No 6 | Autumn/Winter 2017 | The Bartlett School of Architecture Contents Reception 6 Masthead 8 Contributors 10 Editor’s Letter Words by Regner Ramos 12 22 26 38 40 56 62 The Crit Room 70 Beat Quartet Words by Gregorio Astengo Drawings by Kenismael Santiago 130 Nadir to Zenith Words by Gregorio Astengo Photography by Jermaine Francis 76 Death of a Mascot Words by Stylianos Giamarelos Drawings by Kenismael Santiago 138 Columns of Magnificenza Words by Andrea Alberto Dutto The Dérive Photography by Erik Hartin 142 82 Hidden Behind the Wall Words by Emma Letizia Jones Drawings by Kenismael Santiago Stuck in the 60s Words by José Aragüez Illustration by Percie Edgeler The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire 146 86 Space Architecture Words by David Nixon Drawings by Kenismael Santiago Utopian/Present Words by Montse Solano 150 The Metaphor of the Bridge Words by Dragan Pavlovic´ Drawings by Kenismael Santiago The Style of No Style Words by Ben Highmore Illustration by Daniel Clarke 154 Re-form Words by Gregorio Astengo Illustration by Aurelie Garnier Hating The Beach Boys, Loving the Rest Words by Lilliana Ramos-Collado Illustration by Marie Jacotey 90 Extraterrestrial Visions Words by Ben Webb Photography by John Gribben 94 Expression Under Repression Words by Lorena Espaillat Bencosme Illustration by Fanny Wickström Rotated Angles Words by Francisco Javier Rodríguez Drawings by Kenismael Santiago The Exhibition Space Part III: Progress The Exhibition Space Part II: Unite A Gentle Revolution Words by Marcela Aragüez Photography by Ko Tsuchiya Television and the Public Interest Speech by Newton N. Minow Photography by Jurgen Landt-Hart Anxious Skies Words by Matthew Turner Illustration by Aurelie Garnier Just in Case Illustration by Thomas Hedger Words by Juan José Acosta 166 Fill That Window Words by Anna Ulrikke Andersen 170 How to Disappear Completely Words by Afonso Dias Ramos Illustration by Phil Goss Walking in the Mental Space Words by Renzo Sgolacchia Illustration by Joe Rudi 172 West Side Stories Words and Photography by Tag Christof Theme Park of the Lost Cause Words by Alyssa Skiba Illustration by Fanny Wickström 174 Boxing the Holocaust Words by Lucia Tahan Illustration by Chester Holme This Fragile Inheritance Photography by Lara Giliberto Words by World Wildlife Fund 112 What Remains to Be Shared? Words by Marisa Daouti Illustration by Yeni Kim 114 4 160 102 116 Reception The Library LOBBY No 6 Reception CREATIVE DIRECTOR & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Regner Ramos ART DIRECTOR & DESIGNER Moa Pårup EDITORIAL Regner Ramos Marcela Aragüez Gregorio Astengo The Exhibition Space The Crit Room The Library EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Sophia Edwards, Stephanie Johnson, Grace Simmonds, Yip Siu, Benedikt Stoll CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Anna Ulrikke Andersen, José Aragüez, Marisa Daouti, Afonso Dias Ramos, Andrea Alberto Dutto, Lorena Espaillat Bencosme, Stylianos Giamarelos, Ben Highmore, Emma Letizia Jones, Jorge Lizardi-Pollock, David Nixon, Dragan Pavlovic´, Lilliana Ramos-Collado, Francisco Javier Rodríguez, Renzo Sgolacchia, Alyssa Skiba, Montse Solano, Lucia Tahan, Matthew Turner, Ben Webb COVER ILLUSTRATION Martin Nicolausson PHOTOGRAPHERS Tag Christof, Lara Giliberto, John Gribben, Jermaine Francis, Erik Hartin, Ko Tsuchiya ONLINE EDITORS Regner Ramos, Christo Hall LOBBY EVENTS TEAM Jordi Casanueva, Sophia Edwards, Lorena Espaillat Bencosme, Lucca Alex Ferrarese, Zuzanna Grodzka, Stephanie Johnson, Theo Jones, Grace Simmonds, Benedikt Stoll, Laura Narvaez, Andreea Vihristencu, Lu Wang SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Regner Ramos ONLINE CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Sophia Edwards, Petr Esposito, Lucca Alex Ferrarese, Matthew Turner, Ray Majewski, Jake Parkin, Moa Pårup, Issey Scott ILLUSTRATORS Emilie Carlsen, Daniel Clarke, Percie Edgeler, Aurelie Garnier, Phil Goss, Thomas Hedger, Chester Holme, Marie Jacotey, Yeni Kim, Joe Rudi, Kenismael Santiago, Fanny Wickström PREPRESS & RETOUCH Erik Hartin LOBBY organises international events about architecture. Follow us on social media and visit our website for our 2017–2018 events. The Bartlett School of Architecture 140 Hampstead Road London NW1 2BX info@bartlettlobby.com Reception LOBBY is printed by Aldgate Press ISSN 2056-2977 6 www.bartlettlobby.com facebook.com/BartlettLOBBY twitter: @BartlettLOBBY instagram: @BartlettLOBBY LOBBY No 6 LOBBY No 6 7 Reception A Gentle Revolution Itsuko Hasegawa has always operated as she pleases, shaping up a remarkably singular architectural career all on her own. Here, she offers a sharp vision of her past mentors, alongside an insightful account of her esteemed design and theoretical production. Words by Marcela Aragüez Photography by Ko Tsuchiya The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire 40 LOBBY No 6 LOBBY No 6 41 The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire Photography: Mitsumasa Fujitsuka. T The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire 42 LOBBY No 6 he 1960 Tokyo World Design Conference is often regarded as the event in which the official presentation of the Metabolist group took place. A manifesto signed by architects Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa and Fumihiko Maki, among others, under the avuncular