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

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1 A JAPANESE CONSTELLATION FOCUSES ON A NETWORK OF CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE ARCHITECTS, FRAMING A RADICAL MODEL OF PRACTICE IN THE 21st CENTURY A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond March 13 July 31, 2016 Architecture and Design Galleries, third floor NEW YORK, March 8, 2016 [Updated] A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond focuses on the work of architects and designers orbiting Pritzker Prize winners Toyo Ito and SANAA, on view from March 13 to July 31, MoMA s first presentation dedicated solely to Japanese practitioners, the exhibition spotlights a small cluster of contemporary Japanese architects working within the larger field, exploring their formal inventiveness and close professional relationships to frame a radical model of practice in the 21st century. The exhibition s 44 projects represent a diverse range of work, from small domestic projects to museums. Presented in models, drawings, and projected slideshows, the work highlights the architects significant structural innovations and use of transparent and lightweight materials, while foregrounding their commitments to the social lives of their buildings, reviving a social conscience that characterized earlier avant-gardes. Drawing on Japanese material traditions, the exhibition design uses soft partitions of semi-translucent fabric, which act as surfaces for multimedia and provide an immersive visual experience. A Japanese Constellation is organized by Pedro Gadanho, former Curator of Contemporary Architecture at MoMA, and current Director of the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, with Phoebe Springstubb, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA. A Japanese Constellation offers a retrospective of recent works by three generations of internationally acclaimed designers, including Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, and Junya Ishigami. With its idea of a network of luminaries at work, the exhibition is intended as a reflection on the transmission of an architectural sensibility, and suggests an alternative model to what has been commonly described as an individuality-based star-system in contemporary architecture. Offering a panorama of established and up-andcoming architects, the exhibition reveals how shared architectural themes travel across generations of architects, creating a strong identity for a regional practice with global impact. As many of the featured architects have been involved in the reconstruction of Japan after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, the exhibition further reflects how the architecture field is responding to societal change with a combination of strong aesthetic positions and a commitment to users emotional needs.

2 A Japanese Constellation is separated into six intersecting spaces, but begins with a display of models, drawings, and digital films by the six architects in a space adjacent to the exhibition s entrance. The opening section of the exhibition is devoted to the work of Toyo Ito (b. 1941). Ito approaches architecture conceptually, in search of a fluid language capable of interpreting the complexities of contemporary life and overcoming what he sees as the limitations of 20th-century modernism. Born during the height of WWII in Japanese-occupied Seoul, as a young architect he worked in the offices of Kiyonori Kikutake, one of the founders of Japan s postwar Metabolist group known for its visionary urban experiments. Establishing his own office in 1971, Ito s early work drew on this lineage, exploring lightweight materials and ephemeral designs that could respond to the technological and social changes rapidly transforming Japan s cities at the turn of the 21st century. His design for the Sendai Mediatheque ( ), which opens this section, was a turning point in his conceptual thinking, developing a highly innovative approach to the building s structure that blurred boundaries, creating unexpected spatial effects and altering the social experience of the building. This experimental approach to structure is representative of Ito s mature approach to architecture, in which form and geometry are shaped through a response to social needs and a desire to impart aesthetic pleasure rather than to pursue a particular architectural style. This trajectory culminates in the National Taichung Theater ( ), on view, in which transformations to a generic grid create expressively curved organic spaces meant to suggest the vitality of nature. The following section is devoted to Kazuyo Sejima (b. 1956), an architect who creates designs attentive to the physical experiences of architecture, both as a relationship to time the building s transformation through use and to the proportions of the human body. As a young architect in the early 1980s, she spent several formative years in Ito s office during a period marked by Tokyo s transformation through consumer culture and the technological products of the information age. Establishing her own office in 1987, her first built works unfolded in the precarious years following the collapse of Japan s economic bubble, an environment that demanded a new, socially conscious architectural language. Sejima s work, beginning with projects like the Saishunkan Seiyaku Women s Dormitory (1991), has engaged this thinking in designs that critically examine both collective and private experiences of space. Her designs for residential and single-family houses develop nuanced, hybrid living spaces through an economy of means that incorporates details from the local surroundings, such as the House in a Plum Grove ( ) that opens this section. Her larger projects are compelled by a civic understanding of architecture s role in shaping and mediating public space, such as in the pavilions that compose the Art House Project at Inujima, where the synthesis of architecture and landscape creates settings for community engagement. SANAA (est. 1995), the collaborative Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates, operates in parallel to Sejima and Nishizawa s individual practices. The three studios share one large 2

