts time out of joint. Ruins are persistence, insistence, survival. The word suggests more than a continuance of existence. Sur-vive­ names a kind of ‘over-living’ – living on, living beyond one’s time – and thus is also a kind of anomaly or scandal. A ruin has always gone beyond or retreated from the death and decay to which it bears witness. Ruins in fact hold death at bay: having undergone a first, pseudo-death, the process of decay seems now to have been arrested in them. Ruins are a kind of annealing of the mutability to which they testify. There is nothing but mortality in ruins, but it is too late for them to die, they are too old, too ruinous. …”

- Steven Connor on ruins

Arata Isozaki was fourteen years old when WWII ended. With post atomic bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki razed to the ground and large portions of every other city in the country destroyed by fire bombing, he was devastatingly aware of the impermanence of architecture and instant destructibility of cities. Throughout his career as an artist, theorist and architect, ruination would become his unlikely leitmotif.

Working under Japan’s great modernist architect Kenzo Tange in the 1950s, Isozaki declined an invitation to be part of the Metabolist manifesto in 1960. He would share ideas and collaborate with the futurist architecture group throughout the 60s, but maintained a clearly stated conceptual distance from them. In a recent interview with Rem Koolhaas (for his excellent new book Project Japan, which sheds light on Metabolism’s political, philosophical and stylistic divergences), Isozaki recalls his hesitation in the face of the Metabolists’ optimism, and his desire to inject some doubt into their utopia. He was opposed to what he saw as their linear model of time and progress, feeling the need to point out the destruction concomitant with all construction.

Isozaki was on the advisory committee for the major Metabolism retrospective currently showing at Mori Museum in Tokyo. In the first room of the exhibition is a recreation of Isozaki’s photomontage Re-Ruined Hiroshima (above), where images of crumbling Metabolist megastructures are superimposed onto the blasted landscape of postwar Hiroshima, intended as a reminder that even the most magnificent techno-futurist cities will one day be ruins. It was part of an installation Isozaki set up at the 1968 Milan Triennale, where twelve curved panels with Shomei Tomatsu’s panoramic images of devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were accompanied by the work of musique concrète composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. (As part of the ’68 movements, students occupied the venue and prevented the public from ever seeing it – burgeoning political radical that he was, Isozaki remained sympathetic.)

Isozaki’s rendering of his own Tsukuba Center Building in ruins, 1983

As the above quote from Steven Connor suggests, all ruins are in a sense already superimpositions of the past onto the present, and Isozaki was not the first to build on this temporal paradox by imagining future ruins. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Hubert Robert’s picturesque paintings of the Louvre ravaged by time were followed Joseph Gandy’s marvellous picture forcing the brand new Bank of England into ruin – a curious commission from the building’s architect Sir John Soane.

In his article A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic (published in Artforum in 1967), Robert Smithson (who often quoted Vladimir Nabokov’s statement that “the future is but the obsolete in reverse”) recounts walking around his suburban hometown in New England finding ruins in reverse: “This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.” For a more recent example of artists picturing the future retrospectively ruining architecture, earlier this year the Danish collective SUPERFLEX’s film Modern Times Forever depicted Stora Enso, the iconic Alvar Aalto building in Helsinki, slowly degrading over 240 hours. The film was projected for ten consecutive days and nights on a screen next to the actual (indifferent and enduring) building.

For Isozaki, having been faced with such drastic material destruction as a teenager, a building’s ruin was always already contained within it, haunting us from the future. This might bare some superficial resemblance to Albert Speer’s Ruinenwerttheorie or ‘theory of ruin value’, whereby the First Architect of the Third Reich persuaded Hitler that new buildings be designed to decay into graceful forms resembling classical ruins. But Isozaki’s visualisation of future ruins wasn’t an attempt to colonise the future, it was aimed at disrupting his contemporaries’ incorrect perception of time as progressive instead of cyclical. Rather than a propagandist pre-emption and absorption of decay as part of a monumental building’s design, his ruination indexed his cynicism about the futurist utopia that Metabolism was incapable of.

Below is an installation shot from the disastrous exhibition Isozaki held at the 1996 Venice Architecture Biennale – more on that here.

The Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is well known for his innovative use of recycled cardboard paper tubes to quickly house disaster victims. He provided emergency refugee shelters for post-civil-war Rwanda, as well as to the homeless after Japan’s Kobe earthquake in 1995 and the 2010 Haitian earthquake. He is currently working on a cardboard tubing cathedral for post-disaster Christchurch, and his Container Temporary Housing project for Onagawa in Japan was recently announced.

The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11 left half a million people displaced. In Onagawa, 3,800 of the costal town’s 4,500 homes were severely damaged or completely destroyed, and for this area Ban’s firm proposed pastel-coloured multi-story housing made from stacked shipping containers and steel frames that could be quickly erected, as pictured below. Furniture and cooking equipment is being donated by MUJI, and the grounds surrounding the homes will provide the residents with a market and library. Provisional housing like this often ends up going to waste, but Ban is determined that these transportable units will be reused for future disasters.

Currently under construction on the town’s baseball field, the 188 homes are set to be completed on October 15. Future residents are currently sheltered in a nearby gymnasium where Ban installed cardboard tubing partitions as an immediate intervention after the earthquake (pictured above). Since the March disasters, he has set up over 1,800 individual partitions for homeless Japanese families, all funded by donations: the Container Temporary Housing project is receiving government funding, but donations for Shigeru Ban’s relief work are still needed and can be made to the following bank account:

Bank: The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd.

Branch: Higashi Matsubara Branch

Account Name: Voluntary Architects Network

Account No: 3636723 (Futsuu)

Swift Code: BOTKJPJT

Bank Address: 5-2-18 Matsubara, Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan

If you make a contribution, you are asked to send your contact details to van[at]shigerubanarchitects.com so that you will receive updates on the project.

Plans for an inflatable elastic mobile concert hall by Arata Isozaki and Anish Kapoor have just been announced. Starting in the spring of 2012, Ark Nova will bring free music and theatre performances to various locations within the devastated areas of Tōhoku.

From the editors of OK Fred comes a new bilingual magazine about cities and built spaces, Too Much. Published in Tokyo, the first issue had articles on buildings by Japanese cults, depression, experimental physics, non-monumentalism at SANAA, skateboarding as urban practice, scarves, and Nicola Formichetti.

The recently launched second instalment had been delayed by the Tōhoku earthquake/tsunami and Fukushima crisis. Half a year after those natural and man-made disasters, the new issue is poised to speak to the present as it considers the role of architects and the future of urbanism. Topics covered include: shelters, neon lights and Tokyo’s new nightscape after the power cuts, Paolo Soleri’s desert city that doesn’t exist, the history of urban planning (or lack thereof) in Tokyo, and the process of sorting debris in the tsunami inundated zone around Motoyoshi. There’s also interviews with artists Tomoo Gokita and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and a 40-page lift out of photographs by Takashi Homma. Keep eyes out for this intelligent and good-looking new publication of ‘romantic geography’.