supervision of Kenzo Tange, set the basis of a movement that would be internationally considered as an example of the production of radical and technologically driven architecture, largely based on fixed megastructures and replaceable cells. Far from being conceived as paper architecture, many of these schemes were in fact realised across Japan. Robin Middleton, former editor of Architectural Design, recalls how members of the Archigram Group carried around the issue dedicated to the Metabolists in October 1964, excited by the audacity of their Far Eastern colleagues. Meanwhile, less known Japanese figures in the West at the time, like Kazuo Shinohara, refused to abandon tradition as a source for inspiration and the small scale as the working field. In 1961, by the time the Metabolist manifesto came hot off the press and Tange presented his visionary Tokyo Bay project, Shinohara had just built the Umbrella House, a pitchedroofed, timber-framed house of 55 square metres with an extremely clear —and non-technological—arrangement of carefully crafted spaces. Declaring the house as a work of art, Shinohara’s revelation towards the hegemony of technology as the advocate of architectural progress was seen by younger generations at the time as a controverted alternative to the Metabolists, one paradoxically rooted in tradition. It was the Umbrella House that caught the interest of a young Itsuko Hasegawa while she was working for Kikutake, on the other side of the board game. Driven by this interest, she made up her mind and started working for Shinohara at his lab in the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Among LOBBY No 6 the pupils that the upraise of post-war Japanese architecture produced at the beginning of the 1960s, Hasegawa stands out as a rare example, blending in her work the technological aims of the Metabolists with a profound knowledge of traditional spaces. This combined with a sensible taste for materiality and experience, largely driven by the teachings of her two opposing mentors. Hasegawa is one of the first female architects in Japan. She has eased the ground for future generations almost singlehandedly. Her work also introduced practices of user-involvement, participation and an early application of computers to the design process. Today, a warm and humid summer afternoon, I visit Hasegawa in her atelier in Tokyo, which has just moved from its former, nearby location—a building designed by her. The building now functions as Gallery IHA, a space curated by Hasegawa that gives voice to young Japanese architectural practices and researchers. Hasegawa is kind but firm in her statements, expressing herself with conviction in a soft tone. As she speaks, she points at sketches and models to make sure that her concepts and ideas are understood alongside her built production. After our conversation, she walks me around Gallery IHA, proudly pointing at the models of some of her most famous projects, like the house in Yaizu 2, the Shonandai Cultural Centre and the competition entry for the Cardiff Bay Opera House. At 75, Hasegawa has a number of projects under construction and no intentions of slowing down. In fact, she invests much of her efforts in encouraging the coming generation to produce spaces for today without forgetting the lessons of the past, with the conviction that Japanese architecture is still in a process of modernisation.  Before joining Kazuo Shinohara’s lab, you worked with Metabolist architect Kiyonori Kikutake, mainly for large-scale projects. Some of these projects have been extremely influential. How did Metabolist ideas contribute to reshaping the image of the Japanese city during the 60s and 70s? At the time, the Metabolists were working on speculative projects. Kenzo Tange proposed the Tokyo Bay project at the Tokyo World Design Conference and this eventually influenced later developments of the Tokyo waterfront. Also, projects like Kurokawa’s Nagakin Capsule Tower became very famous. However, other architects were not that interested in building these ideas. I think Kikutake was not particularly Niigata-City Performing Arts Centre 43 The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire “Projects like the Umbrella House were not only based on the understanding of Japanese tradition— they pursued its reinterpretation.” The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire interested in realising the Metabolist style. If you look at Kikutake’s Tokoen Hotel in Tottori, built in 1964, you realise how he was rather interested in the structure of traditional architecture rather than in Metabolist ideas. Kikutake did not have many projects in Tokyo either, so in that sense Tange was much more influential in reshaping the image of the city. You made the decision to join Shinohara’s lab at the Tokyo Institute of Technology after seeing his Umbrella House, built in 1961. What about it striked you? I first saw the Umbrella House in Shinkenchiku magazine when I was still working at Kikutake’s office. The main interest for me is that projects like the Umbrella House—and also Shinohara’s House in White—were not only based on the understanding of Japanese tradition, but they pursued its reinterpretation. In fact, House in White seems to accomplish an abstraction of traditional housing elements, and the fact that it is completely painted in white reinforces