There Is A Dog In A Train Sitting Next To Me

A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA March 13 – July 4, 2016

A Japanese Constellation focuses on the network of architects and designers that has developed around Pritzker Prize winners Toyo Ito and SANAA. Providing an overview of Ito’s career and his influence as a mentor to a new generation of Japanese architects, the exhibition presents recent works by internationally acclaimed designers, including Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, and Junya Ishigami. Departing from one of Ito’s pivotal works, the Sendai Mediatheque, completed in 2001, as well as SANAA’s 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2004), the 44 featured designs range in scale from small houses to museums. Organized through intersecting spaces separated by translucent curtains, drawings, models, and images reveal the structural invention, non-hierarchical thinking, and novel uses of transparency and lightness that link these practices. Exploring a lineage of influence and cross-pollination that has become particularly relevant at the start of the 21st century, the exhibition highlights the global impact and innovation of contemporary architecture from Japan since the 1990s. With its idea of a network of luminaries at work, A Japanese Constellation is intended as a reflection on the transmission of an architectural sensibility, and suggests an alternative model to what has been commonly described as an individuality-based “star-system” in contemporary architecture.

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Antarctica René Koster

The Project ‘Antarctica’ shows a series of photographs of a voyage to the South Pole. I travelled with a sailing ship which was built in 1911; the same period the last great expeditions left for the unknown continent.

Thoughts of frozen ships trapped in ice-covered seas cross my mind, images of the photographers who joined these expeditions to report of the unexplored. Fascinated by their stories I head for the same circumstances as those of the early twentieth century. A journey of longing, to a time that once was. An heroic saga; filled with hardship and adventure, in an infinite, barren land.

Images and text via René Koster

London house extension with a “butterfly” roof and exposed wooden rafters »

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