Outdoor clothing designers Setsumasa and Mami Kobayashi built this weekend retreat in the Chichibu mountain range northwest of Tokyo from locally harvested larch wood and removable fiberplastic walls. The ‘platform for living’ (not to be referred to as a house) runs on solar energy and has electricity, hot water, wifi, iPads and other bare necessities. The yellow not-quite-geodesic dome tents are the bedrooms. Photos by Dean Kaufman via Dwell.

In the early 1980s, Genpei Akasegawa and some of his students encountered this useless staircase in Yotsuya, Tokyo. He recalls how taken they were by fact that it had “no entertainment, no utility, no ornamentation”. It appeared to be a mistake, since capitalism shouldn’t allow for such pointlessness. It had the form of a staircase without the function, and they decided that a staircase leading nowhere was in fact no longer a staircase. It was, by virtue of its new obsolescence, art. Hyper Art, to be exact: art that was made without any artistic intent. Art made by the city.

They set out in search of more architectural relics where planned utility had given way to accidental futility. This was as the crazed bubble economy was blowing up and Tokyo had money bursting out of its eyeballs: the built environment was in a constant state of redevelopment and flux. Akasegawa formed the Street Observation Science Society in 1986 with a group of students and Professor Fujimori Terunobu of Tokyo University, with the express purpose of seeking out the city’s inadvertent useless leftovers that were ready to be elevated to Hyper Art.

To label these urban vestiges, they settled on the name ‘Thomassons’ after the American major-league baseball star who played for the Yomiuri Giants in Japan. Gary Thomasson famously had a perfect swing, but never managed to touch the ball. In Akasegawa’s words, “he had a fully formed body and yet served no purpose in the world … It was a beautiful thing.” He was living Hyper Art; like the superfluous stairs they had christened le stairs pour le stairs, he was an inversion of Louis Sullivan’s modernist credo that form follows function. They were also pleased to find that if one wrote Thomasson’s name in Japanese characters it spelt the word for Hyper Art.

Akasegawa ran a column in the magazine Photography Times that chronicled all their documented finds, and encouraged reader participation. Thomassons soon became a cult hit, and at one point Akasegawa was offering to remunerate all reader submissions with one of his Greater Japan Zero-yen Notes. The articles (which became increasingly loquacious over the years) were published in English for the first time in a paperback last year.

I posted recently on Akasegawa’s 1000-yen Note Incident and his background in the radical Anti Art movement of the ’50s and ’60s in Japan. Thomassons were where his han-geijutsu ‘Anti Art’ gave way to cho-geijutsu ‘Hyper Art’, which was a different way of re-defining capital A art while carrying on the rejection of Art’s old notions of individual authorship and originality. Hyper Art was art that happens not in the making but in the finding. Art without an artist. In Akasegawa’s (Duchampian) words, “A work of hyperart can have an assistant, but not a creator. In the end, all hyperart has is the person who discovers it.”

This was a reader submission of a ‘full scale stamp of a home’, a two-dimensional relic of a building that no longer existed, which Akasegawa would refer to as an example of an ‘Atomic Thomasson’, in reference to the human silhouettes that were burned into walls in Hiroshima. And here’s a photo I took of some defunct architectural utility in Newtown, Sydney – possibly already too aestheticised to count as a Thomasson discovery. Kaya Press takes submissions for their online Hyper Art archive here.

Akasegawa quotes from Hyperart: Thomasson, Kaya Press, 2010

The bustling Osaka of today can be seen as the faithful elaboration of early beginnings. It was this city that held the world’s first modern exchange market as the centre of rice trading during Japan’s feudal Edo period. Now its hi-tech high rises and complex mazes of above and below ground shopping centers signify the architectural continuation of a munificent legacy.

For all the movement within the city there is of course also some movement away from it. When companies outsource or industry sectors drop off, they leave architectural carcasses. Here relics do not have much time to rest. Recently, buildings in Southern fringe suburbs like Kitakagaya and Northern city areas of Higashi and Nakatsu have become occupied by artists. Old shipyards and unused offices have been transformed by drastic renovations or simple interventions to allow new uses of existing spaces.

The ‘Kitakagaya Creative Village Project’ is an ongoing transformation of the Namura shipyards and surrounding suburbs. What started with a meeting in 2004 has become a project proposed to continue for 30 years. Otherwise unused real estate has been taken over by artists and transformed into galleries, performance spaces and creative bars.

The renovated spaces in Kitakagaya now include Creative Centre Osaka’s, Black Chamber, Side Chamber, Studio Partita, Artist in Residence (AIR) Osaka, Kubiretei and others. As a maker of installation art, I understand well that the experience of space relies on the effectiveness of design.

In Studio Partita the space is completely transformed with theatre lighting and acoustic renovations, while the AIR Osaka residency and its exhibition space employ minimal artisan carpentry. Creative Centre Osaka, housed by a large ex-shipyard, is the most ambitious space dedicated to visual and performance art in the precinct.

Traveling to north of the city, across the road from the district courthouse of Higashi, the experimental sound gallery Naked can be found in an unassuming office block. Developed by sound artist, graphic designer and my courteous guide Tetsuya Goto, Naked is active only on weekends, so as not to disturb the tenants in the building, or the judges and barristers at the court. Goto saw that the office was not in use and proposed to the owner that he put it to work as an art space for free. The renovated space oddly fits into the area that has long been occupied by a number of galleries filled with Japanese lacquer ware and ceramic antiques.

Also in the city’s North is Nakatsu Shotengai, a very old sheltered market place spotted with houses and small privately own stalls. The artist Akiko Yurakawa shows me a house found along one of its appendages that has been significantly renovated from a 100-year-old dilapidation into a new artist-run space Ift. Akiko shows me the work that she and a small team of artists have done to recreate this house into a space for visual and socially engaged practices. Like the other spaces, Ift is not destined to generate large sums of money, if any at all. Instead these spatial interventions and DIY renovations are occurring because these artists are acutely aware of the need for spaces dedicated to creative exchange. Imaginative renewal of Osaka’s unused architecture is a notable side effect.

Text and photographs by Marian Tubbs during a residency at AIR Osaka.

Since being imported from Greek by Thomas More for his 1516 novel, the word ‘utopia’ has carried the ambiguous duel meaning of ‘good place’ (eu + topia) and ‘no place’ (ou + topia), suggesting a place of goodness that doesn’t exist in any place beyond the realm of fiction. It entails the pursuit of an imagined ideal state as well as criticism of present reality.

