Shinohara Kazuo: ModernNext

For much of his career, Shinohara Kazuo built beautiful single-family houses that have reconfigured and enriched our understanding of domesticity, tradition, form, language, scale, nature, and the city. He famously declared “A house is a work of art” just as the Metabolists, who were his contemporaries, were ascending in influence and notoriety. While Shinohara organized his long career into a chronological series of Styles—First, Second, Third, and Fourth—through which he pursued different formal, representational, and technological expressions, there were also important motifs he never wavered from, with the relationship between the house and its surrounding urbanity being the most important and persistent. This exhibition on Shinohara’s architecture highlights his nuanced attitude toward the city, which emerged with greater saliency in the late 1970s and reached its apotheosis in the following decade through a series of institutional-scale projects. This position was partly informed by his travels abroad, to Africa, the Americas, and Europe, and by his reading of European cultural criticism. Shinohara labeled this last period the Fourth Style. In an essay published in the journal Kenchiku Bunka in 1988, Shinohara introduced the term “ModernNext.” As a counterpoint to postmodernism, ModernNext was also a commentary on Japan’s Bubble Economy, as the scale and intensity of urban activity reached unprecedented heights. ModernNext was a decisively forward-looking attitude. In the same way tradition formed the basis of innovation for the First Style, chaos and randomness were to instigate a new vitality for architecture and the city. Exhibition credits Curators: Seng Kuan, Angela Y. Pang, and Shiozaki Taishin Curatorial Assistants: Albert Lui, Siu Man, Po Po, and Jacob Wong Exhibition Installation: Ray Coffey, Jef Czekaj, Anita Kan, Sarah Lubin, Jesus Matheus, and Joanna Vouriotis Structural Consultants Dennis Chan and Hiraiwa Yoshiyuki General Contractor Woodcat LLC Construction Supervisor Ben Dryer Carpenters Alex Benevides and Ernesto Castellanos Dan Borelli, Director of Exhibitions David Zimmerman-Stuart, Exhibitions Coordinator Watch a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Shinohara Kazuo: ModernNext:

Platform 11: Setting the Table

The Platform exhibition represents a year in the life of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Produced annually, the exhibition highlights a selection of work from the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and design engineering. It exposes a rich and varied pedagogical culture committed to shaping the future of design. Documenting projects, research, events, publications, and more, Platform offers a curated view into the emerging topics, techniques, and dispositions within and beyond the GSD. In Setting the Table, the first student-led installment of the series, curators Esther Mira Bang, Lane Raffaldini Rubin, and Enrique Aureng Silva assembled a diverse body of work and cut it up—reinterpreting, rearranging, and ultimately composing a poetry revealed in each retelling. “This year marks a new approach to the way Platform is considered and produced,” says Dean Mohsen Mostafavi. “In the past, a faculty member collaborated with a team of students to devise an overall theme as a means of framing the work of the GSD from across its various disciplines and practices. While both the former and the current models of production are based on collaboration across various fields and among individuals with different backgrounds, on this occasion the whole concept has special resonance as it is constructed through a student rather than a faculty perspective. One distinguishing feature of this installment is its concern with what is placed on the table for consideration, both literally and metaphorically.” The curators adopted the use of a series of “tables” as configurational devices for bringing together a diverse body of work. These themes, with headings such as “Conveyor Belt,” “First Dates,” or “Tabula Plena,” enabled the curators to draw out a multiplicity of re-readings of the work. Each topic is conceived within as a specific collection or setting. The method deployed here is rational-objective, yet the result is a poetic construct. This strategy parallels the work and even more broadly the mission of the GSD, which lies at the intersection of imagination and implementation, of creativity and know-how. The capacity to conceive and realize complex design ideas and projects that can help enhance the built environment equally requires a range of negotiations and strategies between poiesis and praxis—a set of actions that exemplify the true art of making. “To conceive of Platform as a means of framing people and objects, and to devise different relationships between them, is to approach the idea of a platform not as a neutral plane but as an active volume bringing together a multiplicity of conversations around it—literally and metaphorically as a table,” write Platform’s curators Esther Mira Bang, Lane Raffaldini Rubin, and Enrique Aureng Silva. “The table hosts a diverse body of topics from the witty banter of a first date to the weighty gravitas of a negotiation. Its materiality and temperament range from the cold sterility of a dissection to the adrenaline-pumping anxiety of an interrogation. Some guests are offered a seat at the table, some burst onto the scene uninvited, while still others must fight for their place.” In the curatorial vision of Esther Mira Bang, Lane Raffaldini Rubin, and Enrique Aureng Silva, the table is reimagined as a new setting, “an active volume within the GSD, entangled within the very structure of the building, recasting projects upon a single shared datum,” they write. “After reading through hundreds of syllabi, event transcripts, project descriptions, research abstracts, and theses, we cut up these materials and collaged words and phrases that have special resonance for each table—shuffling them, reconfiguring them, juxtaposing them—ending up with a poetic construct: a table of contents that draws out the true art of setting the table.” Curators Esther Mira Bang Lane Raffaldini Rubin Enrique Aureng Silva Design Team Dan F. Borelli Director of Exhibitions David W. Zimmerman-Stuart Exhibitions Coordinator Installation Team Liz Asch, Raymond Coffey, Jef Czekaj, Anita Kan, Christine April, Sarah Lubin, Jesus Matheus, and Joanna Vouriotis Acknowledgements Mohsen Mostafavi Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design Ken Stewart Assistant Dean and Director of Communications and Public Programs Ann Whiteside Director of Frances Loeb Library, Assistant Dean for Information Services Adam DeTour Photographer Martin Bechthold Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology Rachel Stefania Vroman Manager, Digital Fabrication Laboratory        

Mountains and the Rise of Landscape

To ask when we started looking at mountains is by no means the same as asking when we started to see them. Rather, it is to question what sorts of aesthetic and moral responses, what kinds of creative and reflective impulses, our new found regard for them prompted. It is evident enough that in a more or less recent geological time frame mountains have always just been there. It is possible that mountains, like the sea, best provide pleasure, visual and otherwise, when experienced from a (safe) physical and psychical distance. But it might also be the case that the pleasures mountains hold in store are of a learned and acquired sort.

Which is also to say that mountains themselves, for all their unforgiving thereness, are themselves the products of unwitnessed Neptunian and Vulcanian tumults or divine judgment. For the late seventeenth-century theologian and cosmogonist Thomas Burnet, mountains were “nothing but great ruins.” A dawning appreciation of these wastelands appeared in the critical writings of John Dennis. Satirized as “Sir Tremendous Longinus” for his rehabilitation of the antique aesthetic category of the sublime, Dennis expressed the complex concept of “delightful horror.” Mountain gloom was ready to become mixed with mountain glory. More work was still to be done on the literary and philosophical front before the Romantic breakthrough, one high vantage point being the essayist Joseph Addison’s dream of finding himself in the Alps, “astonished at the discovery of such a Paradise amidst the wildness of those cold hoary landscapes.”

But a kindred innovation in seeing and feeling was called for in the formation of mountains and the rise of landscape. Mountains, among other earth forms, are both the medium and outcome of still-evolving habits of experiencing, making, and imagining. Architects and landscape architects, mutually occupied with the horizontal surface, have had a touch equally as searching as that of mountaineers and poets in sensing the terrain. Mountains and the Rise of Landscape is the culmination of a curatorial project and a research seminar conducted at the Graduate School of Design, the latter focusing on the question, How do you model a mountain? The installation in the Druker Design Gallery and continuing in the Frances Loeb Library collects diverse objects and scientific instruments, drawings, photographs, and motion pictures of built and imagined projects and presents invitingly challenging modes of seeing (and hearing!) mountains of varied definition. Allied with the work of artists, visionaries, and interpreters of natural and cultural meaning, they propose new and foregone possibilities of perception and form-making in the acts of leveling and grading, cutting and filling, shaping and contouring, mapping and modeling, of reimagining “matter out of place,” and finally of stacking the odds and mounting the possibilities.

