Eleven objects, five photos, three books and a pamphlet, all highlights, from the long and diverse career of Shiro Kuramata are currently on exhibit in “Liberated Zone” at Clear Gallery, a venue tucked away on a side street between Omotesando and Shibuya. They have selected objects from his material periods of acrylic, glass and expanded metal (more commonly called mesh or metal grating). Consequently the show emphasizes Kuramata’s obsession with immateriality and transparency.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/kuramata01.jpg" alt="Left: 'Glass Chair' (1976); Middle: 'Cabinet de Curiosité' (1989); Right: 'Acrylic Stool' (1990)" class="imgcaption" title="Image: © Nacása & Partners Inc." width="518" />
Kuramata (1934-1991) was a fantastic force in furniture, interior and product design. His works glide effortlessly between the influences of their time, primarily minimalism and post modernism. Rather than being bluntly identified with movements of their time, as is so much design when it focuses on symbols, Kuramata’s fascination with material and poetic detailing simultaneously achieves being of its time and timelessness.
The earliest piece exhibited is Luminous Chair, a white acrylic chair from 1969. Seductively smooth like ice cream carved out with a warm scoop, a hollow for the body has been melted away and a light within the form illuminates with a serene glow. To demonstrate the chair a series of black and white photos shows a backlit naked woman reposing in a variety of positions, mostly womb-like. The photos, looking as dated as the 70s era from whence they come, contain the period’s timeless vitality and conviction that scientific and industrial progress are not at odds with society but in harmony with and accommodating of humanity.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/kuramata02.jpg" alt="Left: 'Glass Chair' (1976); Right: 'Twilight Time' (1985)" class="imgcaption floatl" title="Image: © Nacása & Partners Inc." width="257" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/kuramata03.jpg" alt="Left: 'Twilight Time' (1985); Right: 'Luminous Chair' (1969)" class="imgcaption floatl" title="Image: © Nacása & Partners Inc." width="257" /> 
Many of the furniture designs on display developed into environmental works, most often for long-time client Issey Miyake. Glass Chair (1976) preceded Miyake’s showroom by a year in which minimal shelves hung at angles in a type of public gallery. The chair is a poetically marvelous feat; the gallery attendant assured me that it could support about 100 kilograms. A decade later, in 1985, Kuramata designed Twilight Time, a table that combines a stepped-edge glass top with three expanded metal cone-shaped legs. The ensemble looks delicately fragile as if the top were precariously balanced. The transition from glass to expanded metal prefaced his next boutique for Miyake in 1987, which, like the table, had no visible connections or appendages. Both are apparitions in and of space describing form rather than tectonics.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/kuramata04.jpg" alt="From Left to Right: 'Miss Blanche' (1988); 'Cabinet de Curiosité' (1989); 'Glass Chair' (1976); 'Acrylic Stool' (1990)" class="imgcaption" title="Image: © Nacása & Partners Inc." width="518" />
The piece that has captured the creative profession’s fancy and the purse of auction house bidding is Miss Blanche (1988). (In October 2007 Christie’s London auctioned one for a reported £156,500 [35,000,000 yen], three times the estimated upper bid.) The acrylic chair cast with embedded artificial red roses captures the essence of surrealism in furniture—life caught floating frozen timeless in blooming. Kuramata continued with this theme and produced a variety of objects with, most frequently, feathers cast in the resin—a meditation on the paradox of the ephemeral and permanent.
All the works display a refinement, singularity, if not monumentality. However, beyond their slick appearance the work declares optimism in material and industry. The toughest aspect of making things, Kuramata had said, were the seams. They reveal the finite. It was this attention to detail that sets his work apart—never overwrought or highlighted, Kuramata’s details lean toward neat coupling, simple or self-effacing. Clear Gallery’s small but varied collection provides a worthwhile overview of his sensibilities and aesthetics.

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Liberated Materials – Clearly Kuramata

<a href="http://www.withassistant.net/">Assistant</a> is an international and interdisciplinary design practice co-founded by Megumi Matsubara, Hiroi Ariyama and a team of others. This June at their studio-cum-gallery space, “gallery within assistant”, Megumi Matsubara pieced together a series of explorations into an installation titled “Absent City.” The multimedia interactive installation combined photography, sound, interior design and architectural-model-influenced sculpture in an environment that allowed viewers to develop their own non-linear fictions. While the installation was planned and produced by Matsubara, the number of participants and collaborators involved created a fragmented and networked creation rather than a grand master narrative. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/absentcity1.jpg" alt="Megumi Matsubara at gallery within assistant during ''ABSENT CITY'', 2008" title="Photo: JW" width="518" height="350" class="imgcaption" />
Upon entering the gallery visitors donned headphones with a radio receiving localized broadcasts of conversations associated with portraits of people scattered throughout the room. Moving between images and transmission ranges, listeners were confronted with static, the noise of urban life, before the next moment of clarity emerged. Occasionally a soundtrack played over gallery speakers intruded between conversations and static. The crystal-clear portraits had a shallow depth of field blurring their vaguely urban backgrounds in a milky haze. In the center of the room black felt covered a table bedecked with various black objects: cubes, polyhedra, abstracted tree shapes. Cutouts appearing in the fabric permitted small glimpses of mysterious objects and ‘landscapes’ within the diorama-like construction.
