Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa SANAA

KAZUYO SEJIMA + RYUE NISHIZAWA / SANAA

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Contents

7 Preface Gene Sherman 10 Introduction Leon van Schaik 13 SANAA’s Venture into the Twenty-first Century Yuko Hasegawa

Acrylic series 2002–09 20 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Sydney, Australia 30 Mies van der Rohe Pavilion Barcelona, Spain 40 Tomio Koyama Gallery, Daikanyama Tokyo, Japan 50 Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León León, Spain 58 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk, Denmark

SANAA 72 Biographies 73 Major works and current projects

74 Contributors 75 Acknowledgements

PREFACE DR GENE SHERMAN CHAIRMAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR SHERMAN CONTEMPORARY ART FOUNDATION

Why Architecture? Why Japan? Why SANAA? Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) is committed to commissioning significant creative practitioners from Australia and the Asia-Pacific Region to create a major installation or body of work that might not easily be accommodated within a commercial or public gallery – a work that encourages debate, discussion and perhaps dissent within the arts and wider communities. SCAF focuses on the arts in the broadest sense, embracing architecture, film, fashion and design as well as the more traditional visual art forms that have for centuries defined the parameters of studio practice. All SCAF exhibitions are accompanied by the Foundation’s scholarly catalogues, published solo or in association with universities or partnering institutions. Invited international and Australian speakers participate in forums and educational programmes, which include guided tours of the gallery space.

The Foundation’s first anniversary in May 2009 marked the close of the fourth exhibition/commission to be initiated and presented by SCAF. We began with Ai Weiwei: Under Construction, an exhibition in two venues encompassing Ai Weiwei’s monumental installation, Through, 2007–08, together with the premiere of his groundbreaking film Fairytale.* These were partnered with a Charles Merewethercurated survey exhibition at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, for which Campbelltown commissioned a second major work, Marble Chair, 2008.

Australian Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones’s immersive installation, untitled (the tyranny of distance), and Indian Jitish Kallat’s Aquasaurus, both 2008, followed the Ai Weiwei initiative, and in turn were succeeded by the moving-image exhibition The view from elsewhere, a partnership with the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art. Curated by the Head of the Museum’s Cinémathèque, Kathryn Weir, in association with film curator and theorist extraordinaire Mark Nash of the Royal College of Art in London, the exhibition comprised two distinct parts: ‘Small acts’, a substantial selection of artists’ video and film work from East Asia and the Middle East; and a separate documentary-focused screening programme, in which filmmakers explored and revealed hidden and often painful fissures in their respective cultures.

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SANAA’s work, commissioned by SCAF, sits comfortably within the Foundation’s mission and is the long-term outcome of my personal experience of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, which opened in 2004. I was privileged to attend the opening of this architecturally innovative museum in the company of dear friend and arts colleague Johnnie Walker, and experienced Yuko Hasegawa’s imaginative and fulfilling inaugural exhibition as well as the pioneering architectural space designed by SANAA. Impressions of the space never left me.

A relatively little known Japanese partnership before 2004, SANAA subsequently became an internationally esteemed firm responsible for high profile projects. Various designs had, of course, been proposed or completed since Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa formed SANAA in 1995. A re-thinking of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, conceived in 1997–99, disappointingly never reached fruition. Projects like the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio (2001–06), the Zollverein School of Design in Essen (2003–06) and the Naoshima Ferry Terminal (2003–06) were geographically remote and insufficiently known to attract comment from beyond the specialised architecture community. The small city of Kanazawa, too, was unknown and unvisited by a culturally sophisticated audience and yet SANAA’s extraordinary museum design for this town made a serious splash in contemporary architectural waters, leading to informed and admiring comment as well as visitation in unprecedented numbers, and securing a place and space for the duo in the annals of architectural history.

In 2004 the Venice International Architecture Biennale honoured SANAA with the Golden Lion award. This commendation, followed in 2005 by the 46th Mainichi Shinbun Arts Award (Architecture Category), together with other prizes and accolades, confirmed the respect that the partnership commanded among their peers and beyond. Most importantly for Western-based or Western-oriented visitors, their design of the New Museum in New York, together with the Museum’s associated survey exhibition, SANAA: Works 1998–2008, brought their history and practice to full international attention. The survey exhibition showcased museum, education, commercial and residential commissions as well as furniture and houseware. We can now look forward to their Louvre project in Lens, this renowned institution’s first off-site extension.