Mountains and the Rise of Landscape offers five thematic sections:

Mountain Lines of Beauty
Mild mountaineers, John Ruskin (1819–1900) and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) were among the first theorists, designers, and architects to teach us that the “line” formed by crests, peaks, and ridges presents an exemplary form of beauty. The invention of the panorama and the photomechanical reproduction of mountain views transformed a geophysical phenomenon into an object of aesthetic value and topographical knowledge. Guidebooks, geographical manuals, and maps glorified specific ranges by showing their most beautiful contours. To define a single mountain or group of mountains as a “line,” however, implies a process of abstraction. This process is both enhanced and complicated by contemporary tools such as CAD, GIS, and GPS. To draw the most important mountain ranges of our contemporary world as “mountain lines of beauty”—the phrase is evidently inspired by the eighteenth century painter William Hogarth’s analysis of the serpentine, S-shaped “line of beauty”—should not be seen as a simplified way to represent them. Rather, the difficulty of representation itself becomes visible in the constructedness of the lines. Through them the possibility arises, again, of our being surprised by the sublimity, as well as the beauty, of the mountains.

Artificial mountains are a worldwide phenomenon. Burial sites, such as Etruscan tumuli, were often marked by the intimidating form of the man-made mountain. Incense burners in ancient China evoked the Five Sacred Mountains. A representation of Mount Parnassus was a significant element of European gardens and a symbol of Renaissance humanism. Artificial mounds, typically composed of locally excavated material, may be seen as so many milestones in the history of landscape architecture. The industrial revolution accelerated the rise of an anthropic topography, producing landforms that we often no longer recognize as being artificial. Mountains are ubiquitous in twentieth-century and contemporary art, with a special place—between site and non-site—reserved for the explorations of Robert Smithson, who reversed, displaced, and rebuilt the form, material, and meaning of mountains.

Camouflage: Among the first who climbed high mountains in antiquity were members of the military, in search of an advantageously elevated view of their enemy’s position. From the seventeenth century onward, many mountainous regions were massively fortified, with military infrastructures placed strategically to take advantage of their secluded impregnability. The photographer Leo Fabrizio has documented traces of former military constructions hidden in the most remote areas of Alpine Switzerland. His visual archeology of camouflage techniques employed by the Swiss military exposes the unfamiliar territory of a landscape that still appears “natural” while being completely transformed from within.

Glaciers are in retreat throughout the world. Celebrated and studied during the eighteenth century as sublime objects—sung of by poets and depicted by landscape painters—glaciers register today as metonymies of global climate change and vanishing natural and scenic phenomena. Geneva-based composers Olga Kokcharova and Gianluca Ruggeri have explored the fascinating soundscape of the Mont Miné Glacier in the Swiss canton of Valais. Since 2000, the 4.9 mile-long glacier has lost about eighty-five feet per year. To hear the “voice” of a glacier compellingly questions the visual bias of the landscape-oriented perspective. The mysterious sounds of the white masses bear melancholy aural testimony to the progressive disappearance of a titanic natural feature.

Inhabitants of the Alpine regions have practiced transhumance for centuries, droving livestock between the valleys in winter and the high mountain pastures in summer. Many of the wooden or stone structures built by farmers to shelter their cattle and themselves have been abandoned, ruined, and in some instances transformed into chalets. Martino Pedrozzi, a Ticino-based architect, has worked for a decade in the remote valleys of southern Switzerland. His Recompositions, carried out with his students at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture and other volunteers, consist in repairing the existing structures or in composing a new object from the abandoned material. The resulting architectural objects are designedly functionless; they are poetic metaphors and visual documents of a past that is at risk of disappearance.

