aperture

Kiyokazu Arai [Kyoto|Tokyo] – Mark mag Interview

INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS

Text: Thomas Daniell

“Kiyokazu Arai started his career in the USA, returned to Japan and is now building in Russia and China”

What brought you to architecture?

K.A.: Actually, I first studied to be a certified public accountant. My father was a well known accountant with is own firm, and as the eldest son I was expected to follow in his footsteps. Like most high school students, I didn’t know what i wanted to do, so I enrolled in an accountancy course at university. By the third year of the course, I knewit wasn’t for me. I told my father, and he advised me to finish the course anyway. Then history intervened. Student riots closed down all universities in Japan.

This was 1968?

Right. My university was locked up and I couldn’t have studied even if I’d wanted to. It was a chance to do something else, so I enrolled in a design school and studied there for three years. I got a job in a small office designing houses, and stayed there for two and a half years. I must have designed over a hundred houses, but all typical Japanese post-and-beam houses. I was bored, and I didn’t see anything changing in the future. I wanted to learn more about architecture. Then a friend told me about a new school that had recently been founded in Los Angeles, called SCI-Arc. It sounded great. My wife and I moved to Los Angeles in 1978 so I could enter the postgraduate program there. At that time, SCI-Arc didn’t even have accreditation for their masters program. I was truly just going for the education, not the qualification. My interview was with Michael Rotondi, but i hardly spoke a word of English then. He told me I should go back to Japan and study English. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I enrolled in a language course at UCLA, and applied to SCI-Arc again the following year. I did the undergraduate course for two semesters, and then shifted to the postgraduate course. After one studio taught by Michael, he asked me to join Morphosis. I didn’t even know what that was. Thom Mayne was away at Harvard at that point, so Michael was alone in the office. Thom returned a few months later.

How many people were working there?

There was always SCI-Arc students working as interns. For a while it was just me, Thom, and Michael. I was working full-time at Morphosis while studying full-time at SCI-Arc. I don’t know how I survived. It was difficult but fun. After i graduated, I applied for a green card and stayed at Morphosis.

Thom Mayne describes you as the unofficial third partner during the 1980’s. What was your role?

Thom and Michael were spending half of their week away teaching. They made concept sketches, but the drawings and models were mainly produced by the staff. I was project architect for a lot of the designs, and I guess I influenced some of the people working under me. But i was never consciously  teaching them, just showing them how iI did things. The problem was that I find it hard to delegate. I always want to make all the models and drawings myself. This was in the days before computers. It was important to always have well resolved drawings and models, so it wasn’t necessary to have deep discusions for everyone to understand. We could all just see what had been done, and what should be done next.

What are the sources of your design language?

I don’t think of design as personal, emotive thing. It’s always based on fundamental human principles, on relating behaviors to forms. It’s like music. If you want to embrace people with a building, for example, you make an embracing form. It’s really a case of visualizing these kinds of systems. Axis, hierarchy, datum … these are the kind of keywords that underlie the designs.

But your work with Morphosis and since is very complex, or at least very densely articulated. An embracing form could also be single uninflected line, but you structures often have a kind of Rube Goldberg redundancy to them. Why all the small components? Does it come out of an interest in machines?

Yes, I like machines, because their functioning is visible. The processes at work are revealed in the interactions and connections between the parts. I think that’s a fundamental way of thinking about forms and materials.

When did you come back to Japan?

Around 1990, but it’s hard to say exactly when. In the late 1980’s, Morphosis received a couple of important commissions in Japan: the Chiba Golf Club and the Higashi Azabu Office Building. I started commuting back and forth every month. At some point I wasn’t living in Los Angeles and visiting Tokyo for work, but the other way around. I gradually began to create some relationships back in Japan. After a ten-year absence, I was like a foreigner. But around the time I was thinking of leaving, Thom and Michaels’s partnership was also disintegrating. It was tough for me. Those two guys are like my older brothers, even now. I was totally loyal to them, and i just didn’t know which one to choose. Moving back to Japan was also a way of avoiding the decision.

Were the projects still going on that point?

Yes, I was still officially employed by Morphosis, but my mind was focused on establishing my own office. I received the commission to design the Tsukamoto House in Tokyo while I was still with Morphosis.

The language of the house is very similar to some of the morphosis projects you were in charge of, such as the Crawford House and the Chiba Golf Club.

Yes, it’s a very Morphosis-influenced design. I t was my first house, but too big, too expensive!

What happened to the Morphosis projects in Japan?

They were all cancelled.

Due to the collapse of the buble economy? Did the clients go bankrupt?

No, they just changed their minds. Those designs were incredibly expensive. If they had built them, they would probably be bankrupt.

Did you find work easily after that?

No. I took some teaching positions, and entered competitions. I received plenty of second and third prizes. Arata Isozaki invited me to design a small bridge as part of the Kumamoto Artpolis program. I also entered the SD Review competition [an annual open competition for unbuilt projects by up-and-coming architects]. I remember my Tsukamoto House was selected in the same year as a house by Kazuyo Sejima. I was amazed by her presentation. It was just a few simple models made of thin sheets of painted cardboard, no detail at all. My own model had taken so much time, like a sculpture in its own right.

A sign that the architectural world was undergoing some big changes. Did your own design work start to change?

