EXPERIMENTAL CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE AT THE MORI ART MUSEUM – NO CUTS –

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TOKYO, JAPAN — The Mori Art Museum is presenting its first architecture exhibition, an exploration of revolutionary designs by international architects from the 1950s to the present. On view through March 13, “Archilab: New Experiments in Architecture, Art and the City” uncovers the origins of radical and visionary approaches to building design and urban planning that have changed the way at the city is viewed today.

Featuring more than 200 projects by nearly 100 architects and artists, “Archilab” revisits urban utopias from the 1960s, analyzes deconstructionist works from the 1980s and addresses the influence of new technology in the 1990s. Design models, drawings and installations illustrate creative experiments and transformative designs by leading architects, including Archigram, Rem Koolhaas, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Daniel Libeskind, Diller + Scofidio, Arata Isozaki, Bernard Tschumi and many others.

From biomorphic forms and mobile habitats, to “intelligent” architecture that reacts to environmental changes, the wide range of designs featured in “Archilab” provide an intriguing overview of the complexity of contemporary architecture.

“Archilab” is divided into four sections that chronologically and thematically detail the evolution of architecture in the late Twentieth Century. The first section, “The Pulsating City,” addresses the fanciful, utopian styles of 1960s organic architecture, which featured supple, flexible forms and curving surfaces. Archigram, a UK design collective, developed whimsical urban planning concepts like the “Instant City,” 1969, a mobile aerial city propelled by hot air balloons that transports the entertainment resources of a metropolis to smaller communities. Although their playful, pop-inspired visions rarely progressed beyond the design stage, Archigram’s idealistic influence has continued in the work of many contemporary architects.

The second section of “Archilab” begins with models and designs for “spatial cities” developed by French-Hungarian architect Yona Friedman in 1959. Reacting to the post-World War II housing shortage and urban rebuilding projects, Friedman envisioned new cities projected over Paris, Venice, London and New York that allowed inhabitants to move freely. Friedman focused on flexibility and individual freedom, proposing huge structures supported on columns, in which residents could build their own dwellings. These utopian ideals merged with more realistic goals in the 1960s, as the Japanese Metabolists, Kisho Kurokawa and Kikutake Kiyonari, created environments with future expansion and continual transformation in mind.

“Archilab” also shows developments in conceptual architecture during the 1970s and 1980s. Starting with the radical Italian collective Superstudio, the third section “The Deconstructed City” examines the provocative and confrontational designs that led to the idea of deconstruction in architecture. Founded in Florence in 1966, Superstudio put forward notions of a purely theoretical architecture and criticized Twentieth Century modernist design doctrine. “Archilab” will feature Superstudio’s “Istogrammi d’ architettura,” 1969–2000, an installation that reduces architectural design to a series of generic white building blocks covered with a black grid.

The final section of “Archilab” explores the interactive architecture that has emerged with the development of computer technology since the 1980s, including “smart” spaces that evolve and mutate according to changes in the environment or inhabitants’ moods. The Netherlands architecture firm Oosterhuis.nl designed the “Web of North Holland,” 2001-02, a gleaming steel and aluminum spaceship-style structure, as a multimedia pavilion for the horticultural show Floriade in 2002. Sensors track visitors’ movements and trigger interactive displays, illustrating Oosterhuis’ vision of architecture becoming animated and unpredictable.

The Mori Art Museum is on the 52nd and 53rd floors of the Mori Tower. For information, +81-3-5777-8600 or www.mori.art.museum.

BOOK Brief, AMERICAN COSTUME

Five Centuries of American Costume by R. Turner Wilcox. Dover Publications, 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola NY 11501; 2004, 207 pages, softcover, $12.95.

“I present this collection of historic everyday apparel to all those interested and working in so vital a subject as dress costume,” writes the author in his foreword in 1962.

Dover’s unabridged republication of Charles Scribner’s Sons 1963 edition features 404 black and white illustrations (sketches) of the apparel of the Americas, from the Viking’s everyday wear up to 1960s American attire.

Wilcox has researched his subjects well; however, the information given on color in the captions only serves to point out its absence on the page. Five Centuries of American Costume remains an excellent resource for fashion historians, costume designers and artists.              —LM