An upcoming exhibition at Mori Museum in Tokyo, Metabolism, The City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan looks back at the utopian urbanism of the 1960s Metabolist movement. Launched by an industrial designer, a graphic designer, a critic and four young architects, Metabolism was a response to, among other things, the housing crises in postwar Japanese cities. Distributed in 1960 at the World Design Conference in Tokyo, their manifesto outlined a new urbanism that would lead to new social order.

Fuelled by the imaginative optimism of the early 1960s, the movement’s founding avant-garde technocrats conceived of future cities as living organisms that would be mobile, adaptable and renewable, as per the metabolic processes in the organic world. They proposed vertical urbanism with entire cities in towers, and envisioned the sea and the sky as viable future sites for human inhabitancy. The most famous Metabolist building is Kisho Kurokawa’s ill-fated Nakagin Capsule Tower Building, which was the world’s first large-scale modular structure.

They are often compared to the London-based futurist group Archigram who were proposing hypothetical flexible urbanism and plug-in megastructures, around the same time. But the Metabolists’ futurism was from the beginning borrowing heavily from the past, and they often brought up aspects of Japan’s architectural history that coincided with their emphasis on material impermanence and regeneration – such as the Ise Grand Shrine that has been completely dismantled, burnt and rebuilt from scratch every twenty years for over a millennium.

Until recent years the movement has remained conspicuously under-documented in English. But growing interest is indicated by this new book published last year and this upcoming publication from architect Rem Koolhaas and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as Mori Museum’s major exhibition. The first comprehensive overview of the movement, the show will feature models, drawings, photos and archival footage alongside a detached capsule from the Nakagin Tower.

Metabolism, the City of the Future is promising to not only document the past but to speak to the present – a symposium is programmed for the opening weekend in September, with a discussion between the surviving original Metabolists Kenji Ekuan, Koji Kamiya, Kiyonori Kikutake and Fumihiko Maki, as well as a talk on Metabolism as Politics with Rem Koolhaas, Azuma Hiroki (writer, cultural critic), Mikuriya Takashi (Processor, Research Center of Advanced Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo) and Nader Vossoughian (curator, urban theorist).

I will be reporting from there in September, and from the coinciding The 24th World Congress of Architecture.

Images from top:

Models by Kikutake Kiyonori, including ‘Marine City’ 1963

Nakagin Capsule Tower Building, 2010, photo by Amelia Groom

Restorative Investigation of a Plan for Tokyo-1960- 2008. CG: UPG.@S.I.T

Tange Kenzo, Yamanashi Culture Hall, 1966, photo by Shinkenchiku-sha

If you ended 2010 with a vague sense that you didn’t quite achieve enough tangible stuff over the year, turn to Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of architectural firm SANAA. It will make you feel much worse. Between winning the 2010 Pritzker Prize and finishing their long awaited Rolex Learning Centre in Switzerland, the pair undertook several personal projects, such as, in Sejima’s case, being the first female director of the Venice Architecture Biennale.

They also each made tangible stuff outside of the SANAA firm, including new art spaces commissioned by the Fukutake Foundation on the art-studded islands of Japan’s Inland Sea. The not very accessible region was becoming a veritable ode to the weighty concrete of Tadao Ando, with no less than three major museums by him now on the island of Naoshima within a few kilometres of each other, but the new commissions mark a promising move towards broadening the representation of contemporary Japanese architects in the area.

Nishizawa’s project was a collaboration with artist Rei Naito on the island of Teshima, based on the elusive form of a drop of water. Nearby on Inujima, Sejima worked with Yuko Hasegawa (currently Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo) on Art House Project, the latest ploy to “revitalise” the island’s local community.

With a population of less than 100 and an average age of 70, Inujima’s factories and smokestacks had remained abandoned for decades after its days as a hub for the region’s copper refining industry had come to an end. Now, scattered throughout the island’s sleepy residential district are Sejima’s restored houses and new structures made of transparent acrylic or subtly reflective aluminium, continuing the architect’s battle against the tyranny of corners …

Photos by Iwan Baan.

“The more we learn about the world, the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance – the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” (Karl Popper)

The unknown is always vaster than the known – unlike what is illuminated, darkness is boundless. On the small art-studded island of Naoshima in Japan’s Setouchi Inland Sea is a profoundly simple work by Japanese architect Tadao Ando and Californian light artist James Turrell. Situated in an old temple, the commission is part of the Fukutake Foundation’s Art House Project series, where artist restorations of historic sites are scattered throughout the island’s old residential Honmura district.

The name of the work, Minamidera: The Back Side of the Moon, reminds us that despite being unseen, the moon’s dark side still exists – and while we talk about lunar waxing and wanning we know we are only witnessing the effects of shadow play. Visitors enter a pitch-black room where they wait until they gradually detect a faint light that has always been there but only becomes perceptible after ten to fifteen minutes of retina expansion. The initial darkness feels dense and heavy on the body and the experience is situated somewhere between the anxiety of not understanding the surroundings and the pleasure of anonymous immersion in infinite space. The element of time is crucial – as with the dusk and dawn viewings at Turrell’s Sky Spaces (one of them situated nearby in the Tadao Ando museum Chichu), we must wait patiently in silence before we can see. In keeping with a non-dualistic view of the world, participants are made sensitive to the ways in which light and dark (known and unknown) exist only through each other.

Thinking back on a John Cage performance he attended as a fresh-faced freshman, Turrell said “I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I knew it was important”. Comparisons between Cage’s music and the body of work Turrell went on to create can be useful in thinking about the artist’s practice: while the composer’s noise incorporated silence, Turrell’s light includes darkness; and while Cage is concerned with in his listeners listening to themselves listening, Turrell hones in on the seer seeing her or himself seeing. Furthermore, while Turrell’s work is largely lost in photo and video reproductions, Cage doesn’t translate well to recording: they both offer live, experiential environments which cease to exist without the listener/seer: the imaginative, cognitive and perceptual space in the minds of their audiences is what assembles the reality of the works. In Turrell’s words, “my work is not about my seeing, it is about your seeing. There is no one between you and your experience. It is non-vicarious art.”

Cage wrote what he considered to be his best composition, 4’33” (a work that was included in the concert the young Turrell attended) after sitting in a noise-proof anechoic chamber and observing the cacophonous sounds of his own body. It was then that he realised there is no such thing as silence, and while 4’33” is commonly perceived to be a four minutes and thirty-three second silent composition, it actually consists of the perpetual sounds of the surrounding environment, which the audience is made sensitive to as the performer remains as still and soundless as possible. It exists on the principle that sensory deprivation amounts to sensory enhancement.

