Did moving to Japan change the way you actually view what constitutes culture?
I guess so because you know the whole gross national product, there’s a writer that was talking about Japanese manga and made culture so it did make me think that those types of things are culture whereas I hadn’t understood that maybe living in the west, that cartoon manga could be a really big part of someone’s life or could be mainstream contemporary culture. To understand that contemporary living can be seen as a culture.
For me to go to Japan would be a massive scale shift. Is that how you felt going from Britain to Japan, like an amplification?
I never thought about it like that. I think because the Tokyo we touch is kind of smaller because we don’t necessarily read and write and interact with all of it so we live in a quite tight circle and we even do in the architectural world too.
We live in the Ito biosphere and that doesn’t mean we can go to Isozaki’s parties.
You know there’s quite a clear defined social group, so your worlds are not massive but you’re in a massive place. So culturally we’re kept in like, to some extent, the foreigner biosphere which is linked to an Ito biosphere and I think that’s why many people belong to clubs and their fashion is an affinity to bring, maybe that’s what’s going on that they’re using that to reduce the scale of the city. So I think that maybe one reason that people search for kind of a club or a connection to keep it small. I’ve only just thought of that. I’m not sure if that’s right or wrong. I don’t know. Good question.
Well I guess while we’re on the topic of kind of relationships, how do you see the role of marketing within architecture? Specifically in context is super deluxe.
Yeah I guess that again I think Super Deluxe was, or Deluxe as it was to start with, was to do with not having the Royal College of Art on the doorstep or we were trying to build a mini Royal College.
And then that’s how that started. So we made a collective and I think having the events there once or twice a month was about building a network, of friends, acquaintances, artists which would help build our network for the office so we’re not born in Japan, we don’t have, our parents are not famous, rich or influential. How do you build that through so it was a conscious subconscious tool for building a network in Japan fairly quickly, artistically and also a place that we could entertain because you can’t entertain at home, so all entertaining is done out of your home. You can’t invite people around because you live in a small apartment so it was all a part of
The ultimate club house?
Yeah it was our front room is what deluxe really became. Pecha Kucha was only when we set up the new space super deluxe and we didn’t have enough events and that’s really the reason we set it up because we were still in the red. It was a marketing tool, yeah it was definitely a marketing tool because we always showed at the end, we showed our work every night so it was a marketing tool at that level. We never thought that it would become a thing that went round the world.
It’s a balance and so of course we want people to know we’ve done it but we’ve also got to keep the distance from it. It’s lucky that we do fairly good work because we can’t be seen surfing on other people’s coat tails. But there’s also a casualness to it we want to keep and that’s why our website hasn’t been updated recently but we’re not too worried about that because it gives a more relaxed approachable feel to it. That’s an excuse, because we haven’t updated it.
Playfulness is present in lots of your projects, is that a thoughtful decision to make the work light hearted?
We want to do things we enjoy, things that other people enjoy and make a smile on the face and people remember those types of things. You don’t remember bad experiences, you want to remember good things.
Do you think that’s the way to engage the public? Or a wider public?
Well it’s one way and I think we have to use many, many tools to engage the public, whether it’s the tallest, thinnest, but I think no-one is engaging the public in that way at all. But when you look through a magazine, if you look at an advert on TV, half of them are humorous so there must be something there about attracting people’s attention and to keep delivering a message. So we think humour and twist, as opposed to jokes. Most people are very afraid to use colour in any way, shape or form. They’re all tools that we want to bring to the table.
Would you say that you’re looking for opportunity?
Well you’re always trying to, we see around us, every building we look at is a lost opportunity in Japan, 90% of the architecture in Japan is built by construction companies, not by architects and they’re very well done but every time it’s a missed opportunity. We could have done something better, something more interesting, something more colourful, something that engages it to the correct scale. We’re trying to make something out of the tiny little grains of whatever we’re given. I think that there’s not enough of that, people not trying to hustle a living and this is all about trying to do more than you’re asked to do.