Category: Lab Life

Prof. Obuchi’s design team, Cast on Cast, from Design Research Lab at Architectural Association in London has received Holcim Awards “Next Generation” 1st prize 2011 Europe for their design thesis project on Efficient Fabrication System for Geometrically Complex Building Elements. www.holcimfoundation.org/Portals/1/docs/A11/EUR/Posters/A11EUng1UK.pdf

In response to a call for a design proposal for a small community house to be constructed at temporary housing areas in northeastern Japan, we have submitted our design. This event was organized by the 5 established Japanese architects (Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma, Kazuyou Sejima, Riken Yamamoto, Hiroshi Naito). Instead of designing a building, our idea was to design an environment where the shelters’ residents could come together to grow plants and nurture the spirit of community; as a result, they grow architecture.

This video shows the current state of our Stick team’s project. Their ambition is to develop a manufacturing system that integrates the potential of mass-production, which optimises efficiency in terms of the amount of material and production time, and the logic of mass-customisation, which maximises the possible variations in terms of formal outputs. Their project explores the issue of discarded logs in forests in Japan. Due to the increase in cheap lumbers being imported from Europe and North America, Japanese forest industry has lost its grip on competitive global lumber markets. As a result, many forests have now become abandoned causing problems for both their economy and ecosystem. The project also aims to bridge a link between Japan’s wood working traditions and computational fabrication techniques.

This project is built on Frei Otto’s experiment on Form-Finding, which is a formal and structural optimisation process based on material’s inherent distributional logic.

Joined by professors from University of Tokyo Department of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Urban Planning, we presented our work in progress. Since we were given only 10 minutes to present our four projects, we’ve made a short promotion video of our studio. We will try to upload the video in the coming days after tweaking a few unresolved sound issues.

Obuchi Lab and Kengo Kuma Lab visited areas destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami. Although all of us have seen those places on the news more than a hundred times, but seeing them in real was an overwhelming experience. The magnitude of devastations was absolutely beyond words.

Here are some rendered images from our last studio project – Tokyo Station Performative Ceiling.

Lab life of G30 studio after Super Review in New York and Princeton. Images include Deans Day BBQ at Princeton University, office visit to Jesse Reiser + Nanako Umemoto’s office, Glass House by Kengo Kuma, street of Chinatown and unknown food in New York City.

After 1.5 months form the earthquake, we have begun to pick up the pace again on our design research project. This term’s our focus is to develop a prototype for synthetic urban ecology in Tokyo, creating a new kind of infrastructure and architecture. Although, we have not yet completed our project, we traveled to New York and joined a final review – called super review – at Princeton and Colombia also joined by Tsingha University from Beijing.

While the university’s engineering department remains closed till May 6, Obuchi Lab G30 Studio met in a café to discuss the progress on their ongoing studio projects. Current studio topics, including alternative power plant, floating forest that generates fresh air by plankton in Tokyo bay, structure built with mussels which also functions as water purification system, will be developed further and will be presented at Princeton University joined by Columbia University and Tsingha University.

As usual, the AA is quick in making actions. To support the victims of the earthquake in Japan, Shin Egashira of the AA organized a fundraising event at the AA’s terrace, provided with yakitori and grilled food.