The underpinning theme of SANAA’s work – an emphasis on light, transparency and openness; fluid, non-hierarchical spaces; exterior facades as permeable membranes; relationships between the private and the public, the individual and the community; and the incorporation of natural elements into the built environment – is present

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in their concept for the SCAF commission. Tailoring their architectural preoccupations to the confines of a gallery space, reducing scale and removing functionality will, we trust, allow visitors to experience something of the essence of SANAA’s practice.

SCAF is honoured to present SANAA’s work in Sydney, Australia, and invites you to engage with the installation and related programmes.

Inspirational architecture provides us with work, living and leisure spaces that elevate the spirit and enrich the senses. We owe a great debt to those whose buildings reflect our highest aspirations and our need for both contemplation and community interaction. *

Under SCAF’s banner, Fairytale subsequently screened at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane (23 August – 11 October 2008) and at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (15 March 2009).

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INTRODUCTION DR LEON VAN SCHAIK AO PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE (INNOVATION CHAIR) ROYAL MELBOURNE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

In question time after a lecture at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), veteran Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki was asked in reverential tones whether he would explain the mysteries of ‘ma’ – the Japanese sense of space. With obvious irritation Maki replied that space in Japan was the same as space anywhere. The room lapsed into silence. Thinking about it later, I realise that his answer could be taken in at least two ways.

He could have been (and probably was) asserting the universality claimed for architecture by modernism. Or, more complexly, he might have been exclaiming that the Japanese sense of space is inflected and nuanced in the same way that the perception of space in any community is informed by its members’ experience of the world through the province within which they grew up.1 This is how the human capability of spatial intelligence2 – evolved over millennia – is deployed, much as our language intelligence (the way we speak) takes its form from the ways in which those around us speak. We all construct ‘mental space’ that is in part completely individual and in part shared with the communities in which we have lived. Historian Eric Hobsbawm captures the sense of this when he describes himself as a Bratislavan-Viennese-Hampsteader-New Yorker, enchaining each place in which he has lived and grown in consciousness.

Today, our understanding of architecture – the human practice that spatial intelligence underpins – is divided into two terrains. One is ‘thick’ with the fullest possible mapping of the cultural particularities of the mental space that has given rise to a work of architecture. This is rare. The other, more prevalent, mode is ‘thin’, in that it strips works of architecture of their context and assumes that the forms and spaces depicted in photographs and plans are entirely susceptible to comparative analysis regardless of context. This is the terrain in which students avidly consume glossy magazines, imagining that they can collage architecture into life from their favourite images, and would-be clients clutch sheaves of cuttings of dream houses from anywhere and everywhere and ask an architect to ‘make one like that here’.

Architects invariably produce their best work in their home country, in the provinces of their origin, for this is where they are fully engaged in the mental space of the culture. Here also their works are appreciated – even if unconsciously – through ‘thick’ perception. When architects

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export work they are immediately at risk. They are exporting ‘drawings that they themselves have lived’3 to those who have not lived them. Their works enter a ‘thin’ terrain and are for the most part perceived in the abstract. Some of this phenomenon is very down to earth. Architect Kerstin Thompson talks eloquently of how the regional building industry and its capabilities influence the look of a work of architecture, rendering even the most avowedly international of designs provincially particular in its realisation. Much of the ‘thick’ or ‘thin’, however, is political and cultural.

