co+labo radović    Kengo Kuma opens Keio Architecture Comprehensive Design Workshop 

co+labo is central to organisation of the new, exciting design-research project, a Comprehensive Design Workshop for the Athletic and Recreational Facilities of the Hiyoshi, Shimoda, and Yagami Campuses. In the period April 2018-July 2019 the Workshop, which will be bringing together a number of Keio Architecture and associated laboratories, addressing hypothetical spatial transformations of sports, recreation and wellbeing facilities in the area where three Keio Campuses are located, which consists of complex, diverse interlocking urban, community and university spaces and practices. The project will include numerous design studios and research projects.
Commensurate to the magnitude and importance of Design Workshop was its opening. On Wednesday 11 April, the Workshop was opened by Kengo Kuma's lecture Design and Engineering. Celebrated architect and professor at the University of Tokyo has started his academic career at Keio and, in 2009, co+labo radović was established proudly building upon the tradition of Keio Kuma Lab.
The event at Keio Hiyoshi Campus included an official launch of Keio Architecture, the first book that brings together best of students works produced during the previous two years, 2016-17 (see below). The volume was entirely produced and edited by students of Keio Architecture, and is marked by their desire to help establish a discrete course under such name.
The guest speaker and the book was introduced by Kohei Itoh, Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology, and Darko Radović, a leader of Comprehensive Design Workshop.

co+labo radović    Professor Vladimir Lojanica opens 2018 guest lecture series @ co+labo   

The first invited guest lecturer in the new school year at co+labo is Vladimir Lojanica, a distinguished practising architect, Professor and Head of Department of Architecture at the University of Belgrade. The lecture and research seminar were illustrated by the latest of Vladimir's projects, Rajićeva shopping centre located at the very urban core of Belgrade. While fulfilling all the commercial requirements, the project does not succumb to commercialism. With fine urbanist sensibility, the Complex celebrates and enhances an extremely complex location, one of the key hubs of rich public life in the city.

co+labo radović               another competition award for a co+labo student team                   

Close to the end of the 2017-18 graduate design competitions season  we are glad to inform about another award which a co+labo team. The team was composed of three students from three generations - second and first Masters and final year undergraduate studies - Yamamori Hisamu (now working for Shimizu Corporation), Kobayashi Daisuke and Samejima Takuomi received recognition at the Circos International Architecture Competition held in Nagoya. 
Warm co+labo congratulations for both the collaborative way in which the work has been conducted and the award itself!
(below: panels by Samejima/left, Kobayashi/right and Samejima's presentation to the Jury/middle)

co+labo radović   with a farewell party for our graduates, co+labo ends 2017 and enters 2018  

As perviously reported at this blog, in the school year 2017-18 five co+labo students completed their Masters Theses and will, from the start of April, be pursuing their professional careers. Younger co+labo students have organised a traditional farewell party for their sempai, which this time coincided with hanami, a beautiful cherry-blossom viewing season.

Best co+labo wishes to Riho Tanaka, Ryoto Amano, Shota Kusano, Akitaka Suzuki and Hisamu Yamamori! They all gave their best, an excellent contribution to the culture of our laboratory and, most recently, to our efforts towards the establishment of Keio Architecture - an ambitious plan with which we enter the school year 2018-19. 

In those efforts the latest, 2017-18 cohort of our graduates will stay with us, as ... once co+labo, always co+labo.

  

co+labo radović   co+labo busy break continues with ... a season of graduate competitions  

Regular Japanese graduate design competitions season  is in progress. co+labo's Takuomi Samejima and Norimi Kinoshita have completed their participation, with success in Sendai, Fukuoka and Japanese Institute of Architecture Kanazawa contests.

Takuomi Samejima (prestigious Sendai Competition: top 11), finalist (top 8) in Fukuoka)

Norimi Kinoshita (Konno Chie Award ai JIA Kanazawa Competition)
Congratulations to all co+labo members who took part in these competitions, the experience from which is considered to be among the key "secrets" of an undeniable success of Japanese architecture.

co+labo radović           co+labo busy break continues with ... a Conference at TU Munich      

At Smart Sustainable Sensuous Settlements Transformation Conference, which was held at TU Munich 7-8 March 2018, Darko presented parts of the latest work on quality of urban life in the paper Towards Redefinition of Urban Quality - the subversive pleasures of encounters with water (co-authored with Professor Davisi Boontharm, Meiji University, and Hisamu Yamamori, co+labo). In response to the flow of the Conference, Darko's talk itself consisted of seven digressions to the paper, which were aimed at focusing discussion at the need for true interdisciplinarity in urbanism. Several excerpts from those polemological interventions are presented in the selection of slides, below.

co+labo radović    co+labo busy break continues with ... Darko meets co+labo OB in Milano 

10 March 2018: Yamashita Shohei, Professor Gabriele Masera, Salvatore Nastasi, Luca Sironi, DR, Andrea Bonaiti and Enrico Sterle 
(photo: Professor Akira Mita)

co+labo radović   lecture+exhibition And... yet another Tokyo! @ORIS House of Architecture

On 27 February at ORIS, House of Architecture in Zagreb, Croatia, Darko Radović gave a lecture and Davisi Boontharm  an impromptu exhibition addressing the set of themes central to their research and work of co+labo radović, the concepts of ordinary and extraordinary, in architecture, urbanism and in the ways we live. The talk and exhibition were introduced by Andrija Rusan (an architect, Editor in Chief and spiritus moves of the broad cultural project called Oris) and Tadej Glažar (Professor of Architecture at the University of Ljubljana and, along co+labo, regular contributor to Anatomy of Islands 2012-16). In the media of words and drawings, Darko and Davisi introduced ordinary, dominant Tokyo which reluctantly opens itself to the stranger, and how they decided to embrace, for the foreigners rare, opportunity to live, explore and teach architecture and urbanism in one of the indisputable capitals of design culture. For that, one needs to learn how to enjoy what Barthes described as “the murmuring mass of an unknown language” which in Tokyo, indeed, “constitutes a delicious protection, envelops the foreigner […] an auditory film which halts at his ears all the alienations of the mother tongue”. In Tokyo they both understood Georges Perec, learned to observe and how to accept that, sometimes, one simply can not understand. Only then, Tokyo gives itself generously, opens up in its own, beautiful and provocative ways.

And ... yet Another Tokyo focused at some extraordinary places, practices and moments within the ordinary, lived Tokyo. Visual explorations of extraordinary-within-the-ordinary captured in Davisi's visual, drawing and watercolour diaries, both announced and, literally, unfolded in parallel with Darko's talk. The following day, Professor Glažar and the well-known architectural  critic, writer and an executive editor in Oris, Maroje Mrduljaš conducted a wide-ranging interview with Darko, which is going to feature in one of the future issues of the magazine.

co+labo radović    with DG+OBkai co+labo officially finishes school year 2017+starts... 2018 

(more about this year's co+labo radović DearGirls+OldBoys Party, and why this was a very special one follows soon) 

co+labo radović  co+labo WISHES YOU A HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR, A YEAR OF THE DOG