This contrast of clarity and obfuscation pervaded the installation as well as the process by which Matsubara produced the work. There were people shadowed, arcane references, personal narratives, and non-literal translations attempting to encompass wider meaning. Specificity confronted the obscure. Personal narrative coupled with reader interpretation. Simultaneity challenged sequence, fiction mimicked documentation, and interviews became music. All combined in a cocktail of media and ideas that eluded the singular in favor of multiple sensory experiences.
There are a lot of ideas and means of expression here. How did this start?
It’s always me working in collaboration with others, so I booked lunches called “Sociological Lunch” in February starting from Monday with Ega and ending with Yoshi on Sunday, at seven different places in Tokyo. I gathered some materials from the area, recorded our conversations and took film footage. I also had two or three kinds of secret agent-like people around us, unknown to the person I was having lunch with. In Yoshi’s case it was different because it was in his house, but in other cases it was at restaurants and cafes and it was easy. They were sitting right next to us secretly and they were documenting our lunch and listening to our conversation.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/absentcity2b.jpg" alt="Megumi Matsubara, ''ABSENT CITY'', 2008" title="Photo: Sebastian Mayer" width="257" height="386" class="imgcaption floatl" /></a>How then did you take that raw sociological material and transform it into Absent City?
After those “Sociological Lunches” together with Hiroi, we made a map of Tokyo’s cityscape based only on my memory of the conversations and the things we talked about…all those bits of images inside my head. You can call it a psychological map because it had no physical measurement. It was only based on images and memory. 
This is a coffee table that has a model inside. [Matsubara points to the black felt-covered table in the center of the room.] But also this is a coffee table where you can sit down and have coffee and conversation and “Sociological Lunch”: a 90-minute lunch with a 90-minute discussion with someone and a 90-minute soundtrack. So in a way I wanted to confuse the scale of things as well. There are so many tiny pieces, and there’s no big structure. It is layered information that is being multiplied. Some are growing, spreading. Some are even moving. It’s like particles, movement, but together creating some kind of whole: an impression of the universe but one in which there is no visible overview. You can only see inside through filters and view ports located at certain points. Sometimes things are clear, while sometimes there is nothing there.
How are the conversations and images related here? Or, how do we read this?
You can only see through these small perceptual filters, but it does spread all around inside this table and it consists of very tiny pieces. You can see [lifts the black felt cover revealing the table interior]
You’re giving away the secret.
Different areas are based on different people’s keywords. There is some wind inside the model; you can see some stuff blowing around. And there are many small keywords in Japanese that you can see installed inside. 
Are these keywords arbitrary, contextual, such as from the conversations, or concepts you chose to explore?
The keywords are extracted from books, vintage books, newspapers or magazines from vernacular sources in the area. Just before the lunch I took a copy from the nearest bookstore, convenience store or wherever available. I handed that to one of the “secret agents”. Then this person had to map by listening secretly to our conversation and find some kind of similarity or something that could be imagined from our conversation. They had to mark that down as key phrases or numbers, or something else if they wanted. So these keywords are not the phrases these people actually said but words filtered through somebody.
Assistant is a team and together we made this model, but at the same time only I know the memory and the images of these people. So in a way it’s an open process and I consult with them sometimes. For the most part we have to be together and create together. 
It’s not a literal model but a psychological model.
Yeah. You have to translate these words or images into something different. So in the process there are so many objects that have been thrown away because it was difficult for the team to understand what would and wouldn’t work. 
Does it become an archive of this point in time in your process?
Yeah, it’s a packaging of a certain time. Maybe it’s not a Pandora’s box, but when you open it and see it you think it’s so many things. It’s quite confusing. When I see it, even though I know how I made it, suddenly I start remembering a few conversations that I almost forgot, but by looking at this model they come back to me. They grow again. Those kinds of processes or those kinds of reactions are the triggers of feelings, experience and memory. And that’s something I really wanted to recreate.
Are you influenced by the Situationists?