Australian scholar Paul Carter wrote about the thinness of a migrant’s Christmas in a new land, where all around she sees surfaces uninformed by the depths of accumulated histories that inflect every place and render it intensely particular to those who have grown up in it.4 Now consider the work of SANAA. Trace the works of the partners, and you trace an emergence from particular prefectures. In a lecture at RMIT in 1997, Sejima extolled the way in which Nishizawa’s weekend house at Gunma (1992–98) was inscribed into the landscape and into the agricultural practices that shaped it. Sejima’s first institutional building – the Women’s Dormitory in Kumamoto, completed in 1990–91 – is luminous with organisational layers of the institution. Were Sejima and Nishizawa’s separate spatial histories entwined with the first joint works? Was there a shared history in space that brought the protagonists together? Is it the incompleteness of that commonality that causes them still to do work apart? These are questions for which it would be good to have answers. In the meantime we know that images of their works haunt so many around the world, partly through their refreshing of ancient architectural forms and partly through an accommodation with nature that is recognised in Japanese gardens but cannot be replicated anywhere else, even when Japanese workers construct the Gift Gardens that grace Sister Cities in which the grass grows too coarse, the shrubs grow too vigorously and those tending them prune them in ways that slowly but surely erode their Japan-ness.

Translation is the honour that one culture does to another’s productions, and literary journals are filled with fascinating disputes about the ways in which things are gained and sometimes lost in the process. For many artists SANAA’s 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (1999–2004) is a revelatory re-think of the enfiladed white box gallery.5 Architect Sean Godsell sees this design as a radical advance in the ‘Asian-no-corridor-plan’ characteristic of Japanese temples. The thinnest of transparent cylindrical containers holds rectangular boxes of varying sizes; some are transparent, as if a cookie cutter has sliced through a field of tatami mats. Think back, and the transparency of the Women’s Dormitory comes to mind, a transparency that is an illusion of accessibility because

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the layers provide full separation from the outside for those inside. Or think of the Multimedia Workshop in Oogaki (1996–97), with its concave curl of macadamised roof that almost meets the swelling of the grass mound into which the building is cut, and a plan that draws the firmest of lines between in and out, and yet has inside a series of parallel spaces that defy easy reading. Overtly there seems to be no room for mystery in these simple forms and cuts and slices. And yet, uncomfortably, as we look more closely we have to acknowledge, beyond abstraction, that the sense eludes. Can we understand the cleanliness of these forms without reading, for example, all of Kenzaburo Oe’s novels? Without committing to living in Japan?

And then SANAA goes to Valencia (extension to the Institute of Modern Art, 2002), New York (New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008, and Derek Lam Boutique, 2009) and London (Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2009). They might have gone to Sydney had not two so different cultures clashed, with Sydney politicians dismally lacking awareness of the issues here discussed. The critical reception in New York is ‘thin’. Acclaim and disdain are equally expressed in terms of the abstraction of the work. A translator of poetry would cringe. Transplanted, what exercises the minds of bloggers is the perceived waning ‘novelty’ of the work. The exterior of the New Museum is ‘cold and ugly’. The sinuous transparent forms in the Boutique are just ‘more of the same’. ‘Perhaps’, muses a disappointed essentialist, ‘they should have remained small like Zumthor’.6 Here lies the rub. Thus far Zumthor has not risked translation out of his province. When and if he does, he too will face the ‘thin’ terrain in which all – with the violence that the encyclopaedia does to architecture – is equated with all and, rather than ‘fit-to-culture’, novelty is the measure of success.

We should recognise that it is incumbent on those who commission works of architecture from abroad to construct a robust translation framework at the time of the commission, not calamitously during or after the event. Failures to do this are evident everywhere; successes usually lie in the arena of rare acts of enlightened private patronage. Viewing this SANAA installation we might do well to attempt a full translation.

Endnotes 1 2

3 4 5 6

This is the conclusion that Arato Isozaki comes to in Japan-ness in Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006.

I am drawing on the thinking in my book Spatial Intelligence: New Futures for Architecture, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 2008, and on the research leading to a book (co-authored with Geoffrey London), Procuring Innovative Architecture, to be published by Routledge in London on 2 April 2010.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1969, p. 12: ‘the frothing of the hedges I keep deep inside me. Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived.’

‘Migrant Musings, Christmas in Brunswick’, Agenda, 1972.

Australian artist Stephen Bram has written and thought about this gallery, absorbing it into his practice.

Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, who has mostly worked in Switzerland during his longstanding career.

