Studio Banana TV Interviews: Yoshiharu Tsukamoto

Studio Banana TV interviews Japanese architect Yoshiharu Tsukamoto from Atelier Bow-Wow on the occasion of their participation at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale. Atelier Bow-Wow is a Tokyo-based modern architecture firm, founded in 1992 by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kajima. The firm is well known for its domestic and cultural architecture and its research exploring the urban conditions of micro, ad hoc architecture.

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto was born in 1965. He studied architecture at Tokyo Institute of Technology, graduating from his undergraduate degree in 1987. Tsukamoto travelled to Paris to be a guest student at L’Ecole d’Architecture de Belleville from 1987–88 and in 1994 he completed a Doctor of Engineering program at Tokyo Institute of Technology.  In 2000 Tsukamoto became an Associate Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and in both 2003 and 2007 he was a Kenzo Tange Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Harvard GSD. Also in 2007 and again in 2008 he was a visiting Associate Professor at The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Pet Architecture is a term Atelier Bow-Wow uses for the buildings that have been squeezed into left over urban spaces. Buildings with curious shapes and inventive solutions for windows, drainage, and air-conditioning often arise in these urban situation. One example of this is the Coffee Saloon Kimoto in Tokyo, a triangular structure with a capacity of four customers. Atelier Bow-Wow documented these micro buildings in detail through photographs, elevations, maps, 3D sketches, and brief descriptions in their publications “Pet Architecture Guide Book” and “Made in Tokyo.”

Behaviorology is the study of functional relationships between ‘behaviour’ and its many independent variables in the determining environment. Behaviorological accounts are influences and based on the current social and physical environment in which the behaviour occurs, the personal history of the behaving organism, and the behavioural capacity of the given species. It is also a clever means of integrating the ‘built’ environment across different scales; furniture, architecture, structures of civil engineering and urban planning. Atelier Bow-Wow is famous for its interpretation and use of the concept of behaviorology in its design work. According to founders Tsukamoto and Kaijima, behaviorology defines architectural expression through the understanding of the complex relationship between people (the inhabitants of a space), the built environment, and urban space. Bow-Wow’s Behaviorology goes further than ‘form follows function’: it bases form on the behaviour of both the building and natural elements. The study of a building’s articulation, inherent properties of elements such as heat, wind, light, water and the understanding of individual and common human behaviour leads to a stronger localized architecture.

Interview and translation by Studio Banana TV
Special thanks to the Tsukamoto Lab. and to Andrea Carbajo from Atelier Bow Wow

More information > www.studiobanana.org