Symposia
J. Irwin Miller Symposium
Clouds, Bubbles, and Waves
‘The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings.’
—Kamo no Chomei, 1212
So begins ‘An Account of my Hut’ in which a Buddhist monk recounts a series of catastrophes, both natural and man-made, that precede the description of his 100 square foot minimal dwelling, the site of his escape from the world of humanity. A classic of Japanese literature, the text reflects an underlying sense of the temporality of the built environment that continues to permeate Japanese architectural and cultural discourse. As in Kamo no Chomei’s time, the last century has brought events of destruction from conflict (the mushroom cloud), capitalism (the bursting economic bubble), and nature (the tsunami). While each of these moments has had consequences from the tragic to the unimaginably horrific, the architectural and visual cultures that have risen from the (at times literal) ashes have been unarguably powerful, original, and globally influential. This series of challenges led to an architecture of extreme creativity in a context of scarcity of space and means. Other forms of cultural production embraced aesthetic excess, channeling trauma and uncertainty into works of originality, ingenuity, and surreality. This symposium will explore these parallel currents in Japanese architectural and visual culture that stem from calamity. Bringing together architects, artists, historians, and critics, the symposium will expound on how horrific can lead to cute, the constrained can foster the unexpected, and the unstable can undergird the cultural.
Symposium program
Thursday, April 4, 2019 6:30 p.m.
Keynote Address
Timothy Egan Lenahan Memorial Lecture
Sou Fujimoto
Sou Fujimoto Architects
“Between Nature and Architecture”
Lecture will take place in McNeil Auditorium at the Yale University Art Gallery at 1111 Chapel Street.
Friday, April 5, 2019
Afternoon Session, 3:00 p.m.
Sunil Bald, Yale University—Introduction
Mimi Yiengpruksawan, Yale University—“Building for the Unthinkable in Eleventh-Century Japan”
Ken Tadashi Oshima, University of Washington—“Trajectories of the Hut”
Anthony Vidler, The Cooper Union—“War Shock/War Trauma: Architecture in the Post-Atomic Era”
Yoko Kawai, Yale University—Moderator
Evening Session, 6:00 p.m.
“Buildings and Natures”
Hitoshi Abe, Atelier Hitoshi Abe and University of California, Los Angeles
Momoyo Kaijima, Atelier Bow-Wow
Keynote Panel Discussion with Hitoshi Abe, Sou Fujimoto, and Momoyo Kaijima
Deborah Berke, Yale University—Moderator
Saturday, April 6
Morning Session, 10:00 a.m.
Akira Mizuta Lippit, University of Southern California—“The Soft Disaster: Representation After 311”
Miwako Tezuka, Reversible Destiny Foundation—“Arakawa and Madeline Gins: From the Coffins to Death-Defying Space”
Anne Allison, Duke University—“Managing Corpses in Downsizing Japan”
Sunil Bald, Yale University—Moderator
Afternoon Session, 1:30 p.m.
“Atmospheres and Objects”
Kazumasa Nonaka, teamLab
Novmichi Tosa, Maywa Denki
Ryuta Ushiro, Chim↑Pom
Midori Yoshimoto, New Jersey City University
