On the Thresholds of Space Making: Contemporary Japanese Architecture

3 units

This seminar is offered in preparation for the exhibition, On the Thresholds of Space Making: Installation Art by Young Japanese Architects, to be held at the Kemper Art Museum in Spring, 2014. With contemporary architecture being bombarded with an ever more daunting array of formal, social, technological, and environmental exigencies, the seminar and exhibition will revisit a series of core artistic and representational issues of architectural design through installations by a new generation of Japanese architects. Kshigami Junya, Nakamura Ryuji, Nakayama Hideyuki, and Kikuchi Hiroshi represent a highly energized and promising collective of young creative talent pushing the frontiers of architectural design, unrivaled in contemporary global practice in their intellectual rigor and stylistic coherence. This collective evolved out of Japan's avant-garde architectural culture of the 1970s, spearheaded by Toyo Ito, who synthesized two opposing ideals of architectural design of the previous generation, represented by Shinohara Kazuo and Kikutake Kiyonori. The seminar will trace the genealogy of this collective from Shinohara and Kikutake in the 1960s, Ito in the 1980s to 90s, and SANAA in the recent past. Fulfills History/Theory elective requirement.