this abstraction. I became very interested in designing small houses, and that is why I went to go to work for Shinohara. It was only after I started with Shinohara that I visited these houses. The Umbrella House was actually built the same year the Tokyo Bay project was introduced, 44 LOBBY No 6 Photography: Shuji Yamada. Shonandai Cultural Centre right after the celebration of the internationally acclaimed World Design Conference in Tokyo the previous year. Do you have any memories of this event? I had just started architecture school in 1961, and I remember that Kikutake was actively engaged in the conference. He was asked to present his Marine City project. Shinohara was not that actively involved in the conference but he met some architects from the US that were taking part in the event. It was a good way for him to know what was going on overseas. Reyner Banham once said that the most ‘dangerous’ megastructures were the ones designed by the Metabolists, since they were closer to reality and many of them were actually built. How do you think they changed the image of cities like Tokyo? At the beginning of the 1960s, Tokyo and many other cities in Japan were mostly covered with an aggregation of small houses in a sort of chaotic scenery. Metabolist architects proposed designs with gigantic structures on top of these chaotic small houses with the aim of building housing blocks ‘in the sky’. To be honest, I did not like this architecture, and I hoped that these ideas did not turn into reality. I think that this was a common feeling shared with other people in Japan, and in the end not many of these projects were realised. Kikutake did want to build the Marine City, which was partially realised in Okinawa and it was further developed in other places like Hawaii. He also referred to the fact that Japan, as an island nation, has a limited land available and these projects would become necessary sooner or later in order to increase the land. So, how do ideas by Kikutake —large projects, urban, highly technological—and Shinohara —looking at tradition, inwardlooking and closer to art works —both feed into your designs? LOBBY No 6 45 The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire Photography: Hiroaki Tanaka. The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire 46 LOBBY No 6 When I entered Kikutake’s office, he had just coincidentally gotten a few public commissions for largescale projects. It seems that Kikutake was impressed by my draughtsman skills and he really liked my sketches and hand drawings, so I usually sat next to him to work together on initial conceptual sketches for these commissions. I paid special attention at how Kikutake interacted with these conceptual sketches in order to understand his approach to the project, as well as how he took the context of the site and the city into account. It was only when I, myself, started working on public projects in the early 90s that I realised how prevalent Kikutake’s influence was for me. As for Shinohara, he was engaged in projects like the Unfinished House when I started working for him. This house already belongs to a time in which he was dealing with the use of exposed concrete and structures. He was already trying to overcome tradition, although I still was interested in his early projects. In fact, your interest on tradition is such that you started your own research on Japanese Housing and travelled around Japan to visit examples of Minka, the Japanese traditional rural house. How do you think this early research influenced your practice? What did you learn from them that you think is still relevant today? Minka is a housing typology that was very common before the modernisation and industrialisation of Japan, up until the end of the 19th Century. The typology is based on a ‘void’, a main space in which there is nothing except the light coming in and the soft textures of floors, walls and doors. In my visits to different examples of Minka, it always felt really comfortable to be surrounded by soft textures. You feel almost wrapped by them and they somehow create a sense of gentleness in space. This is what I most appreciated LOBBY No 6 House in Midorigaoka from the Minka. So in my work, although some people argue that the interest resides in the exterior appearance, I actually pay a lot of attention on how to create this sense of gentleness in interior spaces. Even in large-scale projects, I tried to translate the gentleness of spaces found in the Minka. Although Minkas are built using different materials and construction systems, depending on the region, they all share this sense of gentleness in space. So Minka is basically a multipurpose void, where people can celebrate weddings or simply coexist together with other people from the community. People living and working together is rooted in the traditional Japanese life-style, and the place inside the Minka sustains and promotes this kind of culture. 