Mikio Tai (Architect, representative, Architect Cafe)
All you students must have become aware that we are much too indifferent about understanding such basic things as the urban framework. Even many excellent Japanese architects rarely think things through to that extent in arriving at solutions to individual buildings.
Unfortunately, I could participate only in the final review for this workshop in Yokohama, which (as I understand it) is a trial run for the Barcelona workshop. However, I cannot help but sense in these projects generated by new strategies a roughness and power that is the direct, unresolved expression of a mixture of puzzlement, fear and joy felt by students toward a new view of architecture.
Specifically, these are about selecting a number of sites and developing architectural projects there in order to revitalize the city through tourism. The idea of seeing individual buildings as parts of an overall relationship seems matter-of-course but is rarely part of architectural training. Above all, it is a considerable achievement on the part of the students to have realized that tourism as an urban strategy, which has been successful in Barcelona, can contribute effectively to the creation of urban and architectural culture.
What deserves recognition is not so much the pros and cons of the projects for the sites themselves but the fact that students were able to explain in their own words the necessity for creating those projects and their hopes for the future. This workshop was indeed a super-intensive demonstration of Y-GSA's basic educational creed that architecture cannot be discussed without discussing the city.
There is no question that this was extremely good training for students. However, it would have been nice had there been students who took their own approach, instead of adopting this Western stereotypical strategy, or is that asking for too much?
Teppei Fujiwara (architect, Kengo Kuma & Associates)
Yokohama seems a simple city but is oddly elusive. On the one hand, it seems like a mixture of neighborhoods of different character, but at the same time, the area around the harbor has to some extent a clear structure. Generally, the latter leaves a stronger impression. Yokohama is, after all, known as a port.
Luis Falcon, who is in charge of a studio called "Intelligent Coast" at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, reasonably enough, focused on the latter, that is, the port of Yokohama. He undertook a speedy introduction of the present-day strategies of, and the keen economic competition among, ports throughout the world including Barcelona, and showed a simulation in Yokohama. It seemed an urban strategic proposal made in a global context through extremely rapid urban research that demonstrated a grasp of the commercial aspect of the issue.
His philosophy and his words were no doubt extremely stimulating for the students because it was their first exposure to realism. However, looking back, now that we are in the middle of a global economic crisis, I think the impression is slightly different.
