Design Kompany just got around to checking out the SANAA show at Henry Art Gallery, which runs through March 2. SANAA, a Japanese architecture design group lead by Kazuyo Seijima and Rue Nishizawa, made a splash recently when they completed the brand new 7-story building for New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art.
What’s amazing about this show isn’t so much the end results of their architectural design, which while quite beautiful and awe-inspiring, you can’t really do justice in a gallery setting. It’s the level of details they are willing to share with us regarding their process of building. The ideas and underlining concepts, the stuff that’s usually buried in the blueprints or behind the curtains, baffling those who come later to experience the site/sight (Gehry buildings, anyone?).
Views and perspective are the recurring theme. So is “space-making” in a tight corner, and various other restrictions. From the boxes-stacked-on-top-of-each-other New Museum to the glass-encased Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, their approach to problems is at once refreshing and reassuring; drawing from the collective and individual minds of their team, brainstorming and testing possibilities to the maximum.
Refreshing, because architecture is a field where a single-minded “vision” tends to be overemphasized, and reassuring, because it echoes the overtone of emerging trends such as crowdsourcing, bottom-up management and customer-driven branding (I will come back to that topic later).
I was blown away by SANAA’s example, “study for the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art,” which showed 64 variations of its interior layout in 1/500 scale models, each vastly different from each, and all addressing the basic requirement of the job, “a portion of the studies done,” according to the leaflet. I thought: this is a good example of someone using the technology effectively. Then, it hit me: no, these explorations are the reason why new technologies are born and advanced!
Design is so much more than pictures and images. Or words. Or technology. It’s the connectionthat ties them all.
How to generate ideas from nothing
Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/Sanaa: Works 1995-2003 (via Amazon)
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