co+labo radović co+labo's Samejima Taku@Todai on architecture and form + much more 

Following his presentation so co+labo and TAUD 2O2O students at Keio, our Samejima-san continues the development of his theme with a talk at the University of Tokyo - by zooming into the themes opened and zooming out, to explore the widest horizons of his interests. He explains that, very much in tune with Darko's own gaijin fascinations and frustrations discussed and problematised within TAUD since its inauguration on 2009, he is going to argue how "the impossibility of the translation between 'Architecture' and kenchiku precisely lies in the matter of 'Form'. If kenchiku made its prior concerns on the problem of 間 (ma = space, atmosphere), or the interface between Interior and Exterior, or its harmony with the surrounding environment, 'Architecture' on the other hand, has been dealing with the matter of 'How to create buildings as a Form-Object?'." Samejima-san claims how "it is not an overstatement to say that History of 'Architecture', is precisely the History of Form. This can be seen in the continuous discourse on Form, from Brunelleschi, Alberti, Bramante to Palladio, Borromini, and even to Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Aldo Rossi and O. M. Ungers. Such discourse on Form can still be seen in the contemporary dialogue among architects in the US, continuous from Renaissance for more than 500 years." He promises that in his Todai lecture "I will talk about this 'Matter of Form', through my Graduation thesis done in co+labo, education at Yale, fFormal Analysis with Peter Eisenman, Studio curriculums, and by introducing some of the contemporary discourses in the US. Such topics will include 'Image-culture', 'Theories on color', 'Pop-Post-Modernism', 'Primitive Forms' and 'Object-Oriented Ontology'. The discussion will elaborate this topic on Form in relation with contemporary issues such as 'Black Lives Matter' movement, the recent presidential election in US, and the age of Anthropocene and so on." For co+labo, this is a moment to cherish, a moment when one of our own takes off high, into the fascinating confluences of diverse architectural histories, theories and practice(s). Samejima-san's departure to Yale helped him enter the fertile fields of thinking about built environments which, to a careful observer and learner as he is, expose the limitations of both strong, but still regional Japanese ways, and of domineering, but still weak and insufficient "American" ways. The world of architecture is always richer and - what to say about the worlds of urbanism. At co+labo and at co+re we hope and we promise to wholeheartedly support discussions of the kind which Samejima-san brings back to his laboratory, and to his own intellectual world in the making.

 co+labo radović TAUD 2O2O special lectures 6+7: Tamao Hashimoto and Tetsuo Kondo 

The series of TAUD guest lectures continues with presentations by two inspirational architects and long-standing co+labo associates - Tamao Hashimoto and Tetsuo Kondo. Tamao-san, after his successful work at Geidai, recently joined Nihon Fukushi University. In his work, he focuses on a notation of the city, based on the scale of the body/directness "explores a way for celebrating our everyday life. In this case, the celebration means kind of the representation, the mediation, and the configuration of architectural /urban space twisted together with our daily routine, which looks like same repetition but there are quite diverse and overlapped rhythm physically & socially." At the scale of the body/directness, in his own words, Tamao "mainly tries to deal with choreography of movement, as a key term for representing architectural/urban situation, and at the scale of the architecture, he is tying to mediate a series of territorial conditions with spatial configuration of architecture. And, at the scale of the city, even though it’s still conceptual, he keeps describing a series of eccentric, conflicted, and peripheral conditions of the relationship between physical and social structures of the city." In his practical design, Tamao has adapted a method of mapping the city, such as trajectory, time-geography, and personal space, onto residential design process (left). And, in his design-research, he starts to deal with facility of mental disability, "which might be key for figuring out hidden essential relationship between object, human, and design, without reducing purposive affordance. Since Modernism, specifically speaking, since Alexander Klein described the circulation of human movement inside of a house around 1920, by following Taylor system, the circulation of human movement has been kept as a static/linear relic of lived experience of everyday life. From the point of view for tackling those situations, this work tries to invent for notating conceived, perceived, and lived spatial experience onto the static/linear relic of that."

Tetsuo Kondo who, after seven years at SANAA, since 2006 runs his own Tetsuo Kondo Associates, will address TAUD students live, focusing on the theme of "Architecture and people" as addressed in some of his latest projects, such as Inujima Hoppy Bar and Shichigahama (below).