After Cage found there cannot be silence because there are always the sounds within, Turrell went on to teach us there is no such thing as darkness once we locate our inner light – and this is less New Ageist than it sounds. The artist was experimenting with experiences of sensory restriction resulting in heightened sensitivity from very early in his career. With Robert Irwin – an older artist identified with the Californian Light & Space movement of the 1960s – and the perceptual scientist Edward Wortz, Turrell set up an anechoic space at UCLA and conducted a series of experiments on volunteers, as part of the Los Angeles County Museum’s Art & Technology (A&T) 1967-1971 program.

The aim was to focus the participants’ attention on their sense awareness, creating a setting for them to perceive themselves perceiving. In the A&T report Turrell wrote that “The viewers must assume the responsibility, they get into the experience, and they make the art – they are the actuality.” The conceptual groundwork for the project was closely tied in with the practice of meditation and teachings of Zen, which Wortz was at the time heavily focused on and Turrell was also engaged with. They wanted to explore the notion of time as illusionary, quoting from William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

Turrell’s work ­– which he has referred to as being like ‘visual koans’ – has found unique resonance in Japan, a country where the idea that presence will always grow from its interaction with absence, has developed in artistic traditions for centuries. In examining the Chinese landscape painting that would come to also take root in Japan, François Jullien writes (in The Great Image Has No Form), “Any presence that is no longer haunted by its absence gets bogged down, entrenched in itself and, thus isolated, becomes sterile.” Seen and unseen, known and unknown, shadow and light, day and night, emerging and submerging, silence and sound, being and not being: all should dissolve into each other.

In rendering the world of space and time as a surface image, one thing photography rarely achieves (or aims for) with accuracy is scale. Naoya Hatakeyama exploits this gap with his with his recent series Scales, commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). Currently showing at Daiwa Foundation Japan House in London, the body of work comes from the artist’s thinking about perception and our incapacity to grasp the world around us in its entirety. In his own words: “What is embodied in photography is not a clear ‘knowledge of the whole’, but, rather, a ‘longing for the knowledge of the whole’.”

Images © Naoya Hatakeyama

Since the late 1970s Hiroshi Sugimoto has travelled to oceanic horizons all around the world and photographed them in monochrome. Taken at different times of day and night, under varying climactic conditions, the images are always composed of exactly half sky, half water, and nothing else.

Sixteen of these Seascapes are on permanent display under the open sky on the terrace of Benesse House Museum, as well as in several surrounding inaccessible cliff faces, one of them just visible from the museum if you know to look for it. The decision to install them amongst the elements like this came from Sugimoto’s desire to let the images fade into nothingness over the years, while the original sea they represent will endure right behind them.

The prints had been in exhibitions in Pittsburb, Bordeaux and Brussels before made their final stop here, so they hold histories already as they continue into the future. The image of the sea, says Sugimoto, is possible the most consistent thing in the history of our planet. Tadao Ando’s concrete walls obstruct our view of the real ocean, while the photographs re-present it – when they are placed alongside each other, the line of the horizon extends through them so all these seas of different times and places become the one continuous sea.

The museum is part of Benesse Art Site, a complex built by Tadao Ando in 2004 on the remote island of Naoshima as a museum and luxury hotel in one – the museum is open to the public but guests who can afford the whopping overnight rates can enjoy the juvenile pleasure of snooping around after hours. At the end of last year the basement of the hotel lobby (above) was rendered a dark Sugimoto-Ando catacomb where the confined glow of the artist’s aptly named ‘light coffins’ subtly illuminate a series of photographs from his career, including his six-panelled Pine Trees:

A tribute to Hasegawa Tohaku’s iconic ink painting Shorinzu (ca. 1590), this manifestation of the image is at first barely visible in the shadowy space. It takes several minutes for the eyes to adjust to the darkness, and even then the forms of the trees remain elusive. But as with sumi-e, the black ink and wash painting imported to Japan from Song dynasty China, we find there is not one black but astonishing variations of tonality to be found within blackness. Sugimoto says the nuanced expression achieved through the interplay of light-dark tonalities in ink painting spoke to his own continued investigations into black and white photography, and he treated this work as an exercise in ‘ink photography’. He describes his process:

“In Japanese cultural traditions, the act of emulating works of great predecessors is called honka-dori, ‘taking up the melody’. Not scathed as mere copying, it is regarded as a praiseworthy effort. I travelled the length of Japan, visiting the so-called meisho ‘famous sites’ for pines: Miho no Matsubara, Matsushima, Ama no Hashidate. All verged on succumbing to the ravages of encroaching modernization. Only at the very last ‘vanishing point’ of perspective Japan, the Imperial Palace – there in that manicured nature, that ultimate in artificial beauty – did I find my anticipated pine image. After studying each and every pine bending coquettishly this way and that, I synthetically composed this imaginary pair of six-panelled screens. Here, then, is a painting in photographs, though the site photographed escapes any actual location. This is everywhere and nowhere, a fiction of pictorial idealization – as was the original painting.”

Displayed alongside the photographer’s recent stints at furniture design, Sugimoto’s black and white images are perfectly at home on Ando’s grey untreated concrete walls, where the dense rectilinear lines are offset by the continual interplay of intangible and evanescent shadows. Also on display are examples from the artist’s famous Seascapes and Theatres bodies of work, and a series of images from his architecture studies, including his photograph of Ando’s Church of Light in Osaka (above). As with all his photographs of buildings, they blur the boundaries between the structures and their surrounds, challenging our illusions of the permanence of architecture.

The space culminates with a contained courtyard garden designed by Sugimoto. The green moss is the only interjection to the achromatic spectrum of the rooms and photographs, and its incredible colour is enhanced because of this. In the centre of the garden is the artist’s Conceptual Form 003, an ‘onduloid’ sculpture based on a mathematical formula for a surface of revolution with a constant non-zero mean curvature.

Currently dividing his time between New York and Japan, Sugimoto currently has a solo show at The Pace Gallery in Manhattan as well as the inaugural installation of his major new exhibition series, the ambitiously titled The Origins of Art, at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, not far from Naoshima. With his personal works (like his recent Polarized Colours series, below) presented alongside examples from his private collections of antiquities and curiosities, the annual program is structured around four parts: Science, Architecture, History and Religion.