47 The house in Midorigaoka is your first built house, designed in 1975, and a year later you built the house in Yaizu 2, which seem to be radically different. Can we see in them any influence from your research on traditional Japanese housing? Do they follow similar spatial principles with different geometries, or do they each have different rules? During my work at Shinohara’s Lab at the Tokyo Institute of Technology from 1969 to 1979, I designed 10 housing projects. They were more like design studies rather than actual practices. The house in Midorigaoka is one of them, and it is based on my learnings from the Minka. Initially, I wanted to design the house with one big space, but the client wanted to have four separate rooms. I tried The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire “The diagonal line is an exception, an anomaly in modern architecture.” The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire many options to divide the space by adding perpendicular walls, but none of them worked very well, so I finally came up with the idea of having an oblique dividing wall, which would provide larger spaces in the two opposite corners of the house. I wanted to create this diagonal line with columns, but this idea was again rejected by the client for privacy issues. Architecture critic Koji Taki describes this house as a space in which elements seem to be decomposed, scattered and not integrated with each other. He argues that there is no space in the house, but instead a sense of place, and I think that this effect is originated by the diagonal wall. The diagonal line is an exception, an anomaly in modern architecture and that is why the house became so special. The starting point of the Yaizu 2 house comes from the availability of a lot of timber. The client wanted to build an atelier. I decided to use these bars and started trying different ways to combine them with the help of students from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The idea was to reduce the types and number of joints to be used, so we came up with a customised joint design. This was an experiment in construction rather than a conceptual 48 LOBBY No 6 Photography: Mitsumasa Fujitsuka. House in Yaizu 2 experiment, but you can also see here the idea of void embedded in the space. There are no partitions, and spaces are not functionally defined except for the bathroom and the kitchen. Often quoted in your design work are the concepts of harappa and Garandō. Can you tell us more about these concepts and where they come from? Garandō is a difficult term to translate in English. In traditional architecture, and particularly in temples and shrines, the interior is often empty. There are futons and other temporary elements, so basically what is inside these spaces are the different kinds of activities that can take place there. The use of spaces also changes between daytime and night time. This nothing-ness inside space helps create a strong connection with the surrounding nature, and it is nature that witnesses the change of uses inside space. Garandō is then a spatial quality that simultaneously changes and lasts over time, it is the resultant quality of a shared space among the people who coexist in a community. The concept of harappa has urban implications. Every city in Japan used to have its Harappa space, something like an urban void. If you go to China you will not see anything like this. There will only be designed gardens. In Japan, harappa used to be the only public space besides temples and shrines. It is traditionally one of the few spaces where people could play games and parties and even host circuses. It used to be a festive space for the community, a leisure void in the city in which multiple cultural activities and their histories are overlaid. I tried to create a harappa space in my public building projects, like in Shonandai Cultural Centre. You have been also interested in the production of multipurpose spaces, flexible buildings that are designed using a concept of archipielago. Can you tell us more about this? LOBBY No 6 49 The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire “Some Dutch architects got angry with me, one of these architects was Rem Koolhaas.” The concept of archipielago first became prominent in my work when I started to work in large-scale projects like Shonandai Cultural Centre or Sumida Culture Factory. In these projects the site is large and the exterior has to respond to the presence of surrounding buildings. Very often these buildings contain totally different programmes. For the project of the Yamanashi Fruits Museum I was required to locate programs separated from each other within one site, and I started thinking about how to connect these different programmes not only between them but also with the nearby buildings. I decided to connect the programmes using bridges so that the flow of people became visible, and this led to the concept of archipielago, in which the important feature is not the location of the programmes but the flows between them. With this notion I wanted to enhance the public spaces in that area of the city. In the Niigata City Performing Arts Centre, the site is surrounded by a city hall, a theatre and a memory hall, among other buildings. I connected these buildings with bridges and extended the bridges over a river next to the site. After I won the competition House in Yaizu 2, computer drawing by Hasegawa LOBBY No 6 51 everyone told me that it was impossible to extend the building beyond the site, but the government allowed me to do it, and they even took care of the river shore close to the site, replacing the gravel with grass. You produced some very nice computer perspective drawings for the Yaizu 2 house. During that time your office was pioneering in