February 21, 2008 | Broadcast | News
China: To build or not to build? - Libeskind
Speaking in Belfast last week, Daniel Libeskind denounced ‘totalitarian regimes’, calling for architects to take ‘a more ethical stance’. continue >>>
February 20, 2008 | Features | Opinions
Thinking about Cool
From theCoolhunter.net :
“Our first book, the World’s Coolest Hotel Rooms, continue >>>
February 15, 2008 | News | Reports
Kisho Kurokawa Green Institute
Kisho Kurokawa Green Institute
Founded in Honor of World-Renowned Architect
An American university is honoring the late globally acclaimed architect Dr. Kisho Kurokawa with the founding of an environmental institute in his name.
Anaheim University, based in California, has established the Kisho Kurokawa Green Institute in tribute to Dr. Kurokawa, who was known throughout the architectural world for award-winning designs, many based on themes including ecology and recycling, and for leading the Metabolist Movement and developing the theory of “Symbiosis.”
The Green Institute, which was the idea of Dr. Kurokawa, will offer programs promoting environmental sustainability worldwide.
These programs will include an online MBA in Sustainable Management, named the “Green MBA,” as well as short-term certificate programs and seminars in sustainability. Areas covered will be triple bottom line accounting and management, green marketing, recycling, environmental product design, corporate social responsibility, and sustainable enterprise development. All programs will focus on the so-called three Ps of people, planet, and profit and will prepare professionals to make effective management decisions and to look at the impact of those management decisions on environmental and social issues.
The Institute’s creation represents the fulfillment of a long-standing relationship between Dr. Kurokawa and Anaheim University, which specializes in online education. Dr. Kurokawa was the founding member of Anaheim University’s Executive Advisory Board and was Chair of the University’s International Advisory Council from 2001 until his passing last year. Dr. Kurokawa’s widow, Ayako Kurokawa, will serve as the Institute’s Honorary Chairman.
Dr. Kurokawa’s major works include the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia, the National Art Center in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, the new wing of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Toyota Stadium built for the 2002 World Cup, the Astana Master Plan for the New Capital of Kazakhstan and the Eco-Media City Project Plan for Zhengzhou City, China.
Dr. Kurokawa’s design of the Kuala Lumpur airport won the 2003/2004 grand prix by Italy’s Dedalo-Minosse International Prize, and was also certified as a sustainable airport by the United Nations’ Green Globe 21 in 2003. Dr. Kurokawa’s numerous awards include the Gold Medal from France’s Academy of Architecture in 1986, the 48th Japan Art Academy Award in 1992 (the highest award for artists and architects in Japan), the AIA Los Angeles Pacific Rim Award in 1997, and most recently the Chicago Athenaeum Museum International Architecture Award in 2006. His traveling exhibition “Kisho Kurokawa” has been viewed by over 800,000 people, and he was the first Japanese architect to become an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Union of Architects in Bulgaria.
Anaheim University was founded in 1996 and has locations in Anaheim, CA; Irvine, CA, and Tokyo, Japan. The university offers educational programs in business and education.
February 13, 2008 | Articles | Features
Broadway…Bigness for the Masses!
Metabolism started in Tokyo in the sixties, coinciding roughly with the activities of other experimental and theoretical urban cell-groups, like Archigram and its “plug-in city” projects. The Metabolists rejected orderly town-square layouts, claiming that they were poorly adapted to the reality of mass housing pressures and dwindling space in downtown areas. In postwar Tokyo, reconstruction and unprecedented urban growth, together with pre-Olympic infrastructural improvement and a newfound consciousness of design and planning issues - Japan hosted the World Design Conference in 1960 - all prompted the Metabolists to work out how to cope with a rapidly densifying city.
Metabolism’s heritage was Modernist, but had little patience for pure aesthetic reflections on space, light, and transparency; the self-contained detached Miesian glass box was an indulgence, and even Corbusian public housing was something built to the scale of a moderately dense French port city (Marseille). Too settled, too single-noted, and ill-equipped for Tokyo’s monstrous proportions.
Perhaps what was needed was a certain Dis-unity of habitation, expanding on the utopian promises of Modernism without too much of its hygienic order.
In trying to respond to the particular demands of 60’s Tokyo, Kikutake Kiyonori, one of the founding Metabolists, made ambitious proposals for modular capsule structures snaking wildly over existing buildings, towering over traditional low-rise residential neighborhoods. On paper, they looked like a modern reworking of Piranesi with the same sort of Gothic splendor. Height and vertical building extensions were key. Apartment towers that pranced like DNA helixes spiralling out of control.
They were awesome propositions, but of course most of them were bluntly rejected by the relevant authorities.