3 workspace allowing feedback and communication across projects. Focusing on larger cultural and international projects, SANAA works from simple, almost diagrammatic forms, using industrial materials like steel and glass in a language familiar to modern architecture. From these minimal components they generate an experientially complex, intentionally open-ended architecture. They organize space with acute attention to social dynamics and an emphasis on the phenomenal and sensorial effects of materials, such as the reflective and refractive properties of layered glass or the inordinate thinness of concrete walls. Their designs often modify boundaries where the building meets the landscape, or where a private interior intersects with a public exterior to create continuous spaces that multiply possibilities for spontaneous encounters. Lightness and transparency, which recur across their work, are used to express spatial proximity, movement, and the dissolution of the building s physical presence vis-à-vis its context and social life. Many of these ideas are embodied in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art ( ), the early project opening this section, in which a circular plan creates a nonhierarchical continuity between the galleries and environment. Often likening their architecture to landscape and its ability to seamlessly integrate diverse experiences, the projects follow SANAA s development of a flexible, inclusive architecture. Ryue Nishizawa (b. 1966) worked in Sejima s office as a post-graduate student for several years before the pair formalized their collaboration as SANAA and he established his own practice in In Nishizawa s independent work, a recurring line of inquiry is the way in which architecture encounters its surroundings, whether the heterogeneous, unplanned urban fabric of the city or the uneven terrain of the landscape. He has explored this at both cultural and domestic scales in designs that reimagine the discrete enclosures of buildings, from the galleries of a museum to the rooms of a house, as a series of open volumes interspersed and in direct relationship to their context. In parallel to these compositions of linked buildings, his work explores irregular, organic forms that fold or knit the natural environment into the architecture, whether by sloping the floor plate to align to the topography or bringing a hillside into the interior by encapsulating it below a vaulted surface. Like the projects of SANAA, Nishizawa s work is preoccupied with the immaterial qualities of light and transparency. He incorporates these effects into his designs as a way of reengaging place and the immediacy of perceptual experience in a contemporary context of increasingly global mobility. Exploring indeterminate conceptions of space, Sou Fujimoto (b. 1971) seeks to create structures that transform everyday routines and influence the social interactions between people. His conceptual inspiration is drawn from archetypal natural forms such as trees, caves, gardens, and clouds. For him, the nonhierarchical spatial organizations embodied by these forms describe a primitive future for architecture a means through which to recover architecture s essential role in establishing relationships between the human body and space. In his designs he creates flexible spaces that break down conventional hierarchies between interior and exterior, private and public whether by replacing traditional walls and floors with stepped platforms to create layered 3

4 experiences of privacy in domestic projects like House NA ( ) or by configuring the walls of Musashino Art University Library ( ) into a continuous geometric spiral that brings the urban campus into the library. Rethinking the functions of architecture s basic elements (stairs, walls, windows), his architecture offers critical commentary on the social role of architecture, advancing models for new experiences, needs, and ways of occupying the contemporary city. Using mathematical algorithms and geometric patterns to mirror the organic complexity of the natural world, Akihisa Hirata s (b. 1971) designs often start from observations of phenomena such as bubbles or smoke. He seeks to create what he describes as an ecological architecture. The sets of relationships that organize the living world are both a source for formfinding the pleated surfaces of seaweed as a model for sculpted walls, for example and a means to link a building to its surroundings. Simple operations such as folding, curving, or pleating applied at different scales allow for the creation of highly variable spaces that depart from the uniform spaces of modern architecture. Hirata s use of natural motifs as the basis for the development of bold structural designs references his work in Ito s office, where he was involved in the early designs for the National Taichung Theater ( ). In the projects on view, he explores this at both a domestic and urban scale, from Architecture Farm s ( ) curved walls that extend the house into the landscape, to Foam Form s (2011) intricate structural lattice that merges a series of buildings with a park. Junya Ishigami (b. 1974) explores the physical limits of architecture how thin a structure, how lightweight a material, how vast a space can be in pursuit of novel perceptual experiences. His early work featured a series of installations that drew on artistic practices to test the material limits of what can constitute architecture. In Balloon ( ), a five-story metallic inflatable is designed to float effortlessly, appearing to defy gravity. These radical aesthetic ideas are combined with a sophisticated use of structural engineering in buildings that make ambiguous the boundaries between architecture and art, structure and landscape. At the Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop ( ), the precise orientation of hundreds of columns creates a forest-like space, while at House and Restaurant (2013 ongoing) the excavation of soil posits new ways of physically making architecture. Ishigami s use of minimal and abstract elements are informed in part by his years in Kazuyo Sejima s office, where he worked on projects including House in a Plum Grove ( ), on view. His own work aspires to an extreme openness that foregrounds environmental or atmospheric effects and is rendered meaningful through the sense of wonder people bring to it. The exhibition concludes with the Home-for-All initiative. In March 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake struck the northeastern Tohoku region of Japan s main island, Honshu, devastating many of the small coastal towns and displacing thousands of residents. In the wake of the disaster, a group of five Japanese architects, led by Toyo Ito and including Kazuyo Sejima, proposed Home-for-All, an initiative to provide simple communal structures for meetings and social events in areas of temporary housing. Designed in conversation with local residents, 4

