the snow

soft sunlight pours in through the corner as a gentle breeze oscillates above a bed of feathers.  the 'snow' arcs in waves within a transparent boundary.

tokujin says, "the variety of the essence in the nature touches our emotions. i intend not to reproduce them, but to pick the element that inspires our heart and integrate it into the design."



a snowscape of feathers. beautiful.

back to nature; constructed ruin

fantastic! urban reclamation project in tokyo.

a 'haunted' house is magically transformed through the power of design. once covered in ivy, the designer stripped the over-growth revealing the structural elements long left to the passage of time.

i admire the restraint - not to completely gut and start anew. the old structure and new surfaces are well-balanced; it helps to tell the story of the dwelling, not simply masking it behind clean white walls.

a quick overview and stream of consciousness ramble, but check out the whole story.

photos courtesy of takeshi yamagishi

Gathering Place

Our go at the International Glass competition (this year's challenge to reinvent the "community gathering space") had to go off in a well-organized fashion because of the time constraint. Well we took our sweet time on Detroit, we were left with less than a week to represent, finish, print and send the physical thing to Tokyo. But this limitation, I believe, rendered some solid results. Our main objectives had to be simplified, ordered and presented quickly, clearly and diagrammatically.

The project we saw was the re-thinking of how people gathering in contemporary times. There is no "central place" but many unique places; as well, people do not "GO" to a "Place," but more easily and with excitement "bump into" one another along a way. We thought these ideas were the basis of what a new gathering place should be. We did not want to build a place, but reconsider how people live, in order to put in place a framework which would 1) make the "going" more experiential, so as to encourage a more human-paced way of "going," 2) introduce to this "community" what community can be through the encouragement of easy "bump-into" interaction and 3) keep in place several gradients of individual or "owned" places without getting rid of the symbolic American "home."

Strategies:
We took an ex-urb / sub-urb on the edge of Milwaukee as example.
We designed for the better part of a century, showing stages of work that would be done to change the physical environment.
1) bringing in the wide- no-man's-like streets over a period of years
2)planting more and more trees that will add a canopy to the empty suburban pathways and encourage the branching out of people to their front yards
3) collecting half of each owner's backyard and creating a "fortress-like" block-owned area for a variety of activities, and lowering fences to half the human height
4)placing parches and gradients on front of home to encourage the use of "see-and-be-seen " space
5) infilling in-between and re-using garages as the larger corridors (like Capitol Drive) get turned into rail corridors in the future
6) envisioning both economic, agricultural and neighborhood-spurred recreation that line the inner suburban forest, creating no need to go to great lengths for such necessities as food, entertainment, park-systems, or casual community interaction amongst people.

There will be no need for a "center" of gathering, when every place encourages interaction along the normal path of living and moving. Gathering will make its own place amongst a framework designed for interaction.

woods of net

this project is like lincoln logs meets art meets awesome.



the japanese tezuka architects teamed up with tis & partners to create a unique space for net artist toshiko horiuchi macadam. it sits in the hakone open-air museum. no metal was used in the construction of the pavillion. the joinery is derived from thousands years old japanese wooden temples in nara and kyoto.



"this is a permanent pavilion for a net artist, toshiko horiuchi macadam. the artist knitted the net entirely by hands, which is designed for children to crow in, roll around, and jump on the net. it was easy for us to see the artwork being outside even when it cannot be exposed to rain or ultraviolet light. we wanted to design a space as soft as the forest where the boundary between outside and inside disappears. the space attracts people like campfire. the children play inside of the net just as fire and parents sit around and lay on the woods."