Metabolism promised to be ad-hoc and spontaneous. It proposed an organic, contagious movement of cities and their buildings that were a metaphor for runaway economic and demographic growth, growing fungus-like to match demand and circumstance. Instead, it ran up against walls of building codes, sunlight ratio and height restrictions.
The original manifesto was typically overambitious, as manifestoes are prone to being. Although not much of it got realized in Japan, Metabolism found favor far from its original intent and context. When Kisho Kurokawa visited Singapore in the 1960s, marvelling at People’s Park Complex, William Lim’s Golden Mile Complex and Paul Rudolph’s Concourse, he found himself in the awkwardly pleased position of an originator whose disciples had run away with the scripture and freestyled with it.
Back home in Tokyo, an early pioneer of the mixed-use Metabolist highrise was the Broadway complex in Nakano, three stops and five minutes by train west of Shinjuku. Completed in 1961 by Miyada Keizaburo, it had one storey below ground and ten above. Miyada had studied in Washington and been impressed by the shopping malls, apartments and supermarkets of postwar America, and when he returned to Tokyo decided to incorporate these modern comforts into “mansions” (which actually means “condominiums” in Japanese English). These equipped cells for modern living were never more than a short walk away from amenities and “connectors” like public corridors, atria, and plazas for dawdling and gossiping with one’s neighbors.
Broadway housed restaurants, fish markets, clothing stores, rooftop gardens, an outdoor pool and a golf range. Whereas what Miyada saw in Washington was a horizontal spread of urban amenities spaced with greenery, traffic routes and pathways, Broadway flipped those dimensions sideways and reproportioned them to fit the narrow scale of the vertical city-complex.
Broadway is still possessed of that time-warp charm, marooned in the sixties with its linoleum floors, Formica countertops, fluorescent tube lights, and distinctly claustrophobic corridors, bracing shoppers with the smell of mouldering merchandise. It even has glaring design defects that make it hell to navigate but which everyone’s come to love anyway - from the ground level shopping street, Sun Plaza, you are whisked urgently up to the third floor; and then, as required: up one flight of stairs to the fourth, or down one flight to the second floor.
The weekend mobs are more like Kowloon than Omotesando. Families throng the basement food halls and huddle in hawker concession booths for greasy octopus balls, soft serve ice cream, barrels overflowing with pungent pickles and dessicated fishes.
Something like how Singapore’s Golden Mile Complex turned - and some would say, degenerated - from an avant-garde drawing-board scheme into a noisy ethnic supermarket and congregating grounds for the Thai expat population, Broadway’s messiness proves the accidental genius of “Metabolic” development, thriving long and clamorously, far from the blueprint of its original conception. When first completed, Broadway was a coveted address for media personalities and other celebrities, a kind of proto Roppongi Hills. These days, its reputation is quite different, and it attracts quite a different demographic. After Akihabara, Nakano has become Tokyo’s second most important concentration of manga-related merchandise.
Architects are guilty of this betrayal: they wish only good things for the “civitas” of our public spaces, trying to encourage humane interactions in places we can proudly call “commons,” but whose vision of the public is this? Certainly not the public’s. Left to sprout and flower by itself, Broadway acquired a vitality beyond any reasonable original expectations, a classic exercise in hands-off dirty populism, left to languish or flourish according to use value. Golden Mile did the same, but just like with so many other unscripted functions in scripted Singapore, the men holding the blueprints are itching for a rewrite.
February 11, 2008 | Event | Reports
Really Ar?
Walking up the steps of Night&Day bar at Selegie, no one had much idea what to expect of the first Really Ar? sharing session organised by Really Architecture.
Really Architecture is a group of visionary architecture enthusiasts based in Singapore who are concerned with the development of architecture in the Asian region. Really Ar? is another addition to the list of activities that they have organised including their recently concluded “Design My Place Workshop” and the “Architect in a Bottle” talks.While ideas-sharing session had been a regular event within the members of Really Architecture and Really Ar? marks the first attempt to open up this sharing session to a larger audience.
Attended by young(er) architects, the event was a cosy affair with drinks going at a one-for-one special courtesy of Night and Day bar ,co-owned by Singapore architect, Randy Chan of Zong Architects, helping to add to the cozy mood.
The event saw 4 presenters showing off a variety of projects, all of whom talked about their projects each with their own style and with a different focus. The diversity of the projects and approaches to this thing we call “Architecture” was evident with projects ranging from documentation of architecture to thesis projects, to competition entries and last but not least, built works.
Kicking off the event was 5ft Creatives where we screened the pilot episode of the FFW Video Series: Architecture Studio where we featured FARMWORK.In what is planned to be a 10-part series featuring various architecture offices, the FFW video series aims to document the creative processes and also feature the various personalities who shape our built environment. 5ft Creatives also expressed their belief that such documentation would add to the understanding of our very own architectural fraternity and also open up the possibility of us looking at Singapore’s architectural practices in a different light.
