This past Friday I attended the ‘Tokyo Flow’ symposium at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which seeks to build connections between Portland and Tokyo. Sometimes the crowd was a little disappointing, with a mixture of students, professors and seemingly few from outside attending daytime presentations. But those on stage were exceptionally impressive.
In particular, I was struck by the work of Oki Sato, a young Japanese architect and industrial designer. The first project he showed, called Canvas, was the ultimate example of how even the most low-budget projects can come alive with the right imagination. The project was a French restaurant occupying a two-story building in Tokyo. The budget was only about $35,000. Sato and his firm, Nendo (which means “clay”), bought about 200 square meters of fireproof, weatherproof white tent fabric, and proceeded to wrap the entire building, inside and out. On the exterior, Sato placed tiny light bulbs between the fabric and the façade, so at night the entire building became a lantern.
Another Nendo project for Sato’s parents, called the Drawer House, was filled with custom furniture that could be slid in and out of the wall—like drawers. Bookshelves, appliances, even beds were able to disappear and reappear at one’s whimsy.
Perhaps my favorite of Sato’s projects was the Book House, constructed for a small community on a remote island off Japan. The owner wanted a private residence, but also wanted to create a library where residents could borrow and return books anytime. Sato put the private quarters on the inside of a square box, and literally built shelves all around the exterior to stack with books. (The shelves were protected by an overhang and porch that could also be closed off.) Behind the bookshelves were Japanese rice paper, so light pierced the façade in a continually changing abstract pattern based on where there were open spaces in the shelves.
Later, a group of creatives from local ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, multidisciplinary design firm Ziba, and elsewhere shared the stage. One presenter talked about how contemporary design, particularly in Japan, often attempts to recapture the sense of meaning that largely went out with mass production. When you buy a plastic bowl at Ikea, for example, you don’t think about it being manufactured in China by the thousands, but instead you look at the picture at Ikea of the Swedish designer who designed it. The product comes with a story—a context.
One presenter quoted Aristotle saying, “There is the thing, and then there is the meaning of the thing.” Certainly there are some projects in Portland—the tram immediately comes to mind—for which that would be true.
On Saturday it was my honor (and anxiety) to serve as master of ceremonies for the bi-annual awards for the Oregon chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects. We jurors (a cross-section of academics, working designers, and yours truly) had met a couple weeks ago to decide the winners. The biggest honoree, with the Award of Excellence, was the South Waterfront greenway. One architect I talked to after the ceremony snickered a bit about the award. There was a lot of wrangling about how big the greenway would be and what it would look like. And perhaps like any design, there’s more that could have been done. But we on the jury reacted very favorably to the ultimate mix of wildlife habitat, open space, green streets and other elements of the plan. There’s nothing else in the city that comes even close to the scale and scope of the work being done here.
Another top award went to Murase Associates for the Santi Ya residence, a private retreat for the Murase family. As many know, founding principal and legendary landscape designer Robert Murase passed away recently. And while the award was given entirely because of the quality of the project, it was a pleasure to bestow it to the firm as a tribute to Bob’s enduring contributions. If you saw the stone wall at Santi Ya, at once pristinely clean-lined and emotively organic, you’d have given it an award too.
There were several other winners, including Tanner Springs Park and two small but exceptional “green street” projects from the City of Portland. Congrats to all the winners.
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