Credits:

GSD Administration

Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design
Patricia Roberts, Executive Dean
Ken Stewart, Assistant Dean and Director of Communications and Public Programs
Paige Johnston, Manager of Public Programs
Travis Dagenais, Assistant Director of Communications

Exhibition Curation and Design

Michael Jakob, Curator
Anita Berrizbeitia, Co-curator
Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Co-curator
Edward Eigen, Co-curator
Dan Borelli, Director of Exhibitions
David Zimmerman-Stuart, Exhibitions Coordinator
Paola Sturla, Content Curator
Gustavo Romanillos Arroyo, Research
Peeraphol Sangthongjai, Research

Model Fabrication

Carson Booth, MLA ‘19
Jacqueline Wong, MArch I ‘22

Installation Team

Christine April, Liz Asch, Ray Coffey, Jef Czekaj, Jesus Matheus, Anita Kan, Sarah Lubin, Sarah Uziel, Joanna Vourioits, Isabel Brostella, MLA I AP ‘19, Isabella Frontado, MLA I & MDES ADPD ‘20, Melissa Naranjo, MLA I AP ‘19

Photograph Credits

Jean-Michel Landecy, Iwan Baan, Pino Brioschi, Alex MacLean, Hilaire Dumoulin

Art Credits

Leo Fabrizio, Olga Kokcharova, Gianluca Ruggeri, Martino Pedrozzi, Steve Tobin, Andrés Moya

SPECIAL THANKS to

Frances Loeb Library, Chiara Geroldi, Isabel Formica Jakob, and Swissnex Boston

Mountains and the Rise of Landscape is made possible by the Dan Urban Kiley Fund

The Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design: The High Line

In 2017, Friends of the High Line were awarded the Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design. The exhibition celebrating this award aims to re-create the spatial and rhythmic experience of walking along the High Line, where billboards and buildings frame and re-frame elevated perceptions of the city. Here the physical and process-oriented aspects of the High Line are disaggregated, providing opportunities to move beyond iconic visual representations of the project towards a deeper understanding of the back stories that contribute to what the project is today. These back stories, arranged as ‘micro climates,’ are another nod to the High Line’s organizational logic and a way to represent the wide range of views expressed both in the project’s public reception, as well as by various members of the selection committee. Curators’ statement: The 13th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design recognizes the High Line as exemplar for the complex coordination of creative professionals, philanthropists, and policy makers by deeply committed community advocates. The Green Prize also recognizes Friends of the High Line for their unwavering commitment to improving the public realm through design excellence and for their capacity to continually reinvent the High Line in ways that support more inclusive public spaces—both in New York and across the globe. The opening of the High Line in 2009 was neither the park’s first nor final achievement. Originally conceived in the early 20th century, the elevated rail was a response to public outcry over rail-related fatalities at street level. Over time, the High Line became increasingly peripheral to New Yorkers, if they noticed it at all, seen more as a decaying behemoth, a platform for vice, and hindrance to progress than for its potential as a transformative public asset. Nearly ten years after the first section opened, the High Line’s re-emergence as a beloved and celebrated public space has not only transformed a neighborhood. It has also influenced how we approach and understand urban design on a global scale. The evolving nature of cities situates the practice of urban design within much longer trajectories of urbanization than can be fully expressed or understood by a singular site, agent, or process. The High Line exists simultaneously as material, infra-structural, and object-based, and immaterial, agency-driven, and processes-oriented. Its influence extends far beyond the physical, temporal, and geographical space it occupies. Projects like the High Line can only come into being through an expanded practice of design—one that interweaves politics, policy, and public process into the design of the built environment. This exhibition explores these intersections of activism and infrastructure, unpacking the social, natural, and formal design components that make the High Line an exceptional urban design project. —Stephen Gray and Caroline Filice Smith, Co-curators Visit the Online Exhibition.