Fachgebiet für Entwerfen & Gebäudekunde, Prof. Jacob van Rijs, Technische Universität Berlin
POSITIONEN Atelier Bow Wow
Dear collegues, students and others interested in Architecture.
We have exciting news! For our last Positionen of this Sommersemester Momoyo Kajima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto fromAtelier Bow Wow will be our guests at the 8th of July 2021.
Due to the time difference with Tokyo this will be a special edition of Positionen. The online lecture will start at 13:00 BERLIN TIME and will last around 1 hour.
Established in Tokyo in 1992 by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, Atelier Bow-wow's work includes buildings, research and art practice. Starting by documenting the unique urban reality of Tokyo, Atelier Bow-wow produced a number of publications that took the form of guidebooks, introducing the reader to the accidental, ad-hoc nature of the urban landscape. Pet Architecture documented tiny buildings that fill the cracks of the city and are always customised by the user, whilst Made in Tokyo showed instances of hybrid, cross programmed building types with unlikely juxtapositions, the result of the extreme pressure on land. Atelier Bow-wow's approach to architecture is informed by this research and what they have termed 'micro public space', in which they attempt to recreate some of the behaviours and meetings that occur in the city in gallery installations and in their buildings. They do this through the deployment of customised urban furniture that encourages active user participation, such as their 'Furnicycle' designed for the 2002 Shanghai Biennale or the design of public kitchens and vegetable kiosks. In both their exhibition design and the design of buildings, Atelier Bow-wow construct situations rather than objects, design processes that can result in chance meetings and leaving room for users to adapt and appropriate space. During the years they have realized an impressive and diverse series of private houses, but as well public buildings like the Onomichi Station, a trainstation combined with retail spaces and a hotel.
Momoyo Kaijima was born in Tokyo in 1969. She received her undergraduate degree from the Faculty of Domestic Science at Japan Women's University in 1991 and both her graduate (M.Eng.) and post-graduate degrees were from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1994 and 1999. Since 2017 she is Professor at the ETH in Zürich, in 2018 she curatr of the Japanese pavilion at the architecture Biennale in Venice.
Yoshiharu Tsukamoto was born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1965. He studied architecture at Tokyo Institute of Technology, graduating from his undergraduate degree in 1987. 1994 he completed a Doctor of Engineering program at Tokyo Institute of Technology. Since 2015 he is professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
