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Bow-Wow
from Post Bubble City, by Atelier
Bow-Wow.
While the prolific duo of Momoyo
Kajima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, may not be household names
like many other Japanese architects, their oeuvre deserves
as much attention as their more popular contemporaries.
As Atelier Bow-Wow, the two have built a tremendous amount
of (albeit mainly small) commissions in their minus-20-year
existence, as well as seven books, including this monograph
that collects almost 70 of their buildings, unbuilt projects,
furniture, exhibitions, and publications.
The bilingual book is broken down
into twelve chapters, as a means to organize the various
projects by overriding thematic and exploratory tendencies,
with a conversation by the duo introducing each chapter.
The Gap Space chapter, for example, features three projects
that take into consideration the space between buildings
in dense urban areas. These typically leftover spaces are
the product of independent buildings and the lack of shared
walls cities like Tokyo, and the spaces are used to their
advantage in the case of the three projects in that chapter.
Each project includes explanatory
text, photographs, and the studio's axonometric drawings
that will be familiar to those who have seen Bow-Wow's popular
Made in Tokyo and Pet Architecture books.
At the back of the book are a thorough index and bibliography,
the former including statistics like floor-area ratio (F.A.R.)
that reinforces a tendency of the duo to be highly skilled
categorizers and organizers. What comes across in this book,
as well as their previous non-monograph ones is an attempt
to document the urban environment in various ways (via photographs,
architectural drawings, descriptions, and statistics) in
a manner that seems to be at odds with the apparently chaotic
context of Tokyo. Perhaps that duo uses their organizational
skills to find the underlying order in the chaos, a chaos
that is the result of bureaucratic instruments like building
codes and zoning ordinances, of which the F.A.R. is but
one factor. Bow-Wow's designs exploit the potential in these
limiting factors, in effect creating unique yet rooted buildings
that develop from their idiosyncratic take on their architecture
and their surroundings.
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