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Architectural Environments For Tomorrow

The exhibition curated by SANAA includes dozens of architects and artists who reflect on recent environmental upheavals and question the relationship between nature and architecture.

Architectural Environments for Tomorrow: New Spatial Practices in Architecture and Art surveys scenarios of urban and environmental transformation through spatial experiments that act on the relationships between people, nature and technology, and ultimately exploring the limits of the nature/artifice dichotomy. Curated by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, at the invitation of Yuko Hasegawa, Chief Curator of MOT-Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the exhibition reflects on recent environmental disasters, such as the March 11 Japanese tsunami through the contributions of 28 architects and artists. strongly questioning the relationship between nature and architecture.

The exhibition opens with a scale model of the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne designed by SAANA; a huge single-room space that sits on the ground with its undulating form, almost like coral, creating a complex interplay of relationships between interior and exterior. Next is a series of models by Akihisa Hirata, the rising star of Japanese architecture who works on organic structures. The principal model is Architectural Farm, a building complex whose form originates from a single wall that folds in on itself: a self supporting structure that recalls the form of a sponge. Junia Ishigami, Golden Lion Winner at the last Biennale, fills the museum's main space with a piece that again uses air as a structural element. The installation, entitled Bubble Glass consisting of 25 sheets of glass joined together, seems to float in the room with the help of an air generator. Light and imposing at the same time, the piece communicates the experience of space, of matter and of balance.
Top: AMID. cero9, <i>ESA Pavilion,</i> 2010. Photo Daichi Ano. Above, in foreground, Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, Rolex Learning Center EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne), 2007, model. On the wall, Walter Niedermayer. Photo: Daici Ano
Top: AMID. cero9, ESA Pavilion, 2010. Photo Daichi Ano. Above, in foreground, Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, Rolex Learning Center EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne), 2007, model. On the wall, Walter Niedermayer. Photo: Daici Ano
The show unfolds in a spatial and conceptual continuum, a fluid route that dissolves the difference between the disciplines. Sejima says that "today there is no difference between art and architecture." The work of art thus find a new narrative context alongside architecture, as in Garden Wall by El Anatsui, a carpet of flowers made with the bottoms of aluminum cans which can seem like a work of landscape design when shown near the drawings of Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf.

Sejima's attempt to show work "in progress" is evident throughout the exhibit. Architectural offices are reconstructed and opened to visitors in order to show the creative processes in evolution. One of these is Segalscano, a Madrid architectural firm that uses a wide variety of materials and techniques to recreate organic-looking structures. A rich series of study models displayed on shelves introduce visitors to the many possibilities that architectural forms can embody if they are realized.
El Anatsui, <i>Garden Wall,</i> 2011. Photo Daici Ano.
El Anatsui, Garden Wall, 2011. Photo Daici Ano.
The lower floor houses the museum's model of T project (Teshima Art Museum) by Ryue Nishizawa and artist Rei Nato. Through a sophisticated process of curvature, the building is shaped like a drop of water, completely immersed in the nature of the hills of the island of Teshima dominating the entire bay. The museum has three large openings in its concrete shell that let the wind and light flow through a mobile structure that changes depending on the season. The Golden Dome by the Madrid office Amid.cero 9, designed for the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris, is also an organic-looking installation - an inflatable structure that moves in the city's interstitial spaces among trees and buildings with the aim of defining collaborative space. Once again Sejima's attention focuses on public space, the space where people "meet in architecture".
Architectural offices are reconstructed and opened to visitors in order to show the creative processes in evolution.
El Anatsui, <i>Garden Wall,</i> 2011. Photo Daici Ano.
El Anatsui, Garden Wall, 2011. Photo Daici Ano.
Sejima redesigns a trajectory that is similar to the last Architecture Biennale in Venice questioning the concept of "environment" in architecture in relation to the corporeal experience of space. Although the museum context does not encourage the understanding of the works meant to be experienced in full scale and disturbs their spatial continuity, the show provides some interesting insight into how architects and artists reproduce the experience of nature in their work with different sensibilities and solutions. All filtered by Sejima's curatorial and aesthetic choice, which seems to make use of the works on exhibit to talk of her own architecture—a novel way to explore the creative universe one of today's most influential architects.
Akihisa Hirata, Study Models. Photo Daici Ano.
Akihisa Hirata, Study Models. Photo Daici Ano.
The exhibit is part of the Tokyo Culture Creation Project that seeks to create an encounter between art, architecture and design through collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art of Tokyo and the Tokyo University of the Arts and through the organization of a series of events throughout the city.
Selgascano, from <i>OURShELVES,</i> 1999-2011. Photo Daici Ano.
Selgascano, from OURShELVES, 1999-2011. Photo Daici Ano.
On display: AMID.cero9, El Anatsui, The Ministry of Culture of The Kingdom of Bahrain, Petra Blaisse, Mike Starn, Sou Fujimoto, Antón García-Abril, Frank O. Gehry, Hiroshi Hara, Roland Hagenberg, Akihisa Hirata, Junya Ishigami, Toyo Ito, Christian Kerez, Haruka Kojin, Tetsuo Kondo, Luisa Lambri, Walter Niedermayr, Piet Oudolf, Smiljan Radic, Matthew Ritchie, Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, SANAA, Matthias Schuler, Studio Mumbai, Fiona Tan, Wim Wenders.
Architectural Environments For Tomorrow: New Spatial Practices in Architecture and Art
October 29, 2011–January 15, 2012
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan

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