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SANAA’S VENTURE INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY YUKO HASEGAWA CHIEF CURATOR, MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, TOKYO

To mark Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation’s presentation of SANAA’s work in Sydney, Yuko Hasegawa met with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa to discuss the foundations and development of their innovative architectural practice. Notions of transparency, sensory and spatial experiences, interior and exterior landscapes, and the gentle separations brought about by curvature – all evident in the SCAF installation – are considered. By explaining their approach to the design of institutions such as the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan and the Rolex Learning Center in Switzerland, Sejima and Nishizawa guide us in our interpretation of their smaller-scale Sydney project.

Programme Architecture and Relationship Building Since its formation in 1995, SANAA’s practice could be described as ‘programme architecture’. This means that the starting point for its designs is not ‘form making’, but rather research and study into a building’s functions and the human activities in and around it. Diagrammatic plans of the organisational structure then give rise to three-dimensional models and, through this process, form develops. What is ultimately created is greater than simply the realisation of conceptual diagrams. SANAA’s architecture has many unique and fresh elements which we can only experience in reality (when we are inside the finished work), such as the light and air that is interwoven with the building’s surroundings and the relationships that form between different elements in the space. ‘SANAA does not begin with imagining a form, but with imagining how light and wind flow through window and door’, says Nishizawa.

However, SANAA’s architecture is not about pitching structuralism against phenomenology; rather, it is about emphasising ‘experience’ in an architectural space. A typical example of its programme architecture is the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, completed in 2004. The Museum is surrounded by arts and community facilities (library, auditorium, community gallery) and ten different independent exhibition spaces. Within the Museum the

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architectural programme is resolved not only through each architectural element but also through the idea of an ‘open museum’, or a museum without barriers: visually, creatively, and in terms of accessibility and visitor participation. This idea of an open museum also extended to SANAA’s design process, which took place over five years and involved discussions with a team of curators. Although this open, consultative process was specific to the 21st Century Museum, the process itself was an expansive experience for the partners.

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art and the Stadstheatre in Almere, the Netherlands, were completed almost at the same time and the primary design elements for both buildings consisted of many fragments of functional rooms. SANAA began by renouncing the standard formulaic lifestyle space typified by ‘4LDK’ (4 rooms + Living + Dining + Kitchen). Instead, Sejima and Nishizawa focused on creating a flexible and creative relationship between each room. The huge number of study models created for these projects is evidence of the extensive time spent making them and simulating internal relationships and the relationship between inside space and outside space. What can we see from a particular position in a corridor, or in a room? Through a window in the long corridor of a 21st Century Museum exhibition space, the view of a town can be glimpsed. Although the town is far away, the view brings it psychologically ‘closer’; it becomes part of the ‘experience’ of the Museum. SANAA’s innovative application of spatial experience is born from Sejima and Nishizawa incorporating their sensory experiences of the model-making process. Initial study models create a sensory quality – a feeling or an atmosphere – that becomes spatial when largerscale models are developed.

Despite acknowledging their success, Nishizawa says: ‘While we started trying for a creative solution in programme, we unknowingly ended up with a strategy of how to position rooms. As long as we positioned a room, a person’s activity in the room did not really matter; in other words, we became a bit too diagrammatic in a sense. We felt a limitation creating architecture in this way, as if a room became the smallest unit when considering programme.’

The characteristic lightness in SANAA’s architecture is partly derived from the purity of hastily transforming diagrams into vertical extrusions, without using traditional architectural plans, but it is also indebted to the concept of ‘transparency’. Nishizawa remarks that the glass in the Kanazawa Museum leads to semiotic transparency – relationships between different parts of the building are visible – and Sejima talks about the transparency of the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, not simply in terms of its physical composition but also in terms

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of its ambiguous spatial qualities: its series of layered reflections and mirrored surroundings can cause visitors to lose their way. For SANAA, transparency is a tool for transforming spatial depth and width.

From Programme to Curvature The design competition for the Rolex Learning Center (RLC) at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, ‘came just after we finished Kanazawa and Almere’. According to Sejima, ‘having achieved a certain final configuration in our pursuit of programme we decided to participate in the competition and started from zero, thinking “what’s next?”.’