I don’t think my style has undergone radical changes, just tiny adaptations to the Japanese context. My designs became simpler, I guess. Morphosis-type work is just too expensive, with every joint a work of art. They are artists, often fabricating their own components. You can make small projects in California like that, but here is impossible.

Yet the Japanese construction industry is able to achieve very sophisticated, complex, precise assemblages. It seems that Japan would be a good country for producing that type of work.

True, but there are also problems due to the climate. It rains a lot in Japan, unlike southern California. More articulation means more leaks and drafts.

Tell me about a-bands.

I’ve always thought that architecture is not only buildings, but all the items needed for daily life: clothes, furniture, cutlery and so on. I wanted to create a brand that didn’t include my own name. So a-bands is a separate company from Arai Architects. It does everything apart from buildings. I have two a-bands buildings, one in Kyoto that I designed and built, the other in Tokyo that is a renovation of an existing building. They both contain my architecture office and product showroom. The one in Kyoto includes a café, restaurant and salon. I wanted to make it easy for ordinary people to visit an architects office, so the café or salon is like an interface with the public.

Why the two locations?

I originally founded Arai Architects in Tokyo, but my primary base has been Kyoto ever since I became head of the architecture school here at Kyoto Seika University. I commute back and forth each week.

How did you become involved in Russia and China?

One of my former students from Russia now has a large practice in Moscow, and he asked me to collaborate him on a competition for a large cultural project in Ufa [a city in west Urals]. We won, and that led to a series of other projects, such as the international hall in Ufa for the 450th anniversary of Bashkortostan Republic joining Russia. Some of the projects have been very fast. I only had three days to design the Azkbuzat Racecourse building in Ufa. Of course, in cases like that, you can use formal idea that was already in your mind but unrelated to the project. The audience seating is a straight element with one side facing the track, so I thought it would be interesting to curve the rear wall in cross section, then slice away the ends in diagonal. It’s very simple. The amazing thing is that before we even started the design they already poured the foundation, because they can’t pour concrete in winter. It’s so cold that they can only work on site for five or six months out of the year. I became involved in China through university relationships and a series of invited competitions, some of which I won, like the Dalian Medical University campus.

It’s huge. In a case like this, do you just make the basic sketches, and they produce the construction documents?

Yes, it’s always that way in other countries. All of the code issues related to structure, disabled access, emergency exits … It’s too much to learn, so you have to surrender control. Sometimes you can check the construction documents, but not always.

You have worked in America, Japan, China and Russia. They must be very different, not only in the struggles to deal with clients and administrators  but in the quality of construction and the way things are built.

Yes. In the USA, architects must produce everything, because the subcontractors don’t have the ability to invent components or solve details. In Japan the subcontractors and the manufacturers always can be trusted to produce innovative, perfect details. China is very difficult. For example, there isn’t much architectural hardware available, so sometimes instead of metal parts you must use an alternative, like wood. there are some advantages in China. For example, stone is cheaper than tile, because labour costs are low.

But in China you can’t control the details?

As an architect, I’m always fighting for good details. For instance, here in the Dalian Project I wanted to have a kind of mesh cage structure, but they kept saying no. They didn’t want to delay the project and insisted on vertical columns. We ended up bringing a structural engineer over to China from Japan. He explained the calculations and the construction method, and finally we got it built correctly.

You paid the engineer’s expenses yourself?

Yes. I don’t think I made any money on that project.

Your career began with Morphosis, where you worked on very small things and you were able to make almost everything yourself. Now you are working at a very big scale, and losing some control. Is it frustrating?

Yes, sure. I wish I could speak Chinese and Russian. Maybe they wouldn’t listen, but I could try. That’s why I tell my students to learn other languages. English of course, but then Chinese or Russian. But you shouldn’t stay in one country too long. You can’t achieve much.

Where will you go next?

Throughout my life, I’ve never stayed anywhere for mor than about ten years, and I’ve already been here in kyoto longer than that. It’s okay, I’m comfortable, I enjoy teaching. But if I move now, I might be able to make . And when I’m making something new, I forget about everything else.a fresh start. Maybe Russia. Anyway, I’ve had a happy life so far. I just keep doing what i can. But i still like to make objects with my own hands

::: www.aa-archi.com :::

::: www.a-bands.com :::

Towards Post-Capitalist Spaces

Ten Days for Oppositional Architecture

Towards Post-Capitalist Spaces

The transformation of the urban landscape within the last decades has increasingly been dominated by the demands of capitalist utilization. Due to the current crisis, however, which goes far beyond a mere crisis of the real estate and financial market, these neoliberal politics and attendant forms of production of space have been subject to a loss of legitimation. For this reason, not only do the dominance and promises of the privatization model, the free market and private property have to be questioned, but also the conventions of the space-producing professions that follow and materialize these policies.

In this context the event “Ten Days for Oppositional Architecture” takes up the task of exploring possibilities and conditions of a socially committed architectural practice. Therefore the narrow boundaries of the profession have to be left behind. We hence invite activists, geographers, architects, planners, and economists representing different critical approaches to discuss and develop concepts and practices that not only try to oppose and challenge the capitalist mode of production of space, but also try to go beyond it – strategies of de-commodification, re-appropriation and alternative production of space. We will look at already existing spatial actions of resistance as well as search for possibilities to further theorize them: How can these strategies and alternative practices be turned into social and political forces towards post-capitalist spaces?

http://www.oppositionalarchitecture.com/