Home-for-all design proposal

In response to a call for a design proposal for a small community house to be constructed at temporary housing areas in northeastern Japan, we have submitted our design. This event was organized by the 5 established Japanese architects (Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma, Kazuyou Sejima, Riken Yamamoto, Hiroshi Naito). Instead of designing a building, our idea was to design an environment where the shelters’ residents could come together to grow plants and nurture the spirit of community; as a result, they grow architecture.

Stick team - a work-in-progress video

This video shows the current state of our Stick team's project. Their ambition is to develop a manufacturing system that integrates the potential of mass-production, which optimises efficiency in terms of the amount of material and production time, and the logic of mass-customisation, which maximises the possible variations in terms of formal outputs. Their project explores the issue of discarded logs in forests in Japan. Due to the increase in cheap lumbers being imported from Europe and North America, Japanese forest industry has lost its grip on competitive global lumber markets. As a result, many forests have now become abandoned causing problems for both their economy and ecosystem. The project also aims to bridge a link between Japan's wood working traditions and computational fabrication techniques.

This project is built on Frei Otto's experiment on Form-Finding, which is a formal and structural optimisation process based on material's inherent distributional logic.

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.