Surface its nest in the city ": under this title sore, Archilab, in
Orleans, celebrates this year the creativity of the Japanese
architects. About thirty of them are exposed on three sites, at a rate
of two or three achievements per agency, of the houses especially, some
museums and stores. It is, are not afraid of the words, an exceptional
unit presented in a magic way.
It is not the first time that Archilab makes discover with the French
the creativity of the young Japanese architects, but it was in general
drowned in an international soup avant-gardist, of which the most
interesting moments were often leaded jargonneuses considerations and
pedants. The achievements are, this year, exposed and explained
sobrement, methodically.
In the old building of the Subsistence, principal site of the
demonstration, each agency has its space, separated from floating
partitions. A certain flexibility was left to the thirty elected
officials: they are joined together by the whiteness and the lightness
of their models, sometimes “furnished” until the
guard with this
semi-serious semi-play spirit which one finds only with the country of
Sun-Raising.
The majority of the buildings were built in Tokyo, some in Kyoto or
Osaka, seldom further. Sown in the fabrics composite of these cities,
whose panorama covers the blank walls with the Subsistence, they are
démènent with grace to exist, have fun, surprise,
and are
accepted by the buildings which dominate them or the houses which
enclose them, but without jealousies.
The way in which the Japanese architects draw small houses, around 100
m2, seems the result of a been obstinated formal research. It starts
with the generation of the modern architects and the
“metabolists”
(Kenzo Tange, Fumihiko Maki, Kiyonuri Kikutake), sometimes shaken by
bursts of laughter nervous. It is pacified by Tadao Ando - it was to
build the Pinault Foundation in the Seguin island, then destroyed by
the crisis of the years 1990 and the earthquake of Kobe.
Three agencies, mainly, took the changing. Shigeru Ban, which builds
the antenna of the Pompidou Center of Metz, explores the hidden
solidity of the most fragile materials, while the ex-duet formed by
Kazuyo Sejima (author of the future Louvre de Lens) and Ryue Nishizawa,
at one time joined together with the sign of SANAA, invested the
misadventures of the most contemporary materials to renew, starting
from the envelope, the design of interior space.
These architects are, in this register, the successors of the third
renovating one of the Japanese writing, Toyo Ito, which has just
completed the Cognacq-Jay hospital, in Paris. The Ito, oldest but not
most worn (it was born in 1941 in Korea) of these creators, is
introduced in solo in the “hangar” of the FRAC
Centre. Four
achievements with through it seems to want to make live its buildings
(the media library of Sendai, Tod' S Omotesando, in Tokyo), with the
risk of flirter with the old twaddle of architectural organicism and
fascination for the proliferating metaphor of the shells (the park of
relieving of Torrevieja, Spain, in construction).
For the time being, the majority of the architects present at the
Subsistence not anchor in a register more simply ludic, sensual,
aesthetic, which makes building, an independent being able to run on
its legs, but a prolongation of the man, the inhabitant. A geometrical
and often very technical thingummy, which would be an element light,
static, intermediary between worn clothing and the load-bearing wall.
But there is as, here or there, of the weight, gravity, the secrecy,
and even the gymnastics of the overhang, a leitmotiv of rising
generation indicating as architecture did not lose the use of its
muscles, even of doping. Let us note that a French hides within these
Japaneses: the Manual architect Tardits, one of the four partners of
the Mikan agency, which collaborated in the realization of the
Cognacq-Jay hospital.
Terunobu Fujimori, to which was entrusted the house of Biennial of
architecture of Venice, is also present in Orleans. It is a player and
a scientist who will seek, in the the least known Japanese traditions
and of the materials which one believed forgotten, reasons to perch its
houses of tea in the trees. Joined Fujimori, one nothing imagination
moreover, the high-speed motorboat of Archilab, Kengo Kuma, which,
occupies a broad space with the Saint-Vincent Square to him. As its
declared objective is “to erase architecture”, and
that it does it with
a rare force and a refinement, we will leave him his share of shade
here, by wishing that each one go to discover it in the marvellous
constructive labyrinth which Archilab offers to us.
