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; 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.”

These are the words of Kamo no Chōmei in his essay An Account of My Hut, written in 1212. In the 800-odd years that have passed since then many others have commented on 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.”

The traditional Japanese home was built to be adaptable. The shoji sliding doors and byōbu folding screens allowed rooms to be interchangeable, beds were folded away during the day, and tatami flooring was rearranged and regularly replaced. Other flexible spacial markers were the wooden lattice windows at the entrance, and the fabric noren curtains or bamboo sudare blinds that were hung in doorways or between sections of the house. All were adjustable and often entirely removable, depending on season 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, 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 1960s Metabolist architecture movement that arose in the wake of Japan’s post war housing crisis and put forward designs for adaptable, growing and interchangeable plug-in megastructures. Like the metabolic processes of living creatures, their proposed buildings and cities would be able to maintain their basic structures while renewing their material makeup, like Chōmei’s flowing river. Notions of fixed form and function were obsolete, plasticity was the only way forward.

Kurokawa died in 2007, the 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 his iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo would go under the wrecking ball.

The tower’s capsules were supposed to be routinely replaced and rearranged (potentially 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 high-value 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 was unable to save the building from imminent demolition. The world’s first large-scale modular structure and a rare example of built Metabolist architecture, the Capsule Tower is still standing today – but only thanks to Japan’s current financial malaise.

Top photos 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

For over 250 years Japan was completely shut off from the rest of the world whilst under the military dictatorship of Tokugawa Shogunate. 2009 marks 150 years since the country first opened up to foreign trade at the Port of Yokohama, and the City of Yokohama has been using the anniversary to implement various new urban development initiatives under its Creative City Yokohama initiative.

Over the last decade this urban renewal project that is under the guidance of several different local government bodies (including the “Yokohama Creativity Centre”) has made Yokohama, a historical port city just 40 minutes out of Tokyo, home to some of Japan’s most exciting cultural events and young artistic communities.

While Yokohama’s cultural appeal had previously come primarily from the Yokohama Museum of Art as well as several theatres and concert halls, it was not considered to have much creative output of its own, nor did it provide any support for young artists.

From the outset, Creative City Yokohama had an agenda to increase local arts related activities, attract creative industries and tourism, exploit the city’s existing cultural resources, promote social interaction in the city space and preserve the city’s architectural legacy by finding ways to revitalise its historic buildings.

The most significant thing to come out of the ongoing project has been BankART1929, a contemporary art organisation and school that initially opened in 2004 with the support of the local government in two abandoned city bank buildings and is now enjoying a new base in the enormous defunct warehouse of the Japanese shipping company NYK (see last image below), with several offshoot facilities around town.

Rooftop Paradise at BankART1929. Photo by Kazuto Imura.

Kamakura Sumiko, Associate professor of Tokyo University of the Arts and one of the advisers for Creative City Yokohama in the early stages, recalled in a public talk earlier this year that the establishment of BankART was less about encouraging appreciation of the arts than about improving the overall quality of life in the city, and making it more attractive to visitors.

“’Arts for art’s sake’, that conceited slogan coined at the end of the 19^th century, encapsulated the prevalent wish for a breakdown in social mores,” he said. “Art was not considered as having a social function, or of having any value other than its intrinsic worth. Our hope, on the other hand, was that the arts and culture should play a more active role in society, and that society should be more art-like.”

Rather than existing as something separate to daily life in the city, BankART was to be focused on integrating contemporary art with the local communities and wider society. Some of their earliest shows included Food and Contemporary Art and Art and Natural Disasters, making evident their desire to incorporate things from all facets of life into contemporary art. An integral part of their set up is also their fantastic café/bar space on the ground floor, which boasts an impressive program of events and where drinks are super cheap and the doors are open late into the night, ensuring they cater to a local clientele rather than just tourists.

Besides BankART, other points of interest in Yokohama include Steep Slope Studios an interesting new space offering many artist residencies, and ZAIM which is located in a converted historic building downtown and plays host to workshops, performances, exhibitions, lectures and other cultural events.

At the more grassroots end of things, the Voin Pahoin collective have been opening their apartment to the public once a month for the last few years, providing a different artist each time with a “one day residency” where they can do whatever they want with the domestic space. With an emphasis on eating, drinking and social interaction, their hospitable makeshift salon has become a cornerstone for the local arts community.