The plan of the RLC, which is currently under construction, is rectangular but the parallel floor and ceiling undulate gently across the site. Together with the Onishi Hall in Japan, designed by Sejima at the same time and featuring a large wall curvature, this project introduces a new SANAA language.

The RLC is a one-room single-story building, approximately 120 metres x 165 metres, with an entry at its centre that can be accessed from any direction. The interior space is divided by the three-dimensional movement of the floor slab. It creates a landscape of valleys and hilltops within the building and the programme is placed accordingly. In one corner of the room the auditorium slopes down to allow for a view that extends over the landscape. The restaurant is positioned on one of the ‘hilltops’ where the view of the lake is best. Valleys are used for more private activities, such as study spaces. Because ‘it was extremely difficult for high rise to have a smooth connection of programme’, says Sejima, it made sense to gently divide the space using two mounds in order to create spaces for the library, restaurant, café, exhibition space and so on. The aim is to create ‘architecture in programmes that are gently separated but also mixed into each other’.

SANAA’s manipulation of holes, or openings, also creates spaces of various capacities in the RLC. The sizes and places of holes are determined by the character of the area and the degree of privacy required, so public areas have larger openings than office areas. While the holes bring in natural light they also provide patios at ground level.

Says Sejima: ‘Since the floor and ceiling basically move in parallel, from time to time the eye-level perspective is cut either by floor or ceiling.

Therefore, the space of the room is created as you move around. You experience perpetual changing of spatial depth and relationships.’

Nishizawa talks about the intersections: ‘We thought that the rectangles of Almere started to feel closed-off, a bit like a makunouchi bento box. The “curve” was a way of resolving issues around the

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environment and internal rooms and, at the same time, a way of fighting against programme. It also breaks the notion of “rooms”. Once again, going back to the one-room issue, the room is simply a field, and yet by making corners bend we manage to connect a corridor to a wider room without having any partition. The “curve” can supply a different answer to the programme, quite different from the “ism” of room alignment.’

Nishizawa goes on to say that the possibilities presented by the curve lead to the erasure of the architectural image. ‘The curve comes close to surrendering the notion of circulation, an effect that was also achieved by making lots and lots of rooms in Kanazawa: route-less and scattered exhibition rooms change the whole experience of the exhibition every time it is traversed. In other words, the whole architectural image is erased. The curve does the same thing. If we were to represent the changing dynamic of human activity, I wonder if the curve could be, perhaps, the closest to what we sense.’

In Onishi, a small town with a population of 7100, the conditions given to designing a gymnasium, hall and control tower at first suggested to Sejima the theme of an ‘internal plaza’. She proposed a corridor running between the rectangular volumes of the three buildings. Eventually, however, she decided on three volumes of mysterious form that almost look like a freehand curve drawing, integrating these volumes and the plaza as one element. Nishizawa remarks on this bold form: ‘By adopting the curves, Onishi simultaneously moved beyond materialism, the relationship between the environment and the interior, and “room-ism”. In a way, a curve forms a peninsula, a cove, or an isolated island, depending on where you are sitting. Variations of substance and human relationships are born. It is not so much the conditions that define a certain form but the direction in which a free form finds a new programme.’

Sejima is not sure where this strange shamoji (Japanese rice spatula)-like shape, or splitting amoeba form, came from. She did, however, set limitations on the types of architectural combinations permitted: ‘If you just go around the outside of a block of buildings, the architectural experience can be alienating. But if the outside street runs between the buildings we can still experience the buildings, or have a feeling of being inside the buildings, without actually using them.’ While freely dividing the whole area as specified by the brief, Sejima made a conscious decision to provide plazas and places where, for instance, parents can watch children.

As for the actual buildings, the three different functions are independent and yet connected like an organic substance: ‘The form is scattered but I wanted to make them look like one. The buildings are built apart but the structural grids, for example, are the same and

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columns are located at the same equal pitch. When looking at the ceilings from the lower level, they seem to be continuous under the three roofs supported by the equal pitch of columns. I wanted to organise it so that the scattered things can only be perceived as one thing.’ Scenery is created when nearby primary school students or elderly people pass by.