5 students, and builders, each project responds directly to a town s particular needs from providing spaces for children to play to establishing a base for the local fishing industry. The first was built in Miyagino, Sendai, in October 2011, and 15 have now been completed or are under construction. Conceived as not only a building project but as a means to revive the sense of community lost during the earthquake and tsunami, Home-for-All asks architects to take on a renewed sense of social responsibility and to design public spaces through public consensus over and above individual interests. SPONSORSHIP: Major support for the exhibition is provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, The Japan Foundation, and Chris A. Wachenheim. Generous funding is provided by Obayashi Corporation, Kajima Corporation, Shimizu Corporation, Taisei Corporation, Takenaka Corporation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Kumagai Gumi, The Obayashi Foundation, and Toda Corporation. Special thanks to Muji. Additional support is provided by the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund. PUBLICATION: A Japanese Constellation Edited with text by Pedro Gadanho and Phoebe Springstubb. Text by Teronobu Fujimori, Taro Igarashi, and Julian Worrall Published in conjunction with the exhibition, A Japanese Constellation focuses on the work of a small group of architects and designers influenced by and gravitating around the architect Toyo Ito and the architectural firm SANAA. Beginning with an overview of Ito s career and his influence as a mentor to a new generation of Japanese architects, the catalogue presents a richly illustrated portfolio of recent works by three generations of internationally acclaimed designers, including Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, and Junya Ishigami. Essays by curators, architectural historians, and critics reflect on the transmission of an architectural sensibility, and suggest an alternative model to what has been commonly described as an individuality-based star-system in architecture. The publication reveals how shared architectural themes travel across generations of architects, creating a strong identity for a regional practice with global impact. Hardcover, $55. ISBN Published by The Museum of Modern Art and available at the MoMA Stores and online at momastore.org. Distributed to the trade by ARTBOOK D.A.P. in the U.S. and Canada, and by Thames & Hudson outside the U.S. and Canada. PUBLIC PROGRAM: Japan Now: Architecture for the 21st Century Wednesday, March 9, 6:00 p.m. The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, The Celeste Bartos Theater This panel discussion will address the key themes of the MoMA exhibition A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond. Participants include Nanako Umemoto, Reiser + Umemoto and RUR Architecture DPC Founding Partner; Kayoko Ota, architecture curator; and Florian Idenburg, SO IL Founding Partner. Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, will give welcome remarks. Pedro Gadanho, Director, Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon, and curator of the exhibition, introduces the 5

6 discussion, and Ken Tadashi Oshima, Professor of Architecture, University of Washington, moderates. Tickets ($20; $15 members and corporate members; $8 students, seniors, and staff of other museums) can be purchased online or at the information desk, at the Film desk after 4:00 p.m., or at the Education and Research Building reception desk on the day of the program. No. 8 Press Contacts: Paul Jackson, (212) or paul_jackson@moma.org Margaret Doyle, (212) or margaret_doyle@moma.org For downloadable high-resolution images, register at moma.org/press. 6