I first heard about them in graduate school when I made a conceptual project for a mobile phone application. It was more than five years ago right after GPS technology was installed in phones. There were only very simple functions and simple applications available, but I was very excited by them. Together with some programmers I made a project called “Happy City” using GPS-installed internet-connectable mobile phones. You could actually press a button from where you are happy and then see the psychological thermometer of the whole city, of the whole of Tokyo. An architecture and urbanism critic saw that project and told me about the Situationists and Guy Debord. They are a very interesting group of people, but I’m not always influenced by them.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/absentcity3b.jpg" alt="Megumi Matsubara, ''ABSENT CITY'', 2008" title="Photo: Sebastian Mayer" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" /></a>
There are a lot of affinities to psychological mapping, the “Naked City”1 and temporary autonomous events throughout the city.
Yeah, for sure I do feel more sympathetic to their way of thinking and extracting impressions, extracting feeling instead of just what you see. Quite often architects tend to forget that their work is based on experience. Everything is there to be experienced, not just taken from a visual point of view alone. 
How would you describe your idea of urbanism, architecture, and space in general?
I don’t know if I have an idea of such things in general. I think the only thing I can say is that my ideas are constantly changing through the projects I do. I always question what things are or could be through my projects.
What about some of the other collaborative elements? How do they fit in?
For this music [the soundtrack playing in the room] I worked with a Finnish musician, Ilpo. I sent him all the conversation recordings and asked him to make a sound environment lasting ninety minutes using only these pieces. He could distort the material however he liked; the only rules he had were that it had to be ninety minutes and it had to include all the conversations somehow. It wasn’t necessary to have to be able to hear what is being said, but all the seven sound recordings had to be in the music.
Also, this portrait series, I commissioned a photographer to take portraits of the seven people in different streets in Tokyo. The series is called “Translucent Portraits”. It’s not Photoshopped. The translucent background was created with a photo studio made of translucent material set up temporarily on the street.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/absentcity4b.jpg" alt="Megumi Matsubara, ''ABSENT CITY'', 2008" title="Photo: Sebastian Mayer" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" />
You work with a lot of different individuals. Does that grow out of assistant and working with a larger collaborative? What’s your working process?
The working process is quite diverse because the studio is not closed off to the outside world. For example this project’s conception is mine in that I created the story and I created the whole idea of the project. But at the same time I left space for the photographer, for the musician, or for other people to involve themselves and do something. So it’s an open process. 
When I decided to do the portraits I needed and wanted to work with a photographer and I asked him what he thought. I respect the people I collaborate with as professionals in their respective fields and yet I bring by own ideas to the process and we discuss and negotiate what will work best. For example, in this case the photographer wanted to do a studio photo shoot, setting up a photo stage in a one room with a proper white background. But for me, that didn’t fit with my basic conception of the project, so I came up with the idea that we could shoot on the street in a temporary photo studio. I wanted to use the translucent material for that, so that it would halfway between indoors and outdoors; it had to float in the background. 
With the music, I didn’t care how it would sound, but I did care about the guidelines, that it had to be ninety minutes long and it had to include seven conversations. I had worked with the musician before, so I give him the initial ideas and he responded with music. So the process is very open but at the same time very precise because it cannot be any old thing. But it’s open to process but there are many things that get thrown out if they don’t turn out right. I really like this process of making conversations with people through work… art work.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/absentcity6.jpg" alt="Megumi Matsubara, ''ABSENT CITY'', 2008" title="Photo: AR" width="518" height="347" class="imgcaption" />
A lot of process-oriented works, as much as they may become artifacts, often raise more questions or ideas in the process. Has this done that yet? Has it raised any questions that you want to investigate next?
Yes, many! Even from the start. I wanted to talk about city. I wanted to talk about the future of Tokyo and I had those keywords, but I didn’t know how to begin from my own context. So, I had to visualize and make it specific to actually let myself talk about it. I wanted to talk about Tokyo from a very internal point of view, but that eventually turned into a layered self, which turned into cityscape. 
You framed “Absent City” as a memoir. Does the installation use memoir as narrative, documentary and fiction, or precognition or fortune telling?
The installation is a combined environment that includes all layers of information from memory, to impressions, guesswork, misunderstandings, feelings, dis-communication and serendipity. Through the process of combining all layers as one space it becomes a kind of spatial memoir in which stories are perceived through the senses. This form is similar to the half-narrative, half-documentary of Marco Polo’s “Travels of Marco Polo” in which he reports his story to his master, giving him a narrative exploration.
Is this the first in a series or do you consider this a continuation?