The whole structure can be seen from any point and, due to the curved glass, the surrounding scenery comes closer and then moves away.

Sejima thus brilliantly manages to programme ever-changing internal and external perceptions.

These thoughts and approaches indicate a type of classicism as the foundation for SANAA’s philosophy. It is also one of the elements in the creation of a Miesian order of transparency. This classicism is balanced by a leap of intuitive inspiration, which is particularly derived from Sejima’s acute sense of physicality.

New experiences In the RLC and in Onishi, the challenge for SANAA was to push the boundaries of its typical study methodology. For example, it is very hard to simulate the conditions experienced when walking on a gentle natural mound formed by a rising floor and ceiling. Computer graphics cannot supply the perfect simulation. As those who simulate experience through making study models know, one dent can be so beautiful from one aspect but appear ugly from another. However, while they are cautious about ‘ugliness’, Sejima and Nishizawa are open to experiences of space that change their views.

Sejima says she is interested in a moment, or a softly appearing and disappearing space, rather than an architecturally constructed space. Nishizawa adds that there is no longer any defining notion of, for instance, a ‘library’ or a ‘restaurant’; instead, there is simply a notion of ‘a place to be’, such as a comfortable and relaxing place with a superb view.

‘That is a human action much smaller than a programme.’ Nishizawa’s remark echoes the primary concept of an earlier question from Sejima: ‘Why can’t we feel architectural space just like we wear skirts?’

When Sejima and Nishizawa say they offer people a fresh, twentyfirst century experience through their architecture, a new humanism and utopian ideas of liberating sensitivity are gently and deeply rooted in their practice. * All quotations in the text are from an interview with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa conducted by Yuko Hasegawa at SANAA’s studio on 21 April 2009.

Translated from Japanese by Koichi Takada.

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SHERMAN CONTEMPORARY ART FOUNDATION SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA INSTALLATION 2009 SANAA

This installation has been commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and is part of a series of recent SANAA experiments with acrylic.

By viewing design studies and final photos of installations in the series we can trace the development of SANAA’s exploration of transparency.

This installation is composed of three independent free-form shapes that appear to weave around each other in the gallery space. It creates a new depth of transparency and allows visitors to experience the acrylic as a cloud that surrounds them, rather than as a sculptural piece to be viewed from a distance. Visitors are immersed in the acrylic and are invited to move through and between the bubbles. Boundaries are blurred and lounge spaces are created in the alcoves, both between acrylic and gallery wall and in the spaces created by the relationship of one form to the next. The curves of the acrylic draw reflections in from the outside, carrying them through the full length of the gallery space.

Since there are two entrances to the installation, one from the street and one from the courtyard, a route has been created through the acrylic to form a continuous labyrinth from garden to city. Numerous rabbit chairs are brought into the space to create a field of activity.

Included here are a plan of the bubbles arranged in the space, a sketch of the misty atmosphere created by the installation and photographs of the study model.

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MIES VAN DER ROHE PAVILION BARCELONA, SPAIN INSTALLATION 2008–09 SANAA

This installation was commissioned by the FundaciĂł Mies van der Rohe.

For this project, SANAA imagined a design in which the acrylic stands freely on the floor, leaving the existing space of the Barcelona Pavilion largely undisturbed. The acrylic forms a calm spiral that moves through the space, wrapping around furniture and allowing people to observe the pavilion through a transparent curtain, or screen. The curtain gently encompasses the space and creates a new atmosphere, with soft reflections slightly distorting views of the pavilion through the acrylic.

The following images show design studies and the completed installation.

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TOMIO KOYAMA GALLERY DAIKANYAMA, TOKYO, JAPAN PERMANENT INSTALLATION 2008 OFFICE OF RYUE NISHIZAWA

This installation emerged from the idea of creating a transparent acrylic lens that would distort the impression of the gallery space. Early studies sought to use the acrylic’s surface to create this effect, but as the project developed it became the tight curves of the acrylic that altered the view of the artwork. The undulating acrylic sheet wraps around itself, filling the interior of the small space, creating a place where artwork and city life become interwoven through the reflections on the acrylic, and establishing a sense of continuity with the street.

