School’s Out! #10 with Momoyo Kaijima

Momoyo Kaijima was the speaker at School’s Out! #10 on 28 February 2020. Momoyo is co-founder of the Tokyo-based design firm Atelier Bow-wow, which she established in 1993 together with Yoshiharu Tsukmoto.

In her talk, Momoyo gave an overview of their teaching and commercial work at Atelier bow-wow which includes building, research and art projects –  always trying to get as close as possible to the community they work for in both the architectural aesthetics as well as in the materialisation and construction techniques.

Starting by documenting the unique urban reality of Tokyo, Atelier bow-wow produced a number of publications that took the form of guidebooks, introducing the reader to the accidental, ad-hoc nature of the urban landscape. Pet Architecture documented tiny buildings that fill the cracks of the city and are always customised by the user, whilst Made in Tokyo showed instances of hybrid, cross programmed building types with unlikely juxtapositions, the result of the extreme pressure on land. Atelier Bow-wow’s approach to architecture is informed by this research and what they have termed ‘micro public space’, in which they attempt to recreate some of the behaviours and meetings that occur in the city in gallery installations and in their buildings. They do this through the deployment of customised urban furniture that encourages active user participation, such as their ‘Furnicycle’ designed for the 2002 Shanghai Biennale or the design of public kitchens and vegetable kiosks. In both their exhibition design and the design of buildings, Atelier Bow-wow construct situations rather than objects, design processes that can result in chance meetings and leaving room for users to adapt and appropriate space.

Programme

18:00 Drinks, Tunes and Bites
19:00 Talk by Momoyo Kaijima + Q&A
20:00 Quick break
20:15 Screening of Film fragments, selected by Jord den Hollander
20:45 Drinks, Tunes and Bites
22:00 End of Programme