Midterm Review

Joined by professors from University of Tokyo Department of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Urban Planning, we presented our work in progress. Since we were given only 10 minutes to present our four projects, we’ve made a short promotion video of our studio. We will try to upload the video in the coming days after tweaking a few unresolved sound issues.

Post Tsunami Zones

Obuchi Lab and Kengo Kuma Lab visited areas destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami. Although all of us have seen those places on the news more than a hundred times, but seeing them in real was an overwhelming experience. The magnitude of devastations was absolutely beyond words.

Symposium at Sendai Mediatheque

G30 students joined a symposium at Sendai Mediatheque, which was slightly damaged by the earthquake and has been closed to the public. Mediatheque was opened for only a few hours to hold an event organized by Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma, Kazuyo Sejima, Riken Yamamoto and Hiroshi Naito to discuss future activities proposed by those five architects. The event was packed with people from local communities and students from universities around Sendai.

Tokyo Station Performative Ceiling Project

Here are some rendered images from our last studio project - Tokyo Station Performative Ceiling.

Post Super Review

Lab life of G30 studio after Super Review in New York and Princeton. Images include Deans Day BBQ at Princeton University, office visit to Jesse Reiser + Nanako Umemoto’s office, Glass House by Kengo Kuma, street of Chinatown and unknown food in New York City.

Super Review at Princeton University

After 1.5 months form the earthquake, we have begun to pick up the pace again on our design research project. This term's our focus is to develop a prototype for synthetic urban ecology in Tokyo, creating a new kind of infrastructure and architecture. Although, we have not yet completed our project, we traveled to New York and joined a final review – called super review - at Princeton and Colombia also joined by Tsingha University from Beijing.

G30 Studio Resumes

While the university’s engineering department remains closed till May 6, Obuchi Lab G30 Studio met in a café to discuss the progress on their ongoing studio projects. Current studio topics, including alternative power plant, floating forest that generates fresh air by plankton in Tokyo bay, structure built with mussels which also functions as water purification system, will be developed further and will be presented at Princeton University joined by Columbia University and Tsingha University.