The following images show studies of the acrylic lens effect and the analysis of contour lines, as well as the final work.

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MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN (MUSAC) LEÓN, SPAIN FLOWER HOUSE INSTALLATION 2007 SANAA

This installation was commissioned by MUSAC. It has travelled to São Paolo, Brazil, and Tokyo, Japan.

The Flower House is a 1:2 scale model of an unrealised residential project. It was originally designed as a garden with a house, rather than a house with a garden. This led to the creation of a truly transparent acrylic house, with the garden flowing through it. The living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, guestroom and office were all placed in ideal functional positions, in terms of their relationship to each other and the site. A shape was then drawn to enclose these functions, while at the same time establishing a smooth transition between inside and outside.

The relationship between the spaces results in two internal patios that softly divide activities and allow multiple circulation routes through the house. The acrylic serves as the main structure in an entirely column-less building, leaving the thin roof hovering.

The following images show a stacked collection of study models and the final work in situ at MUSAC.

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LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART HUMLEBÆK, DENMARK INSTALLATION FOR THE ARNE JACOBSEN CENTENARY 2002 SANAA

This installation was commissioned by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. SANAA chose to place this installation in the museum’s only exhibition space that had both sidelight and a brilliantly green view. In an interpretation of Arne Jacobsen’s interest in transparency between exterior and interior, an object is introduced to bring the view into the space. This amorphous acrylic is unframed and transparent. It fills the space with distorted scenery, rendering each visitor a unique image of the park.

The following images show a series of studies for the threedimensional pattern that runs across the acrylic, along with the completed work.

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Kazuyo Sejima

Ryue Nishizawa

Major works

Kazuyo Sejima studied architecture at the Japan Women’s University before going on to work for the celebrated architect Toyo Ito. She launched her own practice, Kazuyo Sejima + Associates, in 1987 and continues to maintain this independent office. In 1995 she formed SANAA with Ryue Nishizawa.

Ryue Nishizawa studied at Yokohama National University and joined Kazuyo Sejima + Associates after graduating. He went on to form SANAA with Kazuyo Sejima in 1995 and has also maintained an independent practice, Office of Ryue Nishizawa, since 1997.

2009 Derek Lam, shop interior, New York, United States

2000 Day Care Centre, Kanagawa, Japan

Extension of the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain

2007 Stadstheater De Kunstlinie, Almere, the Netherlands

La Biennale di Venezia, 7th International Architecture Exhibition, ‘City of girls’, Japanese Pavilion, Venice, Italy

House for China International Practical Exhibition of Architecture, Nanjing, China

1956 Born in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan 1981 Graduated from Japan Women’s University with Master’s Degree in Architecture 1987 Established Kazuyo Sejima + Associates 1995 Established SANAA with Ryue Nishizawa 2001 Professor at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan 2006 Visiting Professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland 2006 Visiting Professor at Princeton University, United States

New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, United States

1966 Born in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan

2006 Zollverein School of Management and Design, Essen, Germany

Current projects

PRADA Beauty Prototype, PRADA Beauty ISETAN, Tokyo, Japan

Rolex Learning Center, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland Louvre-Lens, France

1999 O-Museum, Nagano, Japan

Vitra Factory Building, Weil am Rhein, Germany

Toledo Museum of Art, Glass Pavilion, Toledo, Ohio, United States

1998 Koga Park Café, Ibaraki, Japan

Flower House, North Europe

1995 Established SANAA with Kazuyo Sejima

Novartis Campus WSJ-158 Office Building, Basel, Switzerland

1997 N-Museum, Wakayama, Japan

1997 Established Office of Ryue Nishizawa

Naoshima Ferry Terminal, Kagawa, Japan

M-House, Tokyo, Japan

1990 Graduated from Yokohama National University with Master’s Degree in Architecture

Social Housing in Paris XVI District, Paris, France Neruda Tower, Guadalajara, Mexico Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London, United Kingdom

K-Building, Ibaraki, Japan 2004 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan

