Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow Wow
Momoyo Kaijima recently visited New Zealand where, amongst various speaking engagements and studio sessions, she spared some time to talk to Sarosh Mulla and Patrick Loo about teaching, clients and Bow-Wow.
Since forming Atelier Bow-Wow1 in 1992, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima have been producing some of the quirkiest and most subtly nuanced work of their generation. Their seemingly light hearted name masks what is an extremely insightful research based practice. Not to say they are paper architects. Their projects range in scale and are defined by their spatial inventiveness, rather than aesthetic brand. They have gained notoriety for shoe-horning complex buildings into tightly packed urban neighbourhoods. This notoriety has developed steadily into a loyal following and as Japanese architecture becomes more and more the focus of the international discourse, Bow-Wow are set to become central to that discourse.
The Bow-Wow pair are prolific. They have published and built an enormous amount of work in their relative short careers thus far. The sheer quantity of the work is matched by its quality. The work stems from effective, practically useful research and is aided by the growing pedagogical role of laboratories within architecture programmes. Kaijima’s own laboratory is based at Tsukuba University and is a mixture of undergraduate, masters and doctoral students. In her own words, “the university is a good kind framework for public responsibility” and this belief can be seen throughout Atelier Bow-Wow’s academic and practitioner pursuits. For Kaijima university work allows for a dedication to the design idea, meaning that architecture does not have to submit to being “business more than research”. For Atelier Bow-Wow design at the most fundamental level needs to be ”for our enjoyment, for our pleasure” otherwise in their eyes “quality will go down”.
When asked how they manage to squeeze in enough time for both practice and research Kaijima points out “Time is always continuous. When the two sets of work are close together you can get them to work a little bit easier together.” This seemingly obvious point is difficult for practitioners within the New Zealand context to grapple with as they struggle to find a way to make teaching and practice fit together within the existing framework, especially when there are many examples of foreign practitioners making research based practice work successfully.
Both Tsukamoto and Kaijima teach at some of the most progressive architectural institutes in the world, such as Harvard GSD and ETH Zurich. These institutions are known for pursuing discourses that are focused on the way design is approached. This can be seen in Bow-Wow’s research into what might be thought of as evolutionary urbanism, that is, the way the city makes and remakes itself within its own laws of selection. Their investigations into small “pet architecture” showed how in-between spaces get adopted and developed in Tokyo, often resulting in quirky assemblages that don’t occur in greenfield sites, or even in less densely populated cities. Following these investigations the practice also presented speculative “pet architectures” that they envisaged, but are yet to be realised. Of course when you’re a firm that realises there can be no wasted space within the city, there is going to be a translation into the domestic realm. Within their houses every space is exploited. A lesson that is so useful for a country now that is learning to deal with urban densification. Atelier Bow-Wow teach us that while the dreams of 1/4 acre living may now be disappearing or becoming too expensive for most, we must not view being squished back towards the city as necessarily a bad thing. It forces an exciting re-imagining of what constitutes domestic space.
Behaviourology stands as a complete
reversal of the ubiquitous uniformity of style, colour, shape and volume
characterized by the International style and the subsequent decades of reticence that characterized the period following the demise of post-modernism.
Behaviourology is the title of the latest Atelier Bow Wow publication. The title of the book is defined on its very cover and gives an indisputable sense of direction for the work that is held inside. Behaviourology is a subjective field of interpretation that focuses on the study of “functional relations between behaviour and its independent variables in the behaviour-determining environment”. One could expect anthropologists and psychologists will be salivating at the prospect of such a definition. However, within the architecture field it seems to be a distinctly provocative change of direction within the global discourse. Behaviourology stands as a complete reversal of the ubiquitous uniformity of style, colour, shape and volume characterized by the International style and the subsequent decades of reticence that characterized the period following the demise of post-modernism. It sets a platform of pluralistic solutions and binds programme into a driving role in the design process. After all, our way of living and our behaviour are drawn out of what we do. It follows then that by shifting the way we behave, we gradually will change what we do. A way of living is being designed alongside the architecture, rather than simply resulting from it. Bow Wow refer to this as “behaviour-engineering”.
Bow Wow’s projects are humanist in this respect. They evaluate the role of the human within the architecture in a way that goes beyond the empirical data analysis of bigger offices such as OMA or MVRDV. They embrace more subjective facets of the brief, such as the clients dreams, personal goals and even their desire to make their pets happy. While these subjective issues could be slippery when it came to realising architecture, it seems that within each brief the pair are able to strip away what might be an obvious response to instead deliver a novel way of looking at occupation and programme.