Really Ar? also saw Mr Tham Wai Hon presenting his recently concluded thesis project which revolves around exploring the possibilities of re-programming the existing Malaysian Railway Line land which cuts through various parts of Singapore. This highly contentious strip of Malaysian-owned land in Singapore territory has been at the root of much political disputes between the 2 countries and Wai Hon’s project attempted to approach this strip of land through the lenses of architecture, masterplanning and community-living ideas. His analysis of plans by Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority to re-plan the area contrasted with the masterplan that he was proposing in terms of how one deals with the historical layer of a major infrastructural relic.
Also at the event were Zong Architects and Linghao Architects who presented their works to the crowd.
Linghao Architect’s presented a recently concluded project with the usual dose of site photos and analysis before concluding with images of the completed project.
Meanwhile, Mr Wong Ker How of Zong Architects attempted to show the various possibilities that are open to us in rethinking the way we think and design our built environment with his presentation entitled, “Finding New Grounds”. He shared his personal exploratory works which included a trip down the streets of Shanghai and also an exploration of image manipulation which then led to some form of manifestation in Zong Architect’s submission to the recently concluded Marina South Housing Competition.
Really Ar? then concluded with a Q&A session which wasn’t as lively as it could have been and if Really Ar? is going to be a truly fruitful event with ideas being sparked off and discussed, then audience participation is something that will need to improve in future sessions. The culture of speaking up and questioning with a burning desire to learn and understand is perhaps non-existent in the fraternity now but events such as Really Ar? is definitely a step in the correct direction in nurturing such practice.
As the night drew to an end and the audience starts to leave the bar, one can’t help but feel happy that such events are now in place and if it continues to evolve and mature, then Really Ar? will be an event that architects and other enthusiasts of the built environment will be marking in their calendar.
February 7, 2008 | Broadcast | Events | Features
Happy Chinese New Year
All of us at the FiveFootWay and 5ft Creatives would like to wish all our Chinese readers a Prosperous Chinese New Year! æ?Âå–œå?‘è´¢ï¼?
February 2, 2008 | Others
[m]apping Critical Architecture Theory:Autonomy in Space & Time
a project by Non Arkaraprasertkul & Kyu Ree Kim
This project seeks to explore a comprehensive mapping of architectural ideologies between 1968-1984. Based on K. Michael Hays’s propositions, the mapping is engaged in a critical understanding of architecture as “cultural” and “philosophical” artifacts. By using time as a medium to represent the history of the ideology, five significant architects are mapped in the timeline in conjunction with “matters” that influenced their thoughts: philosophical writing (including theoretical essence of linguistic, semiotic and psychoanalysis models), architectural theories, buildings, architectural trends, and political and economical events. The result of the project demonstrates not only connections between architecture and the real world through events and intellectual dialogue, but also a vivid lineage of the architects’ quest for an architectural discipline.
click on image to view timeline in browser.
OR, right click on image and click “save link as� to download.
February 2, 2008 | Features | Opinions
A Letter about Architectural Criticism
Many would have read Non’s Article “Culture of Criticism” and here is an article long overdue which would add on to the context of what Non is talking about. A couple of months ago, I received an email from Non about a series of correspondence exchanges that he had with some members of the architectural fraternity in Thailand. It sparked off a series of email conversation between me and Non and we have decided that what happened should be shared with the larger FFW community.
It all started with Non’s critique of an article published in Art4d (see scanned article)
February 1, 2008 | Emerging Studios
Pilot Episode : Farmwork
The SINGAPORE EMERGING ARCHITECTURE STUDIOS video series produced by 5ft Creatives features talented up-and-coming architectural personalities and studios that represent the future of Singapore’s architecture scene.
FARMWORK is a young, energetic, multidisciplinary practice that believes design should be intelligent and fun. Officially formed in 2007, FARMWORK runs a collaborative design practice integrating perspectives and inspiration from art, fashion and media.
UPDATE: FARMWORK were the lead curators for the Singapore pavilion in the Venice Architecture Biennale 2008.
Further
FARMWORK website
February 1, 2008 | Digests | Reports
Construction begins on Metropolitan Opera House in Taichung
Taiwan Construction of the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House - a building Taichung Mayor Jason Hu has described as “a feat of engineering” - began Monday in downtown Taichung City. Addressing a groundbreaking ceremony to mark the start of construction, Hu said the simple ceremony represents the emergence of a new landmark in Taichung and a new page in the city’s history. Hu said the opera house is an artistic piece of innovation designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito, a realization of Taichung’s vision of overall development and an architectural piece that has already been an eye-opener in international architectural circles. Observation by Bert de Muynck.
For the full article, please visit:
ChinaPost
For more information and images on Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, please visit:
ArcSpace
Official website:
Toyo Ito