the use of computers. Did you use them to represent ideas or were they actually conceived as tools to be used during the design process? My younger brother owned a very primitive, 60-bit computer in the early 80s, which he used to play the game Go. In this spirit, I drew the section of the house in Yaizu 2 and took pictures of the screen—because printers at the time had really low resolution—and I superimposed pictures of the same drawing with different colours. This was more like a game, just for fun, but it made to the front cover of SD magazine in 1985! At the time I had not yet introduced the use of computers in the design process. This came a bit later when I started to work on the design of the Yamanashi Fruits Museum. For this project I had to find out how to combine a set of four different domes, so I bought a very expensive, state-ofthe-art computer in order to create the drawings that could not have been done by hand. When I went to the Netherlands to give a lecture in the early 90s I showed some of the drawings that I produced using my brother’s computer, and some Dutch architects got angry with me as they would not believe that computers could be used as a design tool. One of these architects was Rem Koolhaas. Certainly, using computers for architecture was completely unthinkable in Japan too; architecture was considered a human-scale profession. Your work is also very interesting for introducing the user as an active agent during the design The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire Photography: Itsuko Hasegawa. process. When did the idea of user-participation come about in your work? Is this common practice in Japan? Traditionally houses in Japan have been designed and constructed by carpenters, and during the design process there was an intimate communication between the carpenter and the client. Very often it was not the husband but the wife who would communicate closely with the carpenter. I took for granted this interaction between the designer and the client, so for the housing designs I spent a long time communicating with the client even before I actually started designing the houses. I wanted to translate these exchanges in my public buildings. When I started working for competitions, I used to go to the local library to create a survey of the history of the site but I realised that it was more important to look at the ‘physical’ history, the history carried by the people living in the area, their memories. When I explain my projects to the people, their reactions are very different depending on the community and the area. Their behaviour greatly differs, and this is also translated in what they wear, what they eat and the climate they are used to. I wanted to understand these differences and accommodate them in my public buildings. Participation in your work is now also translated in the public programme of lectures and workshops taking place in Gallery IHA in Tokyo. How do you understand your role—perhaps not only as designer, but also as a facilitator and ‘producer’ of discourse—in the current Japanese architectural scene? I believe that the process of modernisation since the Meiji restoration is still ongoing. I often go to other countries in Asia to give lectures and I realise that architects there respect the locality in their practices much more than in Japan. I think that Japan somehow lost Sumida Culture Factory, Tokyo its cultural identity in architecture during this process of modernisation. We started to create uncomfortable spaces, forgetting locality and fundamental notions of Japanese space. In this sense, I am counting on younger generations to create an architecture that is rooted in Japanese culture and that is why I invite young architects to give lectures and exhibit their work at my gallery, to try to figure out the future of Japanese architecture. Finally, you are a pioneering female architect in Japan, and certainly an example for the next generations of women architects in this country. A majority of architects in the West can probably only name one female Japanese architect: Kazuyo Sejima, who belongs to a younger generation. Do you think that a change of paradigm occurred between Sejima’s generation and yours? Why do we know so few female Japanese architects? 52 Sejima is 15 years younger than me, and she actually applied to work in my office! But she started to win international competitions only after she partnered Ryue Nishizawa. Practically, you need to have a male partner in order to build outside Japan. In this sense, I believe that the architectural world outside Japan is even more malecentred. Female students are generally talented, and we need to ask ourselves why they cannot become real architects. At the moment, you need to have a good male partner, otherwise you cannot be an architect. In Japan, up until 2000, I won every competition I entered. Competitions used to be anonymous, so it did not really matter whether you had a partner or not. But the system changed after 2000 and now many competitions require you to submit information of your professional background, i.e. how many people work in your office and which kind of projects you have done. I then stopped winning competitions. LOBBY No 6 LOBBY No 6 53 The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire 54 LOBBY No 6 LOBBY No 6 55 The Exhibition Space Part I: Aspire