Top image by Amelia Groom, all others © Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Sou Fujimoto likes clouds. He likes their elevation, their formless forms, their colourlessness, their weightlessness, their translucency and transience, their cloudiness. But his job is making buildings – things attached to the earth, things with surfaces and outlines, things with definite volume and weight and form, things usually founded on a pretense of permanence. How to reconcile the two? That was the question that led to his current solo exhibition at Watari Museum in Tokyo …

Outside the museum there are also actual buildings in the actual world attributed to Sou Fujimoto, like these:

Our earth and our bodies both comprise of roughly seventy per cent H2O, but water is one of the most elusive things in all physical existence. Colourless, odourless, tasteless and transparent, the only form it takes is that of its container. It drips, seeps, flows, incorporates, evaporates, and in the case of the ocean it shifts continually with the motions of the moon, as does the human fertility cycle. If ever it is deprived of movement water quickly protests with the stench of stagnancy.

Modelled on a single drop of water, a new museum by Ryue Nishizawa of the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize winning duo SANAA opened last week on the small, remote island of Teshima in Japan’s Inland Sea. Nestled amongst recently rejuvenated rice paddies, the discreet concrete shell structure will permanently house a delicate and fluid new site-specific work by artist Rei Naito.

“Every project is like creating a baby,” Nishizawa said to me outside his newborn on the day of opening. “When buildings are new they are shiny, embodiments of pure potential. As they grow they lose that shininess but gain character and maturity, and we can’t foresee what they will become.”

In theory, concrete, like water, can take any form. But this unprecedentedly thin, unsupported shell marks a true structural feat that was only achieved with the help of leading engineer Matsuro Sasaki who used advanced software to develop a formula for the shape, which was then realised by Kajima Corporation.

The result is a cornerless configuration that feels at once enveloping and open. Distances and boundaries are made unclear as the gently curved surface overrides the orienting and delimiting functions of the rectilinear. Angles keep vastness at bay, while in domed spaces like this feelings of the infinite are indulged.

Two large openings in the shell provide continual airflow and natural light, with the sun’s illumination projected in two circles on the floor. Looking out at the sea, sky and surrounding vegetation framed by these apertures we might also recall the traditional Japanese shakkei (”borrowed scenery”) garden that is characterised by the incorporation of prescribed distant views as part of the design.

As with all Nishizawa’s work, interior space is opened onto exterior space to the point where the boundary between the two dissolves. The constant movements of nature – including climatic, diurnal and seasonal cycles – are all featured as part of the architecture, which exists harmoniously within the undulating landforms of its surrounds.

The site marks the fourth major museum to be commissioned by The Fukutake Art Museum Foundation on the Inland Sea, as part of billionaire philanthropist Soichiro Fukutake’s vision for rejuvenating the largely abandoned region with cutting edge architecture and art. At the opening he said that the commission was not for a museum that would be independent of the art it houses or the natural surrounds that house it, but for a site where art, architecture and environment would coexist.

When Nishizawa and Naito first came together for the commission neither the art nor the building were decided, so both elements evolved simultaneously out of a long process of dialogue between artist and architect, both of whom also wanted to engage with the island’s natural terrain and its history. They were conscious, for example, of the fact that despite having been an illegal dumping ground for industrial waste for sixteen years, Teshima maintained rich natural resources including clean spring water and fertile ground for rice cultivation – although this background seems to be an excessively literal way of thinking about the subtle and powerful work that resulted from the collaboration.

If the building is unobtrusive in the surrounding landscape, the art inside it is barely even visible. Upon entering the cavernous space the first impression is one of complete emptiness, until it becomes apparent that tiny holes at your feet are giving birth to ever evolving liquid bodies that seem to be alive, travelling along the specially treated ground of their own accord, breaking off, amalgamating, fluxing and refluxing before disappearing again into the floor.

Always moving and never repeating the same arrangements, the clear drops of pure local water offer fleeting reflections of the sky or surrounding greenery as they pass you by. The movements of the air are also made visible by two fine floating ribbons at the apertures. Containing nothing but moving water and moving air, the space itself seems to be living and breathing.

Having set out to create a work that would reflect the continuity of life and be completely unprotected from nature, Naito described her process to me as more akin to searching than creating. She worked largely without any plan, accepting everything that the open space and her materials of water and air proposed. In her own modest words, “any beauty in the work is already happening all the time out there in the world; the work’s beauty doesn’t belong to the artist but to nature, it was already there.”

Photos by Noboru Morikawa

“First, I am not dealing with the object. Perception is the object. Secondly, I am dealing with no image, because I want to avoid associative, symbolic thought. Thirdly, I am dealing with no focus or particular place to look. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at yourself looking.” (James Turrell)

In 2003 a small museum/guesthouse was built in the misty mountains of Niigata in Japan’s north by the Californian light artist James Turrell. Calling it The House of Light, Turrell approached the commission for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial as a response to In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s ode to nuance, darkness and the aesthetic of the unseen in traditional Japanese architecture and art.

Turrell has been using light, space and perception as his subject matter and his media since the 1960’s, and from an early stage his work has been informed by Japanese aesthetics and Zen teaching. The main feature of the House of Light is the Skyspace, part of an ongoing body of work where the artist brings our gaze up to the wide blue yonder. A square is cut out of the roof, framing the ubiquitous sky and rendering it strangely flat and within reach. The celestial is brought to the domestic as the huge volume of the atmosphere is compressed in a two dimensional layer on the ceiling – without context or reference, our sky becomes abstracted and we see its ever evolving colours and forms in entirely new ways.

The accommodation is no frills, with a basic kitchen and traditional futon on tatami mat bedding: the focus is on the opportunity to experience the Skyspace at its best, during dusk and dawn. Every day, guests are awoken at some point between three and four AM as the roof opens itself to a square of starry night sky which gradually shifts from black to blue. At the end of the day the reverse is silently played out as the sun sets and the sky subtly arrives at complete darkness. Dusk and dawn are thresholds where the Japanese beauty of mono no aware (found in the ‘sadness of things passing’) is heightened, bringing to mind the fourteenth century monk Yoshida Kenko’s remark that “in all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting.”

Turrell is very much big in Japan. Besides the House of Light he also has site-specific works on the art-covered island of Naoshima, including Minamidera: The Back Side of the Moon, an immersive space built in collaboration with architect Tadao Ando that explores seeing in darkness, as well as a series of examples from different stages of Turrell’s career on permanent display in Ando’s submerged Chichu Musuem. The artist had a large retrospective exhibition at the Art Tower Mito and has works held in collections at several major museums around Japan including the 21st Century Museum of Modern Art, Kanazawa. At long last a Turrell Skyspace is also now underway in Australia, with the NGA’s major new commission within without set to open this spring. It should be said that Turrell’s experiential art doesn’t translate well to photographs. In the artist’s words “my work is not about my seeing, it is about your seeing. There is no one between you and your experience. It is non-vicarious art.”

First two photographs courtesy House of Light, others by Amelia Groom.

