SIDE II - Speaking both about their own roots in the past at the same time offering some thoughts for the future, are these leading architects: 

MIES VAN DER ROHE generally acknowledged one of the world's great architects whose work in Europe and America shaped the architectural style of our times. WALTER GROPIUS founder of the Bauhaus in Germany and retired dean of Architecture at Harvard University; known both for his trailblazing modern architecture and his important educational efforts. RICHARD J. NEUTRA early pioneer of modern architecture in Europe and the most renowned architect on the West Coast.

Conversations Regarding the Future of Architecture

Architecture Side Two


SIDE I - Speaking first about the future of architecture: 

ERNEST KUMP who heads one of the most active and awarded architectural offices on the Pacific Coast. GORDON BUNSHAFT partner and chief designer with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, one of the largest architectural firms in the country. And talking about the three great architects of our times: EERO SAARINEN internationally famed architect with a reputation for large-scale planning and careful detail, of which General Motors Technical Center is a most celebrated example. PHILIP JOHNSON important architectural historian and Architectural Chairman of New York Museum of Modern Art who is famed for his glass and steel residences.

Architecture Side One

June 29 (2:00-3:15pm) 2009

Abstract: 
   Our spatiality is constructed with an up and a down, a left and a right, an in front and a behind, a near and a far. When nothing arrests our gaze, it carries a very long way. But if it meets with nothing, it sees nothing. space therefore arrests our gaze, it is also the substance, the obstacle, whether bricks or a "vanishing point". Plato understood this very well. In his famous dialogue Timaeus, chora is characterised as both space and primordial substance, and conceived as a mode of reality through which the things of the world (ideas embodied in concrete things) actually appear to our experience. Properly understood, human space is limits, most clearly when it makes an angle, when it stops. There is nothing ghostly about space; it has edges. Human space is in fact all that is needed for the parallel lines of the straight road to meet well short of infinity: it is not Cartesian space.
   And yet, our mobile and digitally ubiquitous civilization, avid consumer of seductive images, can easily believe that true space is Cartesian space, that the photograph depicts "real" space. It can be further swayed by the argument that speed and instantaneity changes something basic in the primary given structure. We can all agree with Paul Virilio's observation that machines, ranging from television to the automobile, transform our visual relationship to the environing world, proposing their own space/time and as a consequence have an effect on our perceptions.
   When we ask questions about architectural design, this new condition is often described and taken for granted. My contention is that in order to understand the site of contemporary architecture and avoid problematic confusions this situation must be unpacked with care. In this paper I intend to offer some observations to this effect.

Architecture + Phenomenology - Kyoto

A+P | Alberto Pérez-Gómez - The Gift of Architecture and Embodied Consciousness

The Imperial villa of Katsura (1615-1662) is considered as one of the most refined examples of Japanese residential architecture. Since the thirties and Bruno TAUT's sojourn in Japan, the literature on Katsura villa has flourished and since the end of the Second World War, Katsura villa has been at the center of discourses of the Japanese tradition and "Japanese-ness." Considering the architectural discourses of thre generations of architects: KISHIDA Hideto (1929), Bruno TAUT (1936), HORIGUCHI Sutemi (1952), TANGE Kenzo and Walter GROPIUS (1960), ISOZAKI Arata (1983), we will focus on the presentation of Katsura villa as a model of Japanese architecture.

Why, in architectural discourses, Katsura villa does represent "Japanese-ness"? How has the complex architecture of Katsura villa been reduced to a representation of the essence of Japan, its tradition and modernity? From both the perspectives of modern history and philosophy, this paper will try to answer the issue of the 'Japanese-ness" of Katsura villa.

The construction of a discourse on “Japanese-ness" is the result of a crossed history (created by both Japanese and Foreign architects) since the the when architects have tried to define what is Japanese architecture. The need to define Japanese architecture was prompted by the importation of Japanese modern architecture. From the thirties, and moreover in the forties, the debate within Japanese architecture centred in the relation to Occidentalism and the desire to overcome the western modernity. After the war, during the controversy on Tradition, Katsura villa was eventually promoted as a model for the creation of Modern Japanese architecture.

Phenomenological approaches to Japanese architecture have insisted on the specific relation to nature—especially in the case of religious (Buddhist and Shinto) architecture—and the thought of WATSUJI Tetsurô and NISHIDA Kitaro have been advocated for the analysis of the Japanese architectural culture. However in HUSSERL's philosophy, the starting point of his Phenomenology is the Transcendental Reduction. The Reduction "brackets" all ideas tha are unrelated to our perception of the object as it is in itself. Thus the Reduction is a precondition for the fundamental purpose of phenomenology, that of a study of the essence of objects as they appear to consciousness.

By investigating the idea of Transcendental Reduction, what it means both within HUSSERL's philosophy and how it relates to the discourse on Katsura villa, we can see how the 'Japanese-ness" which has often been taken to be an "essence" of that particular building, is in fact a misrepresentation of the term "essence" and just another example of the "natural attitude," which phenomenology must attempt to avoid. The discourse of 'Japanese-ness" mirrors HUSSERL's concept of "sedimentation": the addition of layers of meaning beyond the originary vision of the object.

A+P | Benoit Jacquet - Reduction to Japanese-ness: Discourses on Katsura Villa

csxlab.org is Francisco Vasconcelos, self-taught photographer born in Portugal and currently based in Berlin. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture, and has worked for architecture offices such has Kyiokazu Arai Kyoto & Sou Fujimoto Architects Tokyo.

Amateur photographer since the age of 12 (1990), carrying the Father Zeiss Voigtländer Icarex 35cs camera until 2006 when the arrival of the Digital allowed me to photograph almost in a diary like. Together with the Canon EOS 350D I started to carry it with me to everywhere I went, including ... Clubbing.

With time my photos started to get some appreciation and i got some works for some clubs, mainly Pitch through 2007, and started with a more professional attitude (not just photographing because i was there) but requested to do the cover of the events, an invitation by 1ªLinha from Portugal; an event producer now based in Brazil.

From 2007 until today, I have been photographing music events such as Goa-Festivals, concerts, clubbing, in many countries in which I lived, Portugal, Germany, Netherlands, Greece, Japan.

csxlab

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