[2010] MoMAT #1 and other exhibition visits

Visited two exhibitions and two lectures today.

I started with the 33rd LEMON exhibition at Meiji University. Then I went to the Kikuchi Hiroshi lecture at MoMAT, the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo. He spoke about his influences for the exhibition design at MoMAT, the overall topic is "Where is architecture?" with 7 architects exhibiting. His conclusion, white vs. dark architecture, is purely focused on a national context, quite surprising indeed, when considering that he worked for four years at Herzog & deMeuron.

I continued towards Nihon University and passed by coincidently at the book store renovation from Kikuchi Hiroshi, which I saw some minutes earlier during the lecture, quite a surprise.

At Nihon University the NU Architecture Week took place, so I visited Open Labo at CST building No.1 and finished with a lecture at building No.5, where Konishi Yasutaka and Oono Hiroshi, two structural engineers, gave a presentation. Konishi Yasutaka worked with Ishigami Junya on the Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop Building (2008). It was quite surprising to note on the floor plan, that the wildly spread structure of the building is so minimal, that the outlining facade is the most present element, whereas in a photo or a section it is vice versa due to the nature of a glazed facade being transparent. It gives an unknown dimension to the term "flexibility", in it's functional, structural and visual meaning. Oono Hiroshi worked with Watanabe Akira and he presented the aluminium roof of the Sakashita Public Toilet (2009) on the Imperial Palace grounds.

Added Kikuchi Hiroshi.