ArchiTeam
My point of view about: Architecture and Travel
14-12-2009
【Q1】
What is the key word of new travel?
【A1】
Can you please provide your personal opinion at the following issues?
- The importance of Architectural Tourism
- The importance of travels for the Architect (and the student of Architecture)
- The role of Architecture as a destination and the added value that it creates in a city
What key word can bring the dream of new architecture into real world?
We travel to get courage for the creatinon of architecture and to shift our vision on possibility of architecture.
What is the key word of new travel?
【Q2】
What is the new travel?
【A2】
We feel power in critical architecture outside the object that it might belong in, that is, nation, regional style and worldwide fashion, etc.
Such architecture can head for a place without relation with the accent of money and power.
Travel makes it possible to stand outside power.
【Q3】
Which means?
【A3】
We believe that there is hope in the dark of the life of everybody, and brush off indignation and the anxiety to the government. And, we started making “Our architecture” fighting against the swallow to the resignation.
Yesterday … A photographer from Australia visited to us suddenly. He said he wanted to photograph our architecture. "I love the Gion-Machiya among the projects by Eastern design office. When will that be done? What? Is that an unbuilt project? Oh,no! That is a masterpiece. Too bad.” He makes me laugh. An E-mail informed me that “House with Crest” is referred by the class in the high school of architecture in Tunisia. The students who come from Germany and the Netherland to Kyoto often visit it. It is always uncertain from what source they learnt it though I ask them. A man with resistance appearannce who was issuing the online magazine maybe alone published “Horizontal house” on his online magazine in Bulgaria. Information on “Horizontal house” spreaded from there to the United States several days later. The female poet in Greece wrote about “Slit House” by poetic sentences. It leaped to London, and expanded to Europe, to South America and to Asia. The love letter having been written in the rose pictographic emoticon by the woman in Iraq arrived to us. It sayed that she loved “Villa Saitan”. Additionally she wrote that she wanted the drawings of the project to make a model. From Bangladesh a man wrote to us. It sayed “As for my country, the communication is controlled, please send us some references and books”. A certain sensibility has been expanded.
Invisible community by people with thick accent !
【Q4】
Which is your travel?
【A4】
Our travel is not to praise great architectural statues. The destination of our far travel road has not been drawn on the picture yet. There are no descriptions about it even in the cultural book and the encyclopedia either. The city guide book doesn’t notice at all. It is not even in the famous travel guide books and the pamphlets of the travel agency either.
Our destination is not a resort. It is not a vacationland either. We are different from the coverage crew who wanders about the design event and Viennarre of each city without consciousness. Our travel is different. Our eyes and bodies are quite different from it of the critic like the onlooker who continues the minor change while confirming the boring theory on city.
【Q5】
What is the key word of new travel?
【A5】
The person who had been together until yesterday doesn’t sit down at the seat of the table, and start on a travel by chance today. Why do you chase travel? Why do you dream?
You enter the dead-end road of the history over an inner border and the boundary, and enter nothing in the destroyed world. What drives you to such travel?
【Q6】
What is the key word of our new travel?
【A6】
It is “My eyes” that comes off from the center of last dead-end road. From my side it illumes people with whom I come in contact. It tries to add a new aspect and another view point to the last dead-end road. When you become aware of the action studies of new eyes, you will find another destination of travel.
Travel doesn’t receive the depravity that something unseen by anyone is not left in the world. We should be conscious of that architectural masterpieces, the shot in the movies and the photographs, and the image in the guidebooks of city and architecture serve just a refference.