Meanwhile, The City of Yokohama recently embarked on an extensive urban renewal project in the notorious black-market and red-light district of Koganecho, which has now been completely transformed into a cluster of affordable artist studios, gallery spaces and the like. The area is also home to the much loved Shichoshitsu (meaning ‘listening booth’), a café/bar where visitors are free to explore the broad music collection comprising over 10,000 albums, and enjoy regular live performances and screenings.

With the third Yokohama Triennale having taken place late last year, and the city is now also playing host to a new major festival called CREAM, which confirms the people of Yokohama’s unique skill at instigating innovative new uses of existing city spaces. With BankART1929 and the Shinko Pier forming the main venues, the art and media festival is spread around with various satellite exhibitions taking place in the aforementioned Koganecho district, and even the polar bear house of the city zoo (see my review of the festival here).

As if taking cue from Charles Landry’s argument in The Creative City that medium sized cities are better placed than metropolises to use their cultural assets to create new opportunities, Yokohama – which for many years was considered little more than a dormitory city for Tokyo – has used its existing assets in intelligent and innovative ways to establish itself as one of Japan’s most exciting new hubs for contemporary art.

SHIMURABROS. and Taro Izumi’s mixed-media installation at the Polar Bear House in the Nogeyama Zoological Garden for CREAM 2009.

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

Just as King Arthur’s round table went against hierarchical structure by abolishing the notion of the head of the table and ensuring everyone who sat there had equal status, SANAA’s building for the The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa uses the form of the circle to create an integrated, community-oriented centre for contemporary art; one with flexible spacial definition, multiple points of access and a focus on inclusively and participation.

When I wrote about SANAA several months ago during their exhibition in Sydney, I mentioned how their work prefers gradual curvature over dividing walls and corners, synthesises interior and exterior spaces, and emphases transparency, reflections, ambiguity, flexibility and contemplation. The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art seems to be the perfect embodiment of all these things – situated in a park in the heart of the city, the transparent glass surface gives a sense of openness and means the interior and some of the artworks are visible from the outside, rather than separated from everyday life. The subtle reflections in the curved glass further integrate the outside into the inside and vice versa – and courtyards and skylights throughout keep visitors connected with the world outside even when they are in the middle of the building.

Anyone can wonder in and hang out in any of the public areas which have lots of seating, and while the temporary exhibitions usually have a fee there are several ‘people’s gallery’ spaces that are open to the public free of charge. There is a well stocked library and magazine reading room free to the public, as well as a children’s play room, a café that stays open into the night, and many public programs.

The art is worthy of note too. A favourite amongst the premanant collection is Leandro Erlich’s Swimming Pool, which seems perfectly suited to the building with its playful defiance of insideness and outsideness. The perpetual rain (for which Kanazawa is renouned) last weekend had a beautiful and hypnotic effect on the top of the pool from the inside (see below).

Other artists often create site specific works that interact with the building, such as the Tokyo-based Suda Yoshihiro’s easily overlooked Weeds which are incredibly realistic looking fine carved and painted wood sculptures that pop out of cracks in the concrete ground (see below). The temporary exhibitions feature a rotation of exciting names from Japan and abroad, too. I caught the end of the Tadanori Yokoo retrospective and opening at the end of November is a solo show from Olafur Eliasson that will run simultaneously with the survey of his work which is at the MCA in Sydney from December.

Currently celebrating its 5^th year, The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art remains an extraordinary feature of the quiet, remote and inclement town of Kanazawa.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

A new exhibition has just opened at 21_21 Design Site (a foundation that was established by Issey Mikaye and friends in 2007), showcasing 100 objects by product designer  Naoto Fukasawa, accompanied by images of his work from photographer Tamotsu Fujii. It’s always worth a visit there for the architecture alone (an unobtrusive sunken structure by Tadao Ando), and Fukasawa’s clean lines and refined forms fit perfectly with the streamlined, concrete building.

Entitled The Outline the exhibition considers outlines, in objects and photographs, as the boundaries that delineate things in space. While Fukasawa’s design philosophy seeks to examine the way objects exist in the surroundings and how their context fundamentally alters them, Fujii’s photographs typically blur the outline of things so it is unclear where one thing ends and another begins. The exhibition continues until January.

‘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.’