The project started in January of this year. Back then there wasn’t a concrete idea about what it would become. But at the same time I wanted this to grow in six months time to something like an exhibition that people can actually experience. I’m sure this project will continue in different forms and grow into a bigger exhibition. But that’s not the goal. It’s the process of showing and that process itself contains results. These works are complete; they are not just works in progress. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/absentcity5b.jpg" alt="Megumi Matsubara, ''ABSENT CITY'', 2008" title="Photo: Sebastian Mayer" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" />
So this is the first public manifestation and exhibition. Is there a timetable that every six months you will produce something?
There isn’t a timetable. I don’t feel the need for us to have a show every six months like clockwork. The next one could turn out to be in two weeks. For all I know, by then I could have already produced something worth showing. This urban research project is continuous and throughout the project things happen. For example this started with the conversations we had at our ‘Sociological Lunches’ — they were smaller projects inside a bigger project. 
For example, in February I had the conversations with seven people. In March we had a project called “Absent Café” in the Marunouchi Building commissioned by Marunouchi Art Weeks. It was an installation project, but I also had the idea that we could do an “Absent Symposium” together with the “Absent Café” installation. The conversation that was to take place inside the café was taken outside and then it was turned into an online and postcard project. There were 3000 postcards and online forms calling for people to be panelists and they could send messages to the Absent email address, people would reply, and the conversation were intended to continue until they reached a natural end. These “Absent Symposium” messages are also part of the catalog now. It did create some kind of context for the project too. It’s not like you can actually define what is part of this project and what is not. “Absent City” just grew. It’s like sowing seeds and seeing what happens. 
Is this then informing a next step or project?
Well, for sure it will grow and be a component but we don’t know exactly when yet. It’s possible that in six months we’ll do something. It could be in the form of a publication or an exhibition. Some reaction to the exhibition will probably lead to some other related project and eventually we will know how to make sense of the next step. But for me its important to come up with something interesting to say about Tokyo from a different point of view. That way it will become a part of “Absent City” vision.
—
1 “Naked City” is a collage map created in the summer of 1957 by Guy Debord, a seminal member of the French literary/cultural movement Internationale Situationniste. The map records his urban psychogeographic studies and was produced through ‘détournement’ in which fragments of existing works are rearranged or juxtaposed to produce new meanings. As conventional maps represent geometric realities of the city, psychogeographic maps convey experiential impressions. The map shows large arrows connecting city map fragments where certain experiences occurred or relations existed during the derive, a walk where one is led by attractions and encounters of the area rather than purposeful destination. The title is borrowed from a 1948 American film.
—
“Absent City” is being held at <a href="http://www.galleryloop.com/">Alternative Space LOOP</a> in Seoul, Korea from August 29 to September 21, 2008. 
Assistant is also exhibiting at Diesel Denim Gallery Aoyama from August 30, 2008 to February 8, 2009. Details <a href="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/event/2008/39CB">here</a>.
Disclaimer: Megumi Matsubara was a TABlog guest writer from 2005 to 2006. This interview was her and the author’s first meeting.

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Designing the Hidden, Hiding the Obvious

“This is architecture…about the human spirit…serene.” This is how Glenn Murcutt explains his work in Gallery Ma’s architectural exhibition “Thinking Drawing, Working Drawing,” a collection of Murcutt’s single-family homes and an art center, all located in Australia. Murcutt eschews glitzy forms and fashionable theories, pursuing instead the visceral effects of nature and coordinating them into subtle poetic works of integrally environmental architecture. The wonderfully conceived exhibition presents Murcutt, the man and the work, in a systematic manner. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/glennmurcutt1.jpg" alt="Glenn Murcutt, Arthur & Yvonne Boyd Art Center (1996-99)" title="Photo: © Anthony Browell" width="518" height="381" class="imgcaption" />
The lower gallery surveys five projects — four houses and the Boyd Art Center (1996–99). Each house, including the Marie Short House (1974–75) that Murcutt purchased and renovated in 1980, is shown with succinct text, photos, sketches, drawings and an ingenious presentation of a sectional model cantilevered from suspended clear acrylic on which the section drawing has been etched — a unique combination of drawing and model that helps non-architects to ‘read’ the drawings. This room allows easy comparison of the projects and the development of common typologies and strategies—the use of the split plan (bathrooms, kitchens and storage on one side of a corridor and the living, dining and sleeping spaces on the other), opaque walls versus large windows, and the use of commonplace materials such as wood, brick, and corrugated steel.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/glennmurcutt2.jpg" alt="Close up on sectional model cantilevered on clear acrylic panel at Gallery Ma." title="Photo: © Nacasa & Partners Inc." width="518" height="340" class="imgcaption" />
