UG4
Otakutecture Ana-Monrabal Cook, Luke Pearson
Year 2 Hohgun Choi, Nicholas Chrysostomou, Arthur Harmsworth, Will Kirkby, Jimmy Liu, Oliver Mitchell, Aikawa Mok, Luke Sanders, Sarmad Suhail Year 3 Milly Black, Sam Davies, Alex Findley, Emma Jurczynski, Adam Moqrane, Afrodite Moustroufis, Andrew Riddell The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Many thanks to Gavin Hutchison for his continued help and advice as our technical tutor. And to German Casado, Greg Kythreotis (Shedworks Interactive) and Sam McGill (Studio Archetype) for their media workshops and support Thanks to our critics: Laura Allen, Elisa Bertoja, Matthew Butcher, Ian Chalk, Tom Coward, Stephen Gage, Penelope Haralambidou, Gavin Hutchison, Will Jefferies, Carlos Jiménez Cenamor, Diony Kypraiou, Ifigeneia Liangi, Sam McGill, Christopher Pierce, Dan Scoulding, Bob Sheil, and Sandra Youkhana Special thanks to: Akihiko Niiho, Keigo Kobayashi and all at Waseda University, Momoyo Homma (Arakawa + Gins Tokyo Office) and Massimo Baracco (Prada Japan) for their hospitality and guidance during our trip to Tokyo
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From Godzilla to Blade Runner, Tokyo is often held as an architectural synecdoche of the future, a city symbolising the relationship between technology and the metropolis – both seductive and uneasy. Nowhere is this tension more present than in the culture of otaku. As a term roughly translating into ‘nerd’, Japan’s otaku population throw themselves into pop culture proliferated by technology, obsessing over virtual anime pop stars, manga, videogame worlds, trains, modified cars or even the recreation of historical Japanese periods. Cultural critic Hiroki Azuma argues that otaku creativity is both heir to Edo-era Japanese aesthetics, and a Japanese domestication of Americanised pop culture. At best such passion drives the country’s creativity and economy, at worst it is symptomatic of a population withdrawing from the reality of modern Japan, betraying the fragility of the nation’s identity. Otaku also means ‘your home’ and is a polite form of ‘you’ – equating a person with their architectural space of residence. Otaku’s multiple identities remind us of the weird and wonderful bastardisations of culture that sit just beneath the city’s surface. Otaku culture challenges boundaries between actual and virtual, fact and fiction, and author versus consumer. As Otakutects we applied these tensions and distortions in the design of new architectural typologies. UG4 questions the status of architecture in our image-saturated digital world. This year we challenged the boundaries of architectural media through workshops with professionals from the visualisation, animation and videogame industries. Exposing relationships between modern technology and their historical precedents, we blended real, fictional, technological and historical approaches. Projects collapsed distinctions between architecture, craft, nature and super-nature. Otaku approaches saw students embody the qualities of gods in videogames, turn bedrooms into landscapes of scrolling parallax drawings, create spatiotemporal comics, design foldable buildings for slot sites, machine pavilion-scale Noh masks and plan postapocalyptic playgrounds. By extending these obsessions and idiosyncrasies into the design of a building, students worked towards synthesising a piece of true Otakutecture. Research methodologies developed in term one were carried into the production of unique building projects that questioned the nature of obsession in design, becoming transcriptions of our fascinations – from crystallising the typology of Tokyo’s police kobans, through a museum that becomes a secret pilgrimage for a cult, to an artificial landscape containing hidden spaces for Tokyo’s women to break their cultural bonds. Embracing technology, obsession, tradition, perversion and malfunction, we jumped into the symbolic overload of the modern city and emerged as Otakutects!