Advanced Design Studies Blog: Critical Mass
We have successfully transported our first Obuchi Lab+Digital Fabrication Lab full-scale project from our campus to the heart of Shinjuku’s Kabukicho MOA Street, and finished reassembling it as we planned (with unexpected rain towards the end). The pavilion is open to the public from October 15 to October 23, 2011.
We have been busy constructing a pavilion for the upcoming event in Shinjuku, Tokyo. We started designing the pavilion in mid August, and ever since, we’ve been working non-stop to materialize our design. We will upload more images of actual installation in Shinjuku in the coming days.
Minimal Surface Pavilion
As an attempt to create a structure as light as possible while generating a complex spatial geometry, a shrink-wrap membrane was used as tension element connecting two independent rings together. The concept of Minimal Surface Pavilion was conceived as urban furniture providing a place to sit and to gather for passerby.
G30 joined an exhibition at Italian Cultural Centre In Tokyo. The event was organized as part of International Architectural Congress Tokyo 2011.
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.