Yuko Kamei’s images provide a meeting point for the motion and temporality of dance and the freezing of movement and time that characterizes photography. Focusing on release-based techniques and contact improvisation, she had spent many years training in classical ballet, martial arts including aikido and capoeira, and modern dance schools of Limón and Cunningham before she moved into photography.

“Initially I was working with video,” she says, “but my works gradually became short and looped, and finally settled in a photographic space.” This photographic space she conceives of functions as a stage for exploring the interaction between bodies and built environments. In 2009 she took to the new ‘burbs of Tokyo for her Brand New Town series (above), intervening the excessively paved and planned lifeless streets by walking through them, armed (legged?) with wooden stilts.

Prior to that her in the grid project (below) focused on the ubiquitous straight lines of urban spaces with the lines of the human body. “I think both human body and architecture are intentional constructions which reflect our ideals,” she says. “The built environment regulates how we move and behave, but at the same time we can be active and creative in utilising the structure. The simple presence of a human body can bring up numerous unexpected aspects of any given space.”

Yuko’s most recent series (below) has focused on the movement of balance, which she defines as a continuous adjustment between structure and gravity. The act of balancing requires you to get the right alignment and then settle on it, allowing your attention to travel outwards. “You can see what is out there while the body anchors you where you are,” she says, “and I think the experience of looking at the photographs is similar – you see what the body does, then look at the space around it and come back to the body again, making connections in between. The body continues to balance in the same position while the viewer’s eyes travel across the surface, and the brief moment of performative action expands as long as the viewer’s attention exists.”

Yuko is currently completing a one-year residency at Tokyo Wonder Site.

All images copyright Yuko Kamei:

1. Brand New Town, Mogusaen, Japan, c-type print, 2009.

2. Brand New Town, Higashimurayama 2, Japan, c-type print, 2009.

3. in the grid_#2, silver gelatin print, 2008.

4. in the grid_#3, silver gelatin print, 2008

5. in the grid_#4, silver gelatin print, 2008.

6. Untitled, c-type print, 2009.

7. Untitled, c-type print, 2009.

By commissioning seven contemporary architects from Japan to create museum installations, the organizers of this new show at Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art found themselves facing the question of where, rather than what, this thing we call architecture is. Fittingly, they gave the exhibition the title Where is Architecture? Seven Installations by Japanese Architects.

Atelier Bow-Wow’s anonymous animal forms made from intersecting arches came as a response to the observation that while there’s no sign prohibiting them from doing so, visitors to the museum always avoided walking on front lawn. They wanted to create a welcoming meeting space at this museum entrance that would be connected to the city life and natural surrounds. The museum’s closest metro station is Takebashi, which literally means ‘bamboo bridge’, so for this project, titled Rendez-vous, the architects turned to the material of untreated bamboo, loved for its flexibility, strength and capacity to create semi-transparent spaces of overlapping lines where light and shadow interact.

Once inside the museum, the first work we encounter is a paper structure by Ryuji Nakamura that appears to have massive volume without any weight. Comprising 10000 tiny pillars composed in triangular prisms, Cornfield is arranged so that the internal patterns evolve continuously as you navigate your way around it, and its entirety cannot be seen at one time.

In the next room is Hiroshi Naito’s Red Stripes work, comprising two hundred laser beams projected on the floor of an otherwise pitch-black room (see here). The exploration of the architecture of light continues with Hiroshi Kikuchi’s work one day in a room, where a small model of a room rotates around a fixed source of light, simulating the earth’s relentless twenty-four hour diurnal cycle and showing how built spaces change constantly with the configuration of light.

The exhibition culminates with inside in, a survey of Toyo Ito’s pioneering work with materials and form, presented in a beehive-like matrix of interconnected polyhedrons reminiscent of his plans for the Toyo Ito Architecture Musuem, scheduled to open in Imabari in 2011. Modeled on fractured crystals, the geometric spaces are devoid of right angles or corners for things to hide in, giving a feeling of coinciding enclosure and openness.

‘Red Stripes’ image courtesy of the exhibition’s Flickr page (photo by Ano Saici, JunJunSCIENCE performance), other photos by Amelia Groom

Anyone who says you don’t find straight lines in nature needs to be straightened out. Besides many naturally rectilinear cell and crystal formations, straight lines are to be found in such ubiquitous things as rays of light and gravity’s pull. Since the time of ancient Egypt small weights on strings have been used to mark true vertical lines. Today in place of plump bobs carpenters use laser beams, and it was at a construction site that architect Hiroshi Naito was first taken by the beauty of straight lines of light projected on a rough concrete surface.

When he was invited to do an installation for MOMAT’s current Where Is Architecture? exhibition, he decided to return to this image. In an otherwise completely dark room, 200 straight, parallel red laser beams form a rectangle on the floor. It is a curious property of light that we only see it in what it illuminates. In transit it is invisible, but when it reaches a surface it can appear to have its own mass. Looking at the red lines on the floor it is unclear whether we are seeing an object or image.

Forms appear abruptly from the darkness as people pass through the beams, so the ways in which bodies inform space and architecture are literally brought to light. There is an interplay of two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality as the flat lines respond to the contours of the human forms moving through them, and to fully exploit this several dance performances with JunJun SCIENCE and Hiroaki Umeda are scheduled throughout the exhibition.

When Yu Ogata and Ichiro Ogata Ono are not busy building buildings they take themselves to places like China, Mexico, Italy, Greece and Nambia to photograph buildings others have built. They’ve found some pretty good ones.

Izu Photo Museum opened in October last year at the picturesque foothills of Mt Fuji. Hiroshi Sugimoto designed the understated interiors and gardens using traditional Japanese materials and techniques, and the inaugural show presented his recent work with original prints from Fox Talbot’s earliest negatives, along with his Lightning Fields series of experiments with electricity on film (above). The current exhibition traces the relationships between photography, death and time through vernacular and largely anonymous photos, under the curatorship of historian Geoffrey Batchen (see my review for Frieze here); and the next scheduled show focuses on the work of Japanese contemporary artist Yuki Kimura. So we expect the museum will continue the exploration of photography at thresholds of presence and absence, then and now, life and death.

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“The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings. It might be imagined that the houses, great and small, which vie roof against proud roof in the capital remain unchanged from one generation to the next, but when we examine whether this is true, how few of the houses that were there of old. Some were burnt last year and only since rebuilt; great houses have crumbled into hovels and those who dwell in them have fallen no less. The city is the same, the people are as numerous as ever, but of those I used to know, a bare one or two in twenty remain. They die in the morning, they are born in the evening, like foam on the water.”