The upper gallery exhibits only drawings, reinforcing Murcutt’s declaration that recently he has quit building models and now only develops projects by drawing. This move comes after years of experience and learning to understand the space of drawing and its built consequence. Consequently walls are lined with sketches and working drawings — a rarity in most architecture exhibitions—of the Walsh House, Marie Short / Murcutt House, and the Murcutt-Lewin House. There are also tables with sketchbooks and sets of working drawings of the Boyd Art Center and the Magney, Marika-Alderton, and Simpson-Lee Houses, as well as the two accompanying monographs — one of drawings and one of photos, to leisurely review. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/glennmurcutt3.jpg" alt="Photograph and sectional model of Marie Short House (1974-75/1980)" title="Photo: © Nacasa & Partners Inc." width="518" height="337" class="imgcaption" />
Additionally two revealing documentary videos, one in each gallery space, show biographical material, examine buildings and interview people from Murcutt’s long and somewhat quiet career. In one, Murcutt, awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2002, defends his most common accusation of not designing large buildings by challenging his critics to “do a decent little building.” The exhibition indeed shows many decent little buildings. His projects are reminders of how easily building orientation, passive solar for heating and lighting, operable windows and walls for ventilation, and water collecting cisterns can provide simple environmentally friendly living conditions.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/glennmurcutt4.jpg" alt="Glenn Murcutt, Simpson-Lee House (1988-94)" title="Photo: © Anthony Browell" width="518" height="508" class="imgcaption" />
However, with Murcutt’s growing list of public projects — visitor centers, museums, galleries, hotels, restaurants and wineries — it is dismaying to see so many old, albeit iconic, residential projects. Of the seven projects, only the Walsh House (2001–05) and the Murcutt-Lewin House and Studio (2000–03) are of this century and two are Murcutt’s own homes. There is disappointingly no reference to more recent work or works-in-progress.
Murcutt, a solo practitioner for his entire career, proclaims architecture as a process of discovery that allows people to perceive what is around them. The bilingual (Japanese-English) “Thinking Drawing, Working Drawing” allows visitors to easily compare projects through a systematic presentation of common format of text, sketch, drawing. Visitors discover the nuances that make each building uniquely responsive to its site, program and client—revealing Murcutt’s buildings as finely tuned machines in their own wildernesses.

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Drawing Conclusions

Not since the Beaux-arts school has there been a school of architectural thought as influential as that of the Bauhaus. While the beaux-arts set a curriculum based on classical arts and ideals and its opposite, an institute of technology or polytechnic, (Illinois Institute of Technology, which Mies directed from 1938 to 1959) consists of an engineering or technology-based education, the Bauhaus combined the two approaches into a synthesis of technics and the arts that has influenced nearly every modern architectural curriculum that has followed. 
Many Bauhaus exhibitions focus on one designer, or one genre (furniture, architecture or graphics) or focus only on one historical chronology. Typical monographic exhibitions are informational and occasionally inspirational, but are seldom provocative and fail to describe a larger social setting or implication. The current exhibit “BAUHAUS experience, dessau” avoids these pitfalls and exhibits the work of the Bauhaus in a refreshing and holistic manner. Although the wall text is in Japanese, the labels for individual works are in both Japanese and English.
As the exhibition poster advertises, one gets what one would expect upon entering the gallery – a series of works by the masters: Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, Josef Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Not much new here. 
However, the second floor changes the convention, and it becomes fitting that the University Art Museum & Chinretsukan Gallery at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music is the venue for the retrospective “BAUHAUS experience, dessau.” Befitting a university setting, work is divided by each masters’ coursework: material studies are collected under Albers’ course, color studies under Kandinsky, and architecture under Gropius. But rather than works by the masters, the work shown is primarily that of students, giving a full representation of the work of the Bauhaus the school. One excellent student was Karl Marx, not to be confused the political writer, who showed good painting skills, hand drawings, and color studies. The student work even includes a beam structural analysis with a precision in graphics, equations, and hand lettering that is a well-crafted design in itself. 
Following a recent trend in full-sized replicas, there is a full-scale room of the Director’s Office (1926) as designed by Hinnerk Scheper, whose other work graces the exhibition with color plans and isometrics. Director’s Office deftly shows materials, furniture and use of color, but the room fails to give a lived-in reality – no strewn papers on the desk, no mismatched heights and colors in the bookshelves, no framed works on the walls. Nonetheless we are presented with a masterful control of spatial organization and proportion hard to grasp from the usual historical grainy black and white photographs that accompany publications and exhibitions, this one included. 
