Why am I based in China? It’s because I am able to make things. Not only are there many opportunities for work, the situation there is different from Japan. The speed at which things are decided. The way autonomous architecture is built. The participation right from the making of the program. The vastness of the projects. The possibility of expression with handcraft. The aspiration toward novelty. I think that these kinds of situations change the status of architecture.
I establish characteristic “themes” in each project, from scale of the physical body up to the scale of the city. Along with giving clarity to the designs, their purpose is to make strong spaces and architecture that will not be overwhelmed by the Chinese situation.
This exhibition displays projects concentrated on "realization." The exhibition spaces are composed with furniture designed for interior projects. In order to see each project at eye level, the ground lines of the models are set at a height of 1.3m. Here the "themes" are arrayed in the appearance of a fictitious town.
Keiichiro Sako
Unchanging, unmoving, I want to make the kind of place that will always be the same whenever I go there. Having begun to work like this in China, I thought deeply about it. It’s perhaps because, while I feel a yearning mixed with astonishment at the vigor of the rapidly changing townscape of Beijing, I also feel a kind of anxiety. The speed of change has a strength that threatens not only the users but also the makers of architecture, and each day I am forced to look back from this standpoint.
As a designer, I think that when making architecture, at the very minimum we can achieve something that doesn’t change, which is no more than the preparation of something that gives safety to people using it. Notwithstanding the ways it might be used, the thing that remains should be fixed in a shape appropriate to the place – isn’t that the potential of architecture? Adjusting the degree of fixity of things is itself the act of design, I think. I will bring to Japan the buildings and interiors I have fixed in China up to now, and introduce them in the form of this exhibition for a fixed period of two and a half months.
Hironori Matsubara
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(Winter holidays : Dec.23-Jan.7)
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