Kamo no Chōmei wrote these words in his essay An Account of My Hut in 1212. In the eight centuries that have passed since then much has been written about the ephemerally of architecture and built spaces in Japan. A Japanese city as made of “constantly changing appearances, all marvelous but none tangible,” wrote Angela Carter in 1974 (A Souvenir of Japan). “Even buildings one had taken for substantial had a trick of disappearing overnight. One morning, we woke to find the house next door reduced to nothing but a heap of sticks and a pile of newspapers neatly tied with string, left out for the garbage collector.”

Traditional Japanese sukiya interiors are almost neurotically adaptable. Beds are folded away during the day to make room for other uses and tatami flooring is rearranged and regularly replaced. Flexible markers like shoji screens, split cloth noren curtains, reed or bamboo hanging sudare blinds and wooden lattice fences make the configuration of space convertible in accordance with season, time of day and occasion.

According to the architect Kisho Kurokawa, Japan’s long history of destruction from wars and natural disasters (fires, floods and earthquakes having wiped out entire cities on several occasions) has given the Japanese “an uncertainty about existence, a lack of faith in the visible, a suspicion of the eternal.” The seasons in Japan are also very clearly marked and changes through the year are dramatic, he notes, so buildings were to exist in harmony with nature and its whims.

Each of the Nakagin Tower’s 140 capsules – which included built-in furniture and appliances like reel-to-reel tape decks and calculators (the future!) – were assembled in a factory in 1972 and transported to Tokyo in trucks.

Kurokawa was a founding member of the Metabolist architecture movement that arose in the 1960s in the wake of Japan’s post war housing crisis. The Metabolists put forward designs for adaptable, mobile and interchangeable plug-in megastructures. Like the metabolic processes of living creatures (and like Chōmei’s flowing river), their proposed buildings and cities would be able to maintain their basic structures while renewing their material makeup. Notions of fixed form and function were obsolete, plasticity was the only way forward.

Kurokawa died in 2007. In that year he had built the structure of the Anaheim University Kisho Kurokawa Green Institute, ran for governor of Tokyo and, although not elected, successfully established the local Green Party. Around the same time it was decided that his iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, the world’s first large-scale modular structure and a rare example of Metabolist architecture that was actually built, would go under the wrecking ball.

The towers’ separate capsules were initially intended to be routinely replaced and rearranged (even taken away on holidays with their owners), but instead they had remained fixed and fallen victim to decrepitude, with leaks and rotting rendering many of them uninhabitable. The building’s management also cited concerns over asbestos and, most importantly for them, the tower’s inefficient use of land in the now-glitzy suburb of Ginza.

Before he died, Kurokawa pleaded to let the Nakagin office/residential block express its fundamental design feature of flexibility and have the units unplugged and updated. He received widespread support from the international architecture community but the fact that the towers are still standing today has more to do with Japan’s current financial malaise than anything else …

Top image by Tomio Ohashi, others by Amelia Groom.

An aerial view shows Tadao Ando’s Chichu Museum to be an unobtrusive scattering of rectangles, squares and triangles cut into the top of a mountain. Inside, a labyrinthine sequence of gallery spaces, austere gardens and connecting passageways are bound together in an underground system of geometric forms over three levels. Intermittent zenithal light reminds us of the sky above while dim passageways invoke feelings of transcendence and quiet contemplation.

The building was opened by the Fukutake Art Museum Foundation on the island of Naoshima in 2004, housing just eight works by three artists: James Turrell, Walter De Maria and Claude Monet.  The Monet room was built according to the size and dimensions of the Fukatoke family’s five Water Lilies paintings. With white plaster walls and a floor of 700,000 milky white marble cubes, filtered daylight enters through the high ceiling and the water lilies – some of the most reproduced icons of Western art from the last century –  find new life amongst the softly glowing, muted atmosphere.

As in the traditional Japanese home, the courtyards connect exterior with interior, and James Turrell’s Open Sky works on a similar principal. An empty room with seating built into the walls, the space invites visitors to sit and look at an aperture in the ceiling – only it’s unclear whether or not it is just a hole. The framed open sky appears to be a screen or some form of sophisticated artificial light; unless of course you’re there when it’s raining, in which case the water comes straight through and drains away into discreetly designed grills in the floor.

The museum runs night viewings (bookings required) of the Open Sky where visitors can watch the subtly evolving tones of the blue yonder as the sun sets and the stars gradually appear. The artist – who has degrees in perceptional psychology and mathematics – controls the appearance of the outside sky with subtly evolving coloured lighting on the interior walls and ceiling to manipulate perception. The disorienting experience is highly recommended; a meeting of Zen-like understatement and high theatre that is right at home in Ando’s building.

Two other disorienting light works from the Los Angeles Quaker are also on display; the immersive perception-warping installation Open Field (2000) and his early ‘sculpture’ Afrum, Pale Blue (1968), a projection of light which appears uncannily to have mass and weight. As a child, Turrell mimicked the stars by cutting holes in his curtains and letting the light shine through them, and his introspective works have found strong resonance in many private collections and museums around Japan.

The De Maria commission is a room with 27 gilded wooden pillars along the walls and a highly polished 2.2m diameter basalt orb that seems poised to come crashing down the imposing concrete staircase at any moment. The room is aligned east to west so the reflection on the heavy black sphere’s surface under the open skylight is constantly evolving from sunrise to sunset, and the overall effect is that of all-in-one cathedral, Shinto shrine and sci-fi movie set.

Out of consideration for the pristine landscape, the architect’s earlier constructions on Naoshima had been partially buried, but Chichu (literally meaning ‘within the earth’) marked the first instance of submerging the entire structure, moving from the idea of inconspicuousness to that of invisibility. The radical move to start burying his buildings came from a desire to remove their weight and monumentality, which is in contrast to the aspirational impulse of the chapel’s steeples or the their modern day incarnation, the skyscraper.

To take us into the ground is to return us to our origin, as well as our ultimate destination, and the architect has said that his hope for Chichu is that it will eventually disappear entirely under a blanket of native plant life, ceasing to interrupt the scenery at all.

Bathing was historically a public and communal domain around the world, but the recent cult of showering has relegated the washing of the body to a private act devoid of any social possibilities.

While many public onsen and sentō still operate all over Japan, they are less popular with the nation’s younger, more time-poor generations. Last year, in a move to reinvigorate the culture of communal bathing and connect Naoshima’s local residents with the island’s ever increasing influx of visitors, the Fukutake Art Museum Foundation commissioned the local artist Shinro Ohtake to design a brand new public bathhouse.

Built in collaboration with the Osaka design/architecture firm graf, I♥湯, (I love yu – ‘yu’ meaning water in Japanese) stands in the back streets of Naoshima’s sleepy residential district near the ferry port, taking the form of a three-dimensional scrapbook in keeping with Ohtake’s signature style of chaotically bricollaged images.