One aspect that is often overlooked in Bauhaus exhibits, which may be due in part to the temporal aspect, is the performative. Thus the crown jewel of “BAUHAUS experience, dessau” is the work of Oskar Schlemmer. His workshops taught students to explore their bodies in space, using their body’s resistance, proportion, and mobility. His workshops were not a theoretical discourse contained in dusty tomes and sparkling manifestos, but were contained in the reality of experience, which was true of much of the work of the Bauhaus. The culmination of these workshops is shown in film and video recordings of Schlemmer’s performances, including a video of a 1993 restaging of his body-space studies. 
Plagued by politics, both internal and external, the school was continually in flux under three directors at three locations at various times. Walter Gropius founded the school in 1919 in Weimar and led the school until 1927. However in 1925 the school moved to Dessau and in 1927 changed hands to Hannes Meyer, who was fired in 1930 amidst political radicalism and sexual scandals– never a dull moment. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe then became director, and the school moved to Berlin in 1932. In 1933 the Nazi regime disbanded the school with many constituents fleeing to England, North America and Israel.
The Bauhaus’ influence permeates art, architecture, interior design, industrial design, graphic design and typography (the crispness of Herbert Bayer and company’s graphic design for the school) – providing a discourse between various fields, and continuing Wagner’s idea of the gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of art forms). While the Bauhaus’ influence today may seem to repose only in the slick stylings of Ikea, design boutiques and expensive design districts, it did have its basis in something more profound. The Bauhaus was a school and a school of thought that instigated a radical exploration of materials, form and space, and ultimately experience. Experience it yourself.

Send You Back to Schoolin’

Walter Gropius, leader of the Bauhaus from 1919–1927, credited traditional Japanese architecture, à la Katsurarikyu, as an advanced form and justification of modernism. Now a collection of his school’s output resides in the archives of Misawa Homes, which established the Misawa Bauhaus Collection as a laboratory, research center and museum. This exhibition, “Bauhaus Housing & Furniture,” is the twentieth that Misawa Bauhaus Collection has staged and, although a mere sliver of the collection, is impressive and far-reaching.
The housing portion—i.e. architecture—presents sketches, drawings, prints, publications and newer representations including models and video. Most of the videos are computer renderings that highlight circulation and volume of select projects including Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and Gropius’ Bauhaus Dessau building. Unfortunately none are particularly analytic. By moving through rather quickly and jarringly, they forego revealing geometric or formal relations. Two exceptions follow. One, the ADGB Bundeschule, juxtaposes black and white stills with recent color video, somewhat jerkily, to clarify that the ‘minimal’ abstracted visions weren’t always monochromatically neutral but colorfully rich. Also, Hannes Meyer’s Peterschule reveals somewhat more technical and structural characteristics that suggest an influence on some contemporary cantilevers and circulation.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/bauhaus01.jpg" alt="Johannes Itten, 'House of the White Man - Architectural Study' (1921) " class="imgcaption" title="Image courtesy of Misawa Bauhaus Collection" width="518" />
Karl Cieluszek’s precise hand-drawn pencil working drawings and studies—the envy of any architect—are beautiful in their simplistic composition and belie a contemplated consideration rarely revealed in CAD drawings. Drawings, photographs and models show various stages and interpretations of the Experimental House by Georg Muche (who is also represented by a few striking prints in the Collection’s impressive and extensive library), Adolf Meyer, Marcel Breuer, and a version as realized by Gropius in the Meisterhaus (1926).
It is through the latter two Bauhausers that the exhibition jumps to furniture, although mostly through Breuer who is represented by numerous pieces, including the ubër-comfortable and stylish bent steel and leather Club Armchair B, more commonly known as the ‘Wassily’ chair (1925). However the more interesting works on display are Breuer’s Wohnbedarf type 301 and 345 (1932–34), chair and chaise longue respectively. The frames, instead of bent tubular steel but just as elegant, are parallel pieces of bent aluminum bar stock that are more expressionist than their abstracted counterparts. Reminiscent of bent wood furniture, the grainy bent metal forms, rather than suggest a cool smooth naturalism, evoke a visceral strength. Erich Dieckmann furniture, Otto Rittweger lighting designs, two carpets and numerous other works round out the furniture portion of the exhibit.
That it is primarily in Japanese, although the expected German abounds, doesn’t hurt the exhibit as most of the didactic text places the material in a larger context, especially in the several meter-long time line that greets visitors. The fruit of the exhibit exists in the objects and artifacts themselves that show how the simple, refined and slick ‘contemporary’ design that currently feeds the ‘lifestyle’ market had its origins more than 60 years ago. It is a rare opportunity to see this variety and quantity of Bauhaus materials presented together. Although reservations are necessary (and easy to make – I did it with my fumbling Japanese), it would behoove anyone interested in architecture, furniture or design to visit the Misawa Bauhaus Collection at some time.

