Practice Profile: Front Office Tokyo architects explain why there is nowhere like Tokyo, Clear Magazine, Issue 32, Summer 2009
Canadian Architect Will Galloway and Dutch designer Koen Klinkers are inspired by Tokyo and have created a series of stunning private houses, with their eye on even larger commissions...In a city with a notable lack of space, up-and-coming foreign architects Front Office Tokyo must be doing something right, because they have masses of it. The calmness inside their large, central Tokyo studio is remarkable, since it is Tokyo Designers Week in the city and hundreds of thousands of designers and visitors are roaming the exhibitions, openings and product launches around the capital. Stepping into their bright, open plan, apartment-turned-studio, we walk past the kitchen table piled with colorful, foam, cut out bits and into the living room meeting area. Max, their serious looking American intern sits at a makeshift workshop table, sipping tea and rearranging foam model volumes for a house project that is at conceptual design stage…. As Front Office Architects, the duo are making a name for themselves due to their sense of experimentation and their mutual goal of improving urban living in Tokyo, their adopted home. “It’s how people will put potted plants well out into the road, quietly claiming extra space in front of their homes; the way that shops and homes can be stacked one on top of the other without apparent rhyme nor reason. Small things like that are very hard to measure but taken together create a kind of ad-hoc urbanism here that is very lively.” says Galloway. Even after years in Tokyo, he still gets a big kick out of how “the city is allowed to run wild”. With Klinkers, the drama hit him almost as soon as he stepped off the plane. “The experience after arriving at Narita and driving for 1 1/2 hours to get close to the center. It was just jaw dropping what I could see out of the window. I had traveled extensively before, but had seen nothing like Tokyo.”
| frontoffice_tokyo_clear.pdf |
The Capital of Reinvention, Tokyo Designers Week 2008, NEO2 Magazine (in Spanish), February 2009
Highlights from Tokyo Designers Week included Japanese designer Nosigner’s handmade lights made with reassembled eggshells, UK-based Raw Edges Studio’s lightweight paper Pull Lights and Tokyo based designer Jurgen Lehl’s wild woven bamboo and steel stools. Japanese designers Eding Post showed a quirky concept for making recycling more fun with their POPET dolls made of colourful plastic bags stuffed with trash. Maruja Fuentes’s recycled plastic ‘Leaning Molds’ would make a colourful and practical solution street furniture in public spaces. The grounds of 100% Tokyo were home to village of cargo shipping containers with diverse works exhibited inside each one, from big name brands such as Levis and Gstar to student works from Musashino University to multimedia installations by Creative Cluster Digital gallery. Inside the 100% Design show, held in a series of big white tents, young UK designer Max Lamb demonstrated how to make his DIY Chair, a low cost and easy to assemble ‘designer’ chair produced as a series of step by step instructions on how to make it.. Download the PDF below to read the Spanish version, translated and published in NEO2 February 2009.
| tokyo_designers_weekneo2.pdf |
Practice Profile: Raw Edges Studio at Tokyo Designers Week, Azure Magazine, May/June 2009
London-based designers Raw Edges exhibited at DesignTide Tokyo 2008. I met them at the opening party and saw their lecture at Second Nature and interviewed them for Azure magazine: ...Borrowing fabrication techniques from textiles and ceramics, the duo design their architectural furniture from their Stoke Newington studio....Shay Alkalay: “A few months after we graduated from the rca, we were invited to go to China with a group of designers to do a project with Kobold, which makes accessories, bags and suitcases. By this time, we had been together for about six years and were living together, but we hadn’t really worked in a formal collaboration.
For the first time, we were designing, making, and presenting together. We realized although we have different skills and approaches – Yael likes folded, flat materials that can become 3-D, and I like mobile things and mechanisms – what we both look for is how to reinvent an object: its core, structure, how it works and how it’s used.”
Yael Mer: “We were always talking about the “raw edges” of materials. We started thinking about these words and how they represent our strategy, both with how we make things appear industrial and ragged, and keep our ideas fresh and raw. So we started using this as our name.” Read more in Azure May/June 2009 and online here.
Shigeru Ban's new Swatch Flagship store in Ginza, ArchitectureWeek magazine, March 2009.
Internationally renowned Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is known for his experimental houses using lightweight materials such as paper tubing but he here he shows he can tackle urban infill projects like the new Swatch HQ in Ginza with its growing green interior facade...The new Swatch flagship store in Tokyo's Ginza district immediately stands out from the surrounding high-end fashion boutiques on this densely packed street. There is no doorway, no visible sign, and no glass storefront. Instead, a towering four-story void in the streetscape seems to signify a civic-scale entry. The building's enormous retractable glass "shutters" create this dramatic effect when open. Then when the shutters are down — on rainy days and when the shop is closed — the building is disguised as a normal, curtain-wall office building. This unusual store, named the Nicolas G. Hayek Center, is the work of U.S.-trained Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Even at first glance, the building reveals itself as more than just a fancy facade: it is real architecture, a project about volume, spatial complexity, and experimentation. As visitors step off the busy sidewalk into the lobby of the 14-story Swatch building, no merchandise presents, and no salespeople patrol the door. A subtle change in floor material marks the low-key threshold between the sidewalk and the interior showroom. The massive lobby is dotted with glazed hydraulic elevators, planted trees, and a 13-story-tall hanging garden wall. "As we have no space for the garden on the ground floor, we are just suspending it instead," he adds. Read more here.
