On Participation in the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale

Over the past few years, while participating in the Salone del Mobile.Milano and other international events, I have been questioning the way international exhibitions should be held, especially when people have the tools such as Instagram and Facebook to communicate with the world whenever they want. Of course, it is important to actually see the work one-by-one, so I thought it would be more suitable in this day to use email to inquire about what he or she really wanted to see, visit the place where the work was actually created, and have a one-on-one conversation with the artist in front of the work.

It was during this time that Mr. Kozo Kadowaki invited me to participate in the Venice Biennale. As a member of the participants, I told him that if I were to be involved, I would like to create an exhibition that would make people understand the meaning of moving. This idea was well received and shared by everyone. In addition, we all agreed that if we were going to use new materials, we should make an exhibit using scrap materials that would be destroyed and thrown away. It just so happened that the “former Takamizawa residence” in front of Mr. Kadowaki’s house was going to be destroyed, so we decided to carefully disassemble and use each of the materials that would come out of the house.

In the process of dismantling the building, I realized that the building itself had gone through many changes, and that it had been expanded to meet the needs of each era, and that there were many layers of materials from different periods. After the dismantling of the building, it will be reassembled as an exhibition piece in Venice, and after the end of the exhibition, it will be moved to Oslo where it will be permanently installed again. I learned that there is a way to have sustainable architecture, like the stone buildings in Paris, that can continue to be used without being moved, but there is also a way to have sustainable architecture, like the wooden buildings in Japan, that can be expanded to meet the needs and then dismantled and moved to be used again. It is also because of the evolution of information processing capabilities that can handle the individuality of each piece of old wood, and communication processing capabilities that can instantly transmit information across time and space, that architecture that transcends time and place and can enjoy the process of connection and separation has been realized.

Proposal by Jo Nagasaka
We designed the ” Material Storage Area (Exhibition Hall)” and the ” Workshop (Piloti)”, which are important in expressing the co-ownership of the production, the concept of this project. The other four architects, Ryoko Iwase, Toshikatsu Kiuchi, Taichi Sunayama, and Daisuke Motoki, proposed a secondary use of the former Takamizawa residence by reconfiguring parts of the existing building from Japan and converting them to the necessary use, and constructing an exhibition space (courtyard) with the reinforcement of single-pipe scaffolding. We proposed to make small pieces of furniture from the leftover materials in the workshop above, rather than to reuse it after the exhibition, in other words, to make a design for a third use. In order to parasitize the already freestanding single-pipe scaffolding, I devised a way to connect the 48.6φ-tipped single-pipe, and invented a circular saw lathe. The circular saw lathe made it possible to assemble even the deformed materials that do not fit each other perfectly by making male and female cylinders.