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Bauhaus Strikes a Domestic Chord

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Deeper than the Water

It is often difficult to understand architectural projects, whether it’s the scale, the underlying idea, or just what the designers are trying to do. We can look at maps, drawings and renderings, but we often fail to comprehend the actual scale or intent hidden behind the form. One does not have this problem with the current CAt exhibit in Tokyo Midtown’s Gallery Ma. Rather than seduce visitors with star-struck glossy images, CAt relies on good old-fashioned handcrafted models, site photos and animated diagrams to present their process and ideas.
CAt, an acronym for Coelacanth Architecture Tokyo, was established in 2005 by Kazuhiro Kojima and Kazuko Akamatsu. While it may seem too young to deserve such an exhibition, CAt has grown out of two former incarnations, the earliest, Coelacanth, was established in 1986. The firm since has been busy evolving and establishing itself as an architectural powerhouse as its exhibit at the internationally prestigious Gallery Ma attests.
The exhibition presents three large-scale projects currently in progress under the title “Cultivate.” CAt chose this moniker in opposition to development and master planning, which is identified as exploitive, limiting and fragmented. While semantically not much difference exists between developing and cultivating, the conceptual intent is vastly different. Cultivation, in their view, commingles practitioners, disciplines and various solutions to produce holistic, evolving designs that attempt to stimulate the areas beyond their sites. Because cultivation invites change as information and research grows, none of the projects is ever a static vision, which explains why there are no plan and section drawings that usually accompany architectural exhibitions. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/cat1.jpg" alt="CAt, Model for the University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan" width="518" class="imgcaption" title="Photo: © Nacasa & Partners" />
Greeting visitors is an ambitious campus plan for the newly established University of Central Asia that CAt, with Arata Isozaki & Associates, is designing in a 5 km-long valley in Naryn, Kyrgyz Republic. A poster summarizes the project, but the models present a fuller understanding. A large aerial photo mirrors a site model that renders only the central circulation and public space with color and detail; the rest is white and anonymous, even the buildings. Accompanying well-crafted models show buildings in greater detail. Although the exteriors are black the buildings would not be constructed as such. The interior is paramount—the inhabited space where daily lives occur—and CAt succeeds in focusing our attention on the detail there. CAt’s 77,000-122,000 square-meter portions are to be completed in 2009.
The courtyard separating the entry gallery from the second upstairs gallery contains a checkerboard-patterned series of podiums. Each displays a conceptual diagram of site influences and an associated word, usually something implying flow—time, sun position, wind, or some activity. Visitors are invited to create their own flows as they move through the outdoor space while navigating the installation and each other.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/cat2.jpg" alt="CAt, Models for the Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture, Vietnam" width="518" class="imgcaption" title="Photo: © Nacasa & Partners" />
A second campus/building is for the Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture. Located on a swampy 37-hectare site near the Mekong Delta, the building aims for completion in 2013. The concept “fluid direction” informs CAt’s incorporation of light, wind, sound, water, and people, which may give the 117,000 square-meter facility its interwoven spiral appearance. The noodle-like building examines landscape buildings, given its 43,000 square-meter footprint. Models show the evolution from a diagrammatic gesture to a detailed study that reveals the building’s enormity and shows how programmed (classrooms, library stacks and offices) and nonprogrammed spaces (courtyards, circulation space, and multi-purpose spaces) combine to make institutional spaces more inviting and lively. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/cat3.jpg" alt="CAt, Model for the Murayama project, Japan" width="518" class="imgcaption" title="Photo: © Nacasa & Partners" />
The least detailed project is the most poetic. The Murayama project, 35 kilometers west of Tokyo, rehabilitates a former 106-hectare Nissan factory site to its pre-industrial condition, including a large earth embankment on the scale of a monumental earthwork. Curving elongated hills gently rise and fall as they wrap around each other while heeding environmental flows. The project’s lone model has a ghostly paleness; only tiny red scale figures punctuate its glistening milky surface. Programmatically, the client desires an interfaith “sacred site of prayer devoid of any overt religious symbolism.” The site’s sheer scale and openness is sure to inspire as a retreat from bustling urbanity. Considering duration, this may be CAt’s biggest undertaking; begun in 2003, it is scheduled for completion in 2036.
For those who are particularly interested a 510-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Thoroughly documenting each project, the book falls victim to revealing seemingly every diagram, napkin sketch and process image and consequently is unwieldy and initially overwhelming. However, the book is nicely designed with throw out pages to help navigate its bulk and essays define the firm’s conceptual stance and process. 