Like a townhouse on LSD, it comprises an aircraft cockpit, the bottom of a ship, pine and palm trees, neon signs, a cactus garden, an elephant statue from a museum of erotica, painted tiles and mosaics, vintage postcards embedded in the walls and furniture and, yes, steamy baths where members of the local community and visitors to the little Inland Sea island can enjoy the ancient social tradition of sentō up until 9pm.

Images 1, 3, 5 and 8 courtesy Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation (Photographer Osamu Watanabe).

All other images by Amelia Groom.

Keeping up with the Joneses gets tough when they’ve got a homes that grant them eternal life. According to the architecture-poetry due Arakawa & Gins, mortality happens because people live in spaces that are too comfortable. Their solution? Abodes that leave people disoriented, alert, challenged and active, enabling them to ‘counteract the usual human destiny of having to die.’

Identifying their work with the transhumanist movement, the couple’s Architectural Body Research Foundation sees them collaborate with practitioners in disciplines as wide-ranging as quantum physics, experimental biology, neuroscience, phenomenology and medicine. Their architectural projects have included residences (several Reversible Destiny Houses), parks (including the Site of Reversible Destiny) and plans for neighbourhoods (Isles of Reversible Destiny).

From March 12-26, Queensland’s Griffith University is hosting the third international Arakawa & Gins conference, Architecture and Philosophy, taking place entirely online with video presentations and live streams. Registration is free and topics include Art & Architecture; Translation; Life, Science and Medicine; and Philosophy & Linguistics.

In the Gifu Prefecture of Japan is Yoro Park, a site of reversible destiny by architecture/poetry duo Arakawa & Gins. Appropriately, they provide clear ‘directions for use’:

· Instead of being fearful of losing your balance, look forward to it (as a desirable re-ordering of the landing sites, formerly known as the senses).

· Try to draw the sky down into the bowl of the field.

· Always question where you are in relation to visible and invisible chains of islands known as Japan.

· Vary the rate at which you proceed.

· Associate each of the extreme forms your body is forced to assume in traversing the Field with both a nearby and a distant form.

· If accidentally thrown completely off-balance, try to note the number, and also the type and the placement, of the landing sites essential to reconstituting a world.

· Frequently swing around to look behind you.

· Minimize the number of focal areas (perceptual landing sites) at any given moment.

· If an area or a landing site catches your eye and attracts your interest to the same degree as the area through which you are actually moving, take it up on the spot, pursuing it as best you can as a parallel zone of activity.

· Make use of the Exactitude Ridge to register each measured sequence of events that makes up the distance.

· Within the Zone of the Clearest Confusion, always try to be more body and less person.

· To make a decision or to become more subtle or more daring (or both) in regard to a previous decision, use the Mono no Aware Transformer.

· Inside the Geographical Ghost, renege on all geographically related pledges of allegiance.

· Wander through the ruin known as the Destiny House or the Landing Site Depot as though you were an extra-terrestrial.

· Move in slow measured steps through the Cleaving Hall and, with each arm at a distinctly different height, hold both arms out in front of you as sleepwalkers purportedly do.

· Close your eyes when moving through and around the Trajectory Membrane Gate.

· In and about the Kinesthetic Pass, repeat every action two or three times, once in slow motion.

· Walk backwards in and near the Imaging Navel.

Images courtesy Figure Ground

A line without beginning or end, a circle is infinity, unity, wholeness, equality, stuff like that. In the ancient city of Kyoto, the O House by Hideyuki Nakayama Architecture is a cylindric tower extending from a two-story home. With empty white space in abundance, rooms are ambiguously and flexibly defined with gradual curvature in place of corners and dividers. It also brings to mind the work of Shigeru Ban and makes me want to knock down walls and hang up curtains instead …

Images courtesy of Design Boom.

“I wanted to make a space with very ambiguous borderlines, which has a fluctuation between local spaces and the overall space,” says Junya Ishigami of his new structure at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology. “This allows a new flexibility to emerge, revealing reality rather than shaping it.”

Streaming with natural light and perfectly integrated with the outside environment, Ishigami’s Facility comprises over 300 5m high steel columns, irregularly distributed throughout the space to ensure a sense of openness simultaneously with contained local areas which can be freely redefined according to use.

Devoted to the general activity of  ‘making things’, the forest – as it has been dubbed – is said to be a space where “students from a range of engineering and design disciplines collaborate with the local community to craft anything from furniture to robots” (Julian Worrall).

Photographs by Iwan Baan

A cave-like structure that appears both open and closed, rough and smooth, heavy and floating, the onishimaki + hyakudayuki space currently open at The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo changes its form dramatically as you navigate through and around it.

At just 26 and 27 years old, this up-and-coming duo have been getting a lot of attention for their proposals of architectural spaces that trigger real physical sensations. Situated in the Museum’s Media Court space (which is open to the public free of change), this recent commission responds to the angular grey concrete austerity of its surrounds while seeming to have landed there from another dimension entirely.

Continuing until January next year, the display marks the fourth in The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo’s MOT × Bloomberg Public ‘Space’ Projects, an initiative aimed at supporting young artists and expanding public access to art.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

Bringing together two of Japan’s most visionary and free spirited women, an installation from SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima for Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons has opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

The spacial design by Sejima is reminiscent of the instillation that was held at SCAF Gallery in Sydney earlier this year, but the experience of the curved and subtly reflective space with Rei Kawakubo’s extraordinary shapes and colours floating throughout is overwhelmingly beautiful. The clothes cease to exist as individual garments and become unified as parts of one work, the full effect of which is best experienced from above, on ether side of the museum’s upper level.

The show makes evident many similarities between the architect and the designer; while Kawakubo shocked the fashion world in the 80s when she presented collections that showed complete disregard for things as fundamental to fashion as finished seams and hems, Sejima is well known for radically reconsidering accepted notions of space and built environments, also demanding thought and participation from anyone who experiences her work.

Separate to the installation there is a section dedicated to the artful interplay between two dimensionality and three dimensionality in Kawakubo’s work. Displaying garments on mannequins alongside photographs of the same garments removed from the body and laid flat, viewers can see how the clothes completely change form when they are on the body. The are virtually unrecognisable in the photographs, reminding us how closely aligned Kawakubo’s work is to the realms of sculpture and architecture.

The special exhibition is part of a larger fashion show at MOT from Kyoto Costume Institute called Luxury Reconsidered. Looking at society’s changing ideas about the meaning and purpose of luxury in fashion, it examines different cultural and historical perspectives including ostentatious luxury, the luxury of simplicity and more personal or intellectual luxury (which is where Comme des Garçons fits in). The exhibition continues until January 2010.

Photos by Amelia Groom