Second Nature 'Clouds' installation by Tokujin Yoshioka, during Tokyo Designers Week 2008, Mark Magazine, April/May 2009
Ephemeral hand-made environment with a high-tech digital aesthetic...Entering ‘Clouds’, the visitor’s first impression is one of a surprise and disorientation—rarely is art experienced in a gallery by looking up. As the light reflects on the sea of thousands of dangling transparent fibers hung from the ceiling, the effect of the gently moving strands is pleasantly disorienting, magical and atmospheric. The edges of the gallery space seem blurred, and it’s less defined where the ceiling begins or ends. If it weren’t for the other visitors in the all white environment, it would be hard to know up from down…The varying lengths and spacing of the fibers look like they were digitally designed or computed somehow, like the result of some complicated genetic algorithm or abstraction of a natural pattern (like a cloud). Surely there must be some connection to between this PVC landscape and his of-the-moment, emergent crystal research? But here Yoshioka’s concern was the visitor’s experience of the space, not highlighting a natural process or showing off a digital tool or programming code. Although during the design process, Yoshioka turned to the computer first to produce soft renderings of the space, rather than sketching or drawing by hand, he used the computer more as a way of sketching, than as a production tool. Under his supervision, about a hundred architecture students worked for a month to hand-fix the 360,000 plastic strands, individually strung on wire mesh panels…Read more in Mark Magazine April/May 2009.
Profile: Tokyo-based Chris Kirby at DesignTide Tokyo, Azure Magazine, March/April 2009
Tokyo-based Canadian designer Chris Kirby exhibited his work at DesignTide Tokyo in October 2008. I had the opportunity to spend the day with him at his studio and learned about his slip-casting process while interviewing him for Canadian magazine Azure. ...Kirby explains his innovative Compost Vase: "For my graduation project, I wanted to somehow ritualize composting, to design a better and more dignified way than simply using ice cream buckets or plastic bags … The Compost Vase developed into a flat design language, faceted and functional. I wanted it to act like a catcher’s mitt, with a wide opening for tossing stuff into it, but I also wanted it to lie flat on the counter so it could cozy up to the cutting board. It needed to take up very little space, so it sits upright like a vase. I was taking courses in porcelain at the time, and I liked the idea of tying it into dinnerware. I wanted it to be in its own class of dinnerware object, with its own associated activity, like a creamer, teapot or gravy boat. That was my challenge to myself, to make it something special, to bring composting to the dinner table."... Read more in Azure Magazine March/April 2009 and read it here.
Show Report: 100% Futures at 100% Design Tokyo, November 2008, Archinect, www.archinect.com
Archinect is the web's most established online architecture resource for professionals and students. They asked me to report -- to their more than 2 million monthly readers-- on the best student works at 100% Design Tokyo 2008. ...One small but significant part of 100% Design was 100% Futures, a show of student works that has historically been an important part of Tokyo Design Week. This is the first year that the student work has been included at the main venue of 100% Design and the students made sure 100% Futures rose to the challenge of participating along side grown up work. While end of year or graduate design student shows are nothing new, 100% Futures turned the concept on its head in scale and scope. More than 50 schools in Japan exhibiting the best student work and selective curating focused their energy on creating a coherent exhibition. Students of industrial design, interior design, architecture, graphic design, and spatial design were focused around the concepts of eat, move, comfort, protect and touch...Read more here.
Interview with Japanese designer Nosigner, Metropolis Magazine, March 2009
Japanese architect turned furniture and lighting designer Nosigner exhibited his Open Source series at Marounichi during Tokyo Designers Week 2008. ...Nosigner says: "Eggshells can be a very good material. They have a beautiful shape, good structure, and they are biodegradable. They are waste products and you can get them anywhere. Eggshells are fragile, but we can make a stronger structure by using them together in a larger shell form. The form can distribute the weakness of the material. The ‘Open Source’ series is an experimental project I am developing to make products without consumption. I am trying to share with everyone how to make design products with their own hands, without a designer, and without purchasing them—like open source software on Internet. For example, I can share how to make the lighting products made of noodles [Spring Rain light, 2007] or egg shell plant pods [Hatch planter 2008] because their materials are easy to get anywhere in the world." Read more here.
Show Report: 100% Design Tokyo, DesignTide Tokyo and Designers Week, Metropolis magazine, November 2008
Terri Peters reporting from Tokyo Designers Week: ...Inside massive white tents in the grounds of Meiji Jingu Garden in Aoyama, Tokyo, the main show was devoted to cutting edge furniture, interiors, and lighting. Japanese design brands such as Hoya Crystal and Taschen Japan were side by side with up and coming collectives such as Dutch designers Created In Holland. Highlights from local talent included Japanese furniture designers Cozy and Cozy, whose work with ‘plant designer’ Atelier Yukiyanagi looked like plastic bag trees. Jewelry designer Heigo debuted a new collection of minimal, industrial-looking wearable art. Trade Council of Iceland landed the prime spot at the main entrance, and Scottish Enterprise had a host of friendly designers on hand to chat about the diverse works on show... Read more here.