CAt has developed a design methodology based on program, spatial relations, activities and movement to inform their design decisions. Because CAt is dedicated to ideas at each stage of investigation, “Cultivation” exhibits an uncommon degree of conceptual clarity and thoroughness. In short, the exhibition is sure to intrigue and inspire architects and non-architects alike.

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The CAt’s Meow

Mounting her first large scale museum exhibition, Kodue Hibino is presenting a selection taken from nearly twenty years of work, much of it from the past few years. Her selection runs the gamut from costume design to vases, from photography to apparel, from lamps to a rice cooker, and from shoes to beds. This is not a complete list, but even if it were Hibino would surely add a new product to the list before the exhibition finishes. Her work is that varied and prolific.
Color and texture are the strongest characteristics in Hibino’s work. Her attention to these details greets visitors with fifteen costumes in the first gallery. The designs range from a wearable collage of various materials and colors stitched together in a loose cacophonous net, to a lace and reinforced ribbon structural grid skirt, to a monolithic dark khaki fabric and sheer costume. Twelve accompanying sketchbooks show Hibino’s thought and design process through cartoon-like color pencil drawings. This is where her fantasies start and in the costumes and products come to life.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/koduehibino_poachblouson-st.jpg" alt="Kodue Hibino, 'Poach + Blouson-style Jacket', drawing (2007)" width="245" class="imgcaption floatl" title="Image courtesy of Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito"/><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/koduehibino_reclining-bed.jpg" alt="Kodue Hibino, 'Reclining Bed', drawing (2007)" width="245" class="imgcaption floatl" title="Image courtesy of Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito" /> 
Hibino displays an extreme sensitivity to color, texture, and pattern that most strongly manifests itself in the smaller scale works: textiles, handkerchiefs, and rugs. Intricately constructed eyeglass sculptures and insect wing-inspired sunglasses, the sun-shielding effect due to the depth of slits rather than tinted glass. However, this attention to detail gives way to fairly conventional furniture. Wooden desks and kitchen counters are Euro-American country-style. Modernist steel framed sofas and recliners, while comfortable, lack the innovation of the smaller-scaled works. 
The one exception to this scale anomaly results from going beyond the limits of convention: the extremely over-scaled and witty Soumoku no Doresu (Dress for Grass and Trees), is a giant tent-like dress suspended over a series of colorful cut-loop pile carpets (carpets of varying height fibers). After removing one’s shoes and walking under the translucent gown one can peer up the dress to see the colorful pattern become a backlit canopy of glowing leaves.
Hibino designed a series of outdoor apparel for The North Face. The garment giant produced her series of transformable clothes-bags, such as a shoulder bag that becomes a pair of pants through a series of zippings and foldings. Lacking the expressive color and texture of her previous work the clothing relies on the mass appeal of slick streamlined design, conservative colors with bright complimentary accents and its dynamic transformable character. During an opening performance Ryohei Kondo, of performance group Condors, staged a series of improvised vignettes using the clothing as costumes, characters, and props. The recorded performance is projected in the gallery.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/koduehibino_dress.jpg" alt="Kodue Hibino, 'Soumoku no Doresu (Dress for Grass and Trees)' (2006)" width="257" class="imgcaption floatl" title="Exhibition at Kanaz Forest of Creation." /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/koduehibino_kazakhstan.jpg" alt="Kodue Hibino, 'Kazakhstan', photograph (2007)" width="257" class="imgcaption floatl" title="Kamishobo Co.,Ltd. Monthly BOB. Photo: Yoshie Tominaga. H.M: Takayuki Miyamori"/> 
As an exhibit of predominantly product design, the museum uniquely displays the works not only as art objects but also as the commodities that they are. The identification labels mimic retail store price tags as they dangle from string and display the artist and exhibition logo, product information (only in Japanese), and, most importantly the objects that are for sale – and most of them are – have their price displayed. The artist and curators do well to remind viewers that these objects began their existence as commercial product designs and continue to exist as such. The temporary shop at the end of the exhibit breaks ranks with the rest of the galleries only through quantity of items and the cash register. Even the Hibino-designed display shelves throughout the exhibition are for sale, presumably available for pick-up after the exhibit closes.
Getting to the Art Tower Mito is relatively easy, but it does take a commitment. Ranging from one to two hours, by train or bus respectively, getting there is not a quick trip. “Commodity Tune-up,” while thorough, seems a small reward for the travel. It is best to plan a day trip and see some of the ATM’s cinema, performance or concert offerings and visit other museums in the area.

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