Japan recently experienced the heaviest rainfall in more than three decades with major floods and landslides that left a trail of death and destruction behind.
Dramatic natural phenomena radically transform a territory in a short span of time, but decade after decade and year after year, a country goes through slower processes that change and transform it.
Japan experienced a rise in industrial productivity in the 20th century and modernization also introduced divisions in society that materialised in architecture, urbanism and territorial planning.
This evolution has been increasingly questioned by architects and it is currently being addressed at the Japan Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice.
Curated by Momoyo Kaijima, ETHZ Professor of Architectural Behaviorology, Associate Professor of University of Tsukuba, and co-founder of Atelier Bow-Wow (with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto), in collaboration with Laurent Stalder, ETHZ Professor of Theory of Architecture and Director of the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, and Yu Iseki, Curator at Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito, the pavilion is entitled "Architectural Ethnography".
The pavilion could be defined as a collective exhibition in which architectural drawings, illustrations and occasional mixed media models - traditional tools to conceptualize, organize and build space - are studied and their roles in transforming society is revealed.
Selected from the last 20 years, the forty-two works from all over the world originate from university design studios, architectural offices or artistic practices.
The selection includes drawings with design specifications and spatial-activity charts, maps of urban hybrids and, very aptly, large studies of rural farming and fishing villages following natural disasters.
The materials included in the pavilion do not only show how a building may be planned, but become ethnographical documents that allow to discuss and evaluate architecture and therefore discover more about society.
Visitors are requested not to passively stare at the works, but to fully enjoy them in a game that involves magnifying lenses to observe the lines, the colours of the surfaces and the various details, and devices that allow further in-depth engagement with the materials on display.
Ladders, chairs on rollers and binoculars can indeed be used to look at the drawings from other perspectives and decipher the tiniest details included in them.
The open space on the ground floor outside the pavilion is organized with a Yatai Market (with carts built with metal and see-through panels reminiscent of light windows - maybe one of the pavilion supporters, YKK AP Inc. Window Research Institute, helped coming up with these designs) and urban furniture.
This section is a place to draw, debate, rest, study, eat or simply meet other people and share the discoveries about the various materials on display upstairs or questions other guests about the meaning of architecture as portrayed by the various projects.
This exhibition is an extension of a project on which Kaijima has been working since the late 1990s that has focused on people's lives and on the reality of cities in a form of guidebook using architectural drawings as references and questioning the nature of architecture from the perspective of its users and employing at times a humorous point of view.
Kaijima's own project has so far received a strong response in and outside of the country, and maybe the approach of the pavilion will prompt other researchers to start considering architectural ethnography as a new methodology for social engagement.
Image credits for this post
Images 1, 2 and 13: Installation view of Architectural Ethnography, the Japan Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2018, Copyright Andrea Sarti/CAST1466, photo coutesy of the Japan Foundation.
All other images by Anna Battista
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