In the first studio session of the year on the 3rd October, once the brief had been introduced, we were then given a precedent study research task, to present the following week. Everyone was assigned a different architect or project to investigate. This exercise was designed to give all of us, right at the start of the year, a range of new ideas on how to approach a design project and a site.
The architect that I was assigned was Shin Egashira, with particular reference to the contents of his Objects Viewed from the Erased City (1993) and Beautifully Incomplete (2019) exhibitions.
About Shin Egashira
Shin Egashira is a Japanese architect and artist, born in Tokyo in 1963. He began his career in Tokyo, before moving to Beijing, New York, and then settling in London. He is an alumnus of the Architectural Association in London, completing his architectural studies there in 1988. By 1990, Egashira was already teaching at the AA himself, where he has remained and continues to tutor to this day.
Objects Viewed from the Erased City (1993)
Exhibition plan
This work was borne out of Egashira trawling the streets of London, collecting an array of discarded objects. Whilst the objects may be random in what they are, Egashira then took a very methodical and scientific approach. He plotted the found location of each object on this map, and then documented the objects themselves in a series of measured drawings, such as plan, elevation and axonometric.
Map showing the found locations of all of the objects
The exhibition contained a series of moving contraptions, mechanical interventions in the space, which were created from these found objects. Cat Machine (shown below) is an example of one of the contraptions. It is powered by a motor and makes motions inspired by a cat, such as jumping upwards.
Cat Machine elevation and photograph
These automata are not just items of novelty, “they are rooms and houses, distilled to their essence…” This essence is not the basic geometric or architectural forms of the rooms, or the materiality, but instead “the essence of Egashira’s rooms is activity.” The nature of rooms that we inhabit on a daily basis are usually determined by the tasks that we do within them. This exhibition strips away the rooms and instead architecturally constructs, maps and represents some of these activities. It is an inversion.
“Egashira’s constructions are not proposals for buildings, or large pleasure domes, or fish-like transportation. They are rooms and houses, distilled to their essence…” –––– Jefford Horrigan
Beautifully Incomplete (2019)
Beautifully Incomplete was an exhibition at Betts Project Gallery, which just took place this summer. It incorporated elements from 3 previous installation projects, including ones from Objects Viewed from the Erased City.
Installations originally from the Beauty of Our Pain exhibition, where Egashira was commenting on the visual and mechanical similarity between pre-industrial torture contraptions and post-industrial gym equipment.
In this exhibition, the focus was not just on the objects, but on the drawing and cataloguing process which went into creating them. It’s interesting to see the different types of representation next to each other.
Bed Machine (window)
There is also a clear approach of using different scales of drawing. Egashira draws complex axonometrics of the full contraption, but then also has precise drawings laying out all of the constituent parts that make up the contraption. The examples above and below shows this shifting in scales for the Bed Machine installation.
Bed Machine (object)
Pedagogy
As well as considering his endeavours as an artist and architect, it is interesting to look to Egashira's role as a tutor at the AA, where he brings his own approach and methodology to students in his studio Diploma 11: Into the Interior.
The two main strands of investigation and work are "field research" and "material studies". They are interwoven, alternating between the two over a series of exercises, in contrast with the conventional studio approach of precedent study to site analysis to design. This is shown in the diagram below.
Diploma 11 unit structure
Some of the exercises themselves are particularly interesting. In ‘portrait of London’, the first task, students observe and directly engage with a community on site and then make portraits which represent who they are, their values, and how they operate within the city. Their next task, ‘tools to speak’, involves them inventing tools to engage people and trigger active communication. The focus is on the human and the personal, as well as the physical and material.
Later on, in the second material study, students work at a variety of scales, including reversal scales of 20:1 and 100:1, providing fresh perspectives on the materials that we encounter every day.
There is also the emphasis on cataloguing objects; similar to the basis for Egashira’s own work.
They make full-scale constructions designed and fabricated by the students with materials that are chosen for their physical presence, texture and smell.
“[The unit will] question how design can challenge our capacity to appreciate imperfection, explore the ambiguities that lie between new and old, and grant importance to slowness and smallness in a fast-changing urban landscape.”
Reflection
Looking into Egashira's approaches to both his own work and the way that he tutors others in architecture has highlighted the value of a number of different things which I could take advantage of.
One of these is the benefit of alternating between modelling and drawing, in a way that each informs the other.
Another is the benefit of moving between large and small scales, which allows the designer to interrogate the details and discover novel things at a close-up scale, whilst simultaneously understanding the bigger picture.
The final main aspect that I have gained from this exercise is seeing a body of work which demonstrates the beauty of made objects, and their unique tactile and interactive quality. This focus on making objects and designing through making is something that I hope to use throughout my design process.
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