2001 Associate Professor at Yokohama National University, Japan

2003 ISSEY MIYAKE by NAOKI TAKIZAWA, Tokyo, Japan

2006 Visiting Professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

1996 Multimedia Workshop, Gifu, Japan S-House, Okayama, Japan

Christian Dior Omotesando Building, Tokyo, Japan

2006 Visiting Professor at Princeton University, United States

2001 PRADA Beauty, Lee Garden, Hong Kong, China Garden Café, 7th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey

2007 Visiting Professor at Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

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Contributors

Dr Gene Sherman is Chair and Executive Director of Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. She has a specialised knowledge of art, literary theory and French and English literature and spent seventeen years teaching, researching and lecturing at secondary and tertiary levels.

As Director of Sherman Galleries (1986–2007) she initiated, negotiated and organised twelve to seventeen exhibitions annually, as well as regional and national touring exhibitions within Australia, and international touring exhibitions through the AsiaPacific region. Dr Sherman is on the Board of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation, the Venice Biennale Commissioner’s Council, the Art & Australia Advisory Board, and the Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange. In 2003, the French Government honoured Dr Sherman with the award of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her contribution to culture.

In 2008 she received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from The University of Sydney.

Acknowledgements

Dr Leon van Schaik AO LFRAIA, RIBA, PhD, is Professor of Architecture (Innovation Chair) at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, from which base he has promoted local and international architectural culture through practicebased research. Writings include monographs compiled on Edmond and Corrigan, Ushida Findlay, Guilford Bell, Tom Kovac, Poetics in Architecture, The Guthrie Pavilion, The Practice of Practice, and Sean Godsell.

Recent books, Mastering Architecture and Design City Melbourne, are published by Wiley Academy. His latest book, Spatial Intelligence, published by Wiley, was released in September 2008.

His next book, Procuring Innovative Architecture, will be released by Routledge in 2010.

Yuko Hasegawa is Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and a professor of the Department of Art Science, Tama Art University, Tokyo.

Her recent projects include Ryoji Ikeda +/− [the infinite between 0 and 1] (2009), Neo Tropicalia (2008), and SPACE FOR YOUR FUTURE (2007–08), Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; SEJIMA+NISHIZAWA/ SANAA, Tomie Ohtake Institute, São Paulo (2008); and When Lives Become Form, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2008). As Founding Artistic Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, she curated the inaugural exhibition Polyphony (2004) and Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint (2005).

She is a member of the International Arts Advisory Council for the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, a member of the Asian Art Council at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and a board member of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority.

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Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation warmly thanks the following individuals for their invaluable assistance with this project:

We also gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Philips Selecon Lighting.

Kathy Bail Robert Bevan Chris Bosse Yuko Hasegawa Elizabeth Ann Macgregor Peter McKenzie Laura Murray Cree Leon Paroissien Simm Steel Lucy Styles Koichi Takada Margaret Throsby Leon van Schaik Johnnie Walker Brian Zulaikha

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Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 3 July – 26 September 2009 Published by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 16–20 Goodhope Street Paddington NSW 2021 ABN 25 122 280 200 www.sherman-scaf.org.au © 2009 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Copyright in the essays is held by the authors.

Copyright in the images is held by the artists.

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

The opinions expressed in this catalogue are those of the artists and authors and not necessarily those of Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Hasegawa, Yuko Title: Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa: SANAA / Yuko Hasegawa, Leon van Schaik, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

ISBN: 9780957738256 (pbk.)

Subjects: Sejima, Kazuyo, 1956–Exhibitions.

Nishizawa, Ryue, 1966–Exhibitions.

SANAA Ltd.–Exhibitions.

Architecture–Japan–21st century.

Architecture–Japan–History–20th century–Exhibitions.

Architectural partnership–Japan–Exhibitions.

Architects–Japan–Exhibitions.

Other Authors/Contributors: Van Schaik, Leon.

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

Dewey Number: 720.7452 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Chairman, Executive Director Dr Gene Sherman Advisory Board Doug Hall AM, John Kaldor AM, Dr Claire Roberts, Michael Whitