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October 2, 2011 · category blog · by km
Tadashi Kawamata’s Walkway
text: Akira Nagae/ translation: Andreas Stuhlman
‘A sunny day in January 2008. Kawamata is preparing for his “Walkway” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in Kiba, … He brings along the one thousand 12mm plyboards, each about the size of a tatami mat. He fits the boards with legs in the form of woodblocks, and stabilises them with 10kg sandbags. … The “Walkway” exhibition shows something of Kawamata’s answer to the question of how people move, watch, feel and think. The thousand plyboards are joined together to form one long walkway. … Visitors to the “Walkway” exhibition are surrounded by the artwork. Looking at the walkway from afar alone doesn’t mean that one has seen the work. One has to walk on it to understand it. While strolling on the walkway that Kawamata built, the visitor watches other visitors as they walk along, which means at once that he or she is being watched by others. The visitor is a spectator and performer at the same time, and thus a component of the artwork itself. Kawamata introduces society into art, and at the same time releases art into society.’
September 27, 2011 · category blog · by km
Changle Lu spa under construction: curve walls in pebblewash run along walls in the garden of the French Concession townhouse bulging to form rooms, little courtyards, hidden gardens, renewing the old garden experience.
August 27, 2011 · category blog · by km
Up on the northeastern part of Tibetan plateau are high rolling pastures for the grazing of yaks, sheep and horses herded by nomadic Tibetans. In a small rustic mud village of these nomads, who escape here during the harsh winters, is a workshop that produces handwoven scarfs, shawls, blankets, and knitwear from yak wool.
Once in the main working room, the quiet industry of the workers and the whirl and clang of spinning wheels and looms immediately elevate one’s spirit. Industrial-age weaving looms were brought in from India as these older models are more gentle to short-strand yak wool.
The ends of shawls are hand-knotted with just the right amount of strength in order not to over-stress the fabric. All workers come from the village. The women with their ruddy cheeks and colourful attire religiously spin and weave and sew with their traditional finesse for luxury fashion markets in places far removed from theirs.
A Nepalese master technician oversees the proper rigging of these Indian machines to produce the patterns and textures of each design.
In a lower building, two men dye threads by hand, rhythmically crossing stick over stick over a hot basin of pure liquid colour.
At the other wing is a showroom of exquisite samples and an office of male clerks sitting over computers.
The workers hang up their coats, change into soft indoor shoes, and leave their flasks of butter tea in neat corners before assuming their new roles.
During lunch break, the men play basketball while the women chat or pray in groups on the grass.
July 30, 2011 · category blog · by km
Strolling through Parisian streets and glass-roofed arcades of the 19th century, the flâneur was a kind of blasé gentleman anonymously scanning people, goods, and signages, as if they were some kind of text that articulate the culture of that city. Inside and outside mattered not, all was even. In our own times, as urban-dwellers alike, we are at some moments flâneurs all, whether walking along pavements or shopping centres or net-surfing as virtual ones. Walter Benjamin saw this distracted, wandering flâneurie as a way to concretely document the materialist history of the unfolding early modern times. So much so that he started The Arcades Project, a thick unfinished and unfinishable collection of scraps of found advertising, newspaper quotations, personal observations and commentaries — fragments and “detritus” of the contemporary. This would effectively make him a kind of proto blogger.
Benjamin’s memorial is in Port Bou, on the border between Spain and France, facing the Mediterranean. There in that little village, he had killed himself trying to escape his would-be German captors in 1940. One sunny day twelve years ago, I took a train from Barcelona with a few friends to see it. It consists of three parts. The most popular and obvious is a long and narrow flight of steps in corten steel that you descend gingerly towards a view of foaming white whirlpools in blue sea. A wall of glass etched with a quotation from Benjamin stops you in your tracks as the steps continue without you. It is only one-way; you have to walk back up again. Then you climb up the hill with a little chapel to the back to two other fragments, also in corten steel. You come to a sculptural short few steps inserted into the sloping ground that invites you closer to an olive tree. And finally another short walk away, there is a square steel platform with a low cube in the middle. Here you sit alone looking, through a metal fence, at the now seemingly more vast more bright blue that is both sea and sky.
Benjamin’s other fragments in his precious collection One-Way Street I would reread each time with fresh pleasure. It is prefaced with a mention of his Latvian lover Asja Lacis:
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“This street is named
Asja Lacis Street
after her who
as an engineer
cut it through the author”
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We can imagine how forcefully she came into his already turbulent life.
One short fragment that I personally heed:
“Caution: Steps
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.”
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July 17, 2011 · category blog · by km
Tsukamoto’s complaint
Tsukamoto was part of a jury of five that had judged a recent architecture prize for residential buildings in Japan. Five projects from emerging young Japanese architects were shortlisted. From the images, they looked competent and beautiful. In fact a lot like what you would see in design websites on the internet these days. Surprisingly none of them were awarded the prize. Representing the jury, he gave their detailed responses to the shortcomings of each project. Some projects failed to push conventional typologies further. Others were exercises in making beautiful, practical houses without being sensitively appropriate to their surroundings. We could sense that the jury were frustrated with the lack of commitment to other values or going beyond ideas other than received ones. They were concerned mainly with producing something trendily stylish and suitable enough for the client and the present design scene. Tsukamoto seemed to want architects to have some other personal conviction, to try harder, to do more.
Koolhaas’ complaint
In recent lectures at both the Berlage and the Strelka Institutes, Koolhaas lambasted the ’star architect’ system and current conditions of architectural practice in general for narrowly serving only the market economy, forgetting its earlier values such as upholding cultural values of a society. The rise of popularity of architecture and design ironically also corresponded to a slide of their relevance to society, he said. Architecture can and must do more.
Some tried
After the triple disaster in Japan, Japan Architect magazine made an issue devoted to re-imagine what the city or living in Japan could be after such an extreme experience. The sub-text was: “what can architecture do?” Fifty groups of young architects were invited to contribute their responses. Published as JA #82: Towards a New Cityscape, some entries are realistic projects to help disaster victims regain their spirit; some are practical suggestions to alleviate logistical problems in the event of future disasters; some are poetic or metaphoric ruminations about how people could live with nature’s sometimes explosive wrath; still others are suggestions of new relationships between architecture and living with others. But fifty projects taken together, there remains a lingering sense that there is not very much architects can do.
No values
These days, any architect or architecture student can gain access to the deluge of images of the latest works of architecture and design in so many websites on the internet, highly decontextualised and devalued. It takes little effort to know the latest trends and fads in the architecture world. The websites are themselves buttresses propping up the star architect system.
These are the digital pattern books of our times. It has become almost impossible to produce bad-looking architecture, anywhere. Even non-architecturally trained people are able to. Architects can produce decent designs without striving to be really innovative, to push boundaries. Everything can be inherited; architects don’t even have to have their own values or even aesthetics.
If architecture only serves the market economy, then not much architectural innovation is needed. This is needed only in narrow areas such as culture and luxury industries. The rest of the market – the main market – requires only passable architecture, architecture that is not hard to do. With years of entrenched pragmatism since the 80s – that the architect serves clients, that the practice of architecture is part of the dominant market economy – it seems difficult for young architects to think that something else is possible. Or necessary. This is something we should complain about.
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