Time Matters: Transition and Transformation in Architecture

Though the contemporary world in the West has only just started to value architecture that is temporary and highly flexible rather than permanent and timeless, the East has a long building tradition respecting the transitory and ephemeral. Mark Taylor , Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle, Australia, looks at ways in which recent architecture in China, Japan and New Zealand has been embracing the limits and passing of time.     

When a Tree House No Longer Says ‘House’, Are We Virtually There?

In the spring of 2013, Akira Suzuki , the Japanese architectural critic, editor and Professor of Architecture at Musashino Art University, issued an invitation to three architects to design and self-build a tree house for HC Andersen Park in the suburbs of Tokyo. He observes how the resulting ephemeral structures, built out of the trees themselves, invited interaction with visitors and, and were ‘less material buildings with solid roofs and walls than “conditions” or “happenings”’. He discerns that the widespread adoption of social media in Japan has resulted in a paradigm shift. This has moved creativity away from the folly, as an object of contemplation, scale-less and position-less on the landscape's horizon and solitary in the mind. In its place, the solitary browsing of networks is causing people to meet in actual space, which resists the easy flows of internet connectivity without imposing walls or rooms.     

基于空间句法探讨金泽21世纪美术馆的空间组构

展览类建筑的空间配置形态对参观者的使用行为有很大的影响性。金泽21世纪美术馆是SANAA事务所重要的代表作之一,它与传统美术馆设计有很大的不同：因而,本文拟以空间句法（spacesyntax）之动线和视域分析方法来分析美术馆的空间组构形态,希望借此更客观地理解形态表层操作对空间深层的影响,以便于分析设计者的理念。     

Artists of the Floating World: SANNA,Niedermayr and the Construction of Atmosphere

Hugh Campbell expands upon the mutually collaborative spatial qualities evoked in the photographic works of Walter Niedermayr and the architecture of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Tokyo-based practice SANAA. Describing their relation as forming a ‘thickened presence’, he alludes to a particular atmosphere reliant on an ambiguity of scale, detail and discernible proximity that serves to liberate the architecture and the photographs from mere documentation whereby instead they figure as transparent recordings of spatial intentions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.