For instance,
a. The confusion of the projects in Tienchin in which it aims to catch up with the development of Beijing shows that all projects demand money from the goverment and the capital.
b. The party who has caused the trouble in Mexico City is putting up electric wires illegally on the roof for lover tonight. It is my friend who drives the truck loaded with the water tank to put water in the water tower on the roof. One of them will cross the border tomorrow. There is a little skirts of a mountain of Rancho (farm) where the sheafs of corn are piled up in the south here. The government keeps building the social housings in Barragan color of imitation there. 370000 mexican peso MXN (22000 euro €) (250 million JPY) for 3 rooms apartment. However, who on earth lives there?
c. As for me? My house is in Brooklyn even if working at East Side. I tagged along with my girl friend to “Yesterday’s museum”. There were foolish art works enough to make me headache. You underatnd, don’t you? I am taking a train. I go down under the iron bridge. And, I disappear in the town.
d. In one country town in Japan. I am surprised at happy animated feeling there in the evening. The Japanese usually calmly goes home in the evening. Any town is desolate in the evening. Here is different. A glad shout of children playing football. Language of foreign country. They are immigrants of Latin (foreign nationality resident). Father comes back from the factory. His wife says something to him from the window of an old apartment. And, he goes out to the downtown. Children at play. Vigor from which the town is lost is woken up. Japanese in local also participate in the vigor. I was passing the time away for happiness harmony in the town indefinitely.
We train various abilities to imagine architecture and the city in future by touching the place where man lives.
【Q7】
What is the key word of new travel?
【A7】
1. Extinction of the grobal master architects→ Instead → Emerging interest on local architecture
2. Extinction of the universal mainstream→ Instead → Mainstream in change at a blistering speed.
3. Priority level of the value of some architect falls down.→ Instead → Architects of the third country gain in. The enjoyment actually used can be felt only to see a little from their architecture.
【Q8】
Do people need Architecture?
【A8】
The house that we are designing now will become a masterpiece. The client is a mixed blood of Asian woman. She lived in a flat on Trastevere in Rome, a hill in Newport, and in Singapore. This time in Japan. “I exhaust money, and have no more money. “ she says. Her mind is abyss of mystery, is does an exile, and, therefore, is aristocratic. We are making an effort to design her preference in novelty though low cost. Such an age today.
People who need architecture have changed. Aristocrat with no money. Japanese with no Japanese looks. Money is not put out to being. The egg in one’s beer is to live in a marginal land or in a simple silence in a center of a city. The final point is a cheap villa to which can be got in two hours. To imagine that only space of one table just to spend with my lover is my castle. .....If becoming it so, architecture comes to have a pop subject.
【Q9】
What is the key word of new travel?
【A9】
In the future, people who pant because it has no money will become people in all around the world. Where is a place with a new and multiple impact that is requested by middle classers, people who were the millionaires and people who pushed their way top?
【Q10】
Can you suggest the ten most important modern architecture buildings to be visited worldwide?
【A10】
The architecture that we choose as the destination on our far travel road is ever more different.
The famous architecture called someone somewhere a masterpiece is not our destination. What we seek is something outside of power. Poetry of our life-size.
We should visit the following architectures.
1. ”Hasso-ken (8 windows arbor)” in Manshuin Temple
We found this as a masterpiece of tea house. But no one can still criticize it appropriately
Site : Kyoto, Japan
2. ” Museum of Gibellina and Secret Garden” by Francesco Venezia
Italian fantasy
Site : Gibellina Nuova, Italy
3. ”Boa Nova Tea House and Restaurant” by Alvaro Siza
Image of the edge of Europe
Site : Portugal
4. The Gandhi ”Sevagram Aashram”
Deep pop of India.
Site : Wardh Maharashtra, India
5. “Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta” in Habana, Cuba
Deep rumba that sounds from its bottom.
Site : Habana, Cuba
6. The Great Wall
The peak of self-defend architecture
Site : China
7. Works by Felix Candela
Liberty that shines in poverty
Site : Mexico
8. Ishiminedera Temple
Mysterious temple that no one knows though a lot of late works by Jakuchu Ito can be found there.
Site : Kyoto, Japan
9. ”Nara Mondadori House” and “Darcy Ribeiro House” by Oscar Niemeyer
Two seaside houses by Oscar Niemeyer
Site : "Nara Mondadori House" ; Cap Ferrat, France
Site : "Darcy Ribeiro House" ; Marica Rio de Janeiro,Brazil
10. Works by EASTERN design office
Bringing in a new way of appreciation!
Discover “EASTERN design office”