So wrote Angela Carter in A Souvenir From Japan. She was fascinated with the ephemerally of things in Tokyo, which she described as a city of ‘constantly changing appearances, all marvellous but none tangible.’

This phenomenon that so fascinated the British author might be accounted for by the fact that the Japanese conceive space in a more flexible way. The uniquely Japanese spacial concept of ‘ma’ emphasises the void space between things in both art and life. Based on the idea of experiential space as opposed to three-dimensional space, the word ‘ma’ suggests interval and it considers space in relation to time.

Since the Middle Ages, tatami straw mats (measuring 1.8×0.9m) have been used in Japan to cover the floor of a room, thereby denoting the size and dimensions of the space; and along with the interior divisions of the home, such as paper screens, they can be moved at will so the space and light can constantly adapt.

A similar flexibility is found in the public domain too – the street in Japan is a temporary space defined by activity, where makeshift shops and restaurants are built along the sidewalk so they transform from day to day, and can disappear completely overnight.

Mirroring these ideas in their design theory and cutting edge architecture, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of Alelier Bow-wow seek to explore the social use and function of space within urban environments.

Their buildings are often devoid of internal dividers so rooms are separated only by staggered levels and staircases, remaining connected and visible to each other. Space exists as a continuum; as you navigate your way around the rooms change in gradual and flexible ways, without strong dividers between them.

Referring to their work as ‘da-me’ (‘no good’) architecture, Atelier Bow-wow focus on disregarded city spaces and coined the phrase ‘pet architecture’ for the miniature ad hoc buildings that are squeezed into leftover and forgotten gaps of space in the densely developed areas of Tokyo (catalogued by them in their book Pet Architecture).

While they weren’t initially familiar with the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s theories of the social production of space, they say they have since been introduced to his ideas and feel a strong affinity to them.

For their Recycling Tokyo project they proposed the concept of recycling be applied to spaces and cities in the same way it is applied to products. They looked at Tokyo as being comprised of various pieces – such as car parks, buildings and alleyways – and suggested imaginative re-uses of them (like turning buildings into sundials or cutting footbridges in half to make observation points). Encouraging multi-purpose architecture and space, they seek to reveal new possibilities for the city; ones that would usually be overlooked.

Watch Yoshiharu Tsukamoto talking about Atelier Bow-wow’s innovative use of space for their custom built ‘micro house’ here and see some other examples of their work below.

Everybody knows Japanese architects have got it going on. While we marvel at their edifaces all the time, it is less comon to be able to peek behind the ‘walls’ into their prepatory processes. In recent flea market rummaging I scored Drawings by Contemporary Japanese Architects, comprising diverse 2D work from 87 vivionary architects. Many represent purely fantastical renderings or projects which were abandoned before construction. The book was published in ‘82, way back before 3D design software took over from architects properly cultivating hand-drawing skills.

While western architecture has traditionally sought to provide shelter from the natural world, Japanese homes and buildings have always strived to integrate outside with inside. The Japanese garden, for example, is situated in the centre of the home, including the natural world in the domestic space and providing a sense of simultaneous interior and exterior.

In a short time Kazuya Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA have achieved international acclaim with projects around the world such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Louvre Annex, Lens, France; the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio; and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.

Giving Sydneysiders a first-hand taste of their unique architectural aesthetic, a new instillation commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is now on show at the SCAF gallery in Paddington. Continuing Sejima and Nishizawa’s recent experiments with acrylic, the space is reconfigured into an organically curved labrynth which plays with the gentle separations of gradual curvature and synthesises interior and exterior spaces. Also evident is the same emphasis on transparency, reflections, ambiguity and spatial illusion that is found in their architecture.

The ‘architectural intervention’ is on show until the end of September and is accompanied by a beautifully published SCAF catalogue (pictured above), which includes an essay by Yuko Hasegawa, Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. On August 15 there will also be a free public lecture by Kazuyo Sejima followed by Margaret Throsby in conversation with Yuko Hasegawa and Kazuyo Sejima. The talk starts at 3pm at Tusculum Auditorium in Potts Point, with reservations to be made at eleni.ragogo@raia.com.au.

“Inspirational architecture provides us with work, living and leisure spaces that elevate the spirit and enrich the senses. We owe a great debt to those whose buildings reflect our highest aspirations and our need for both contemplation and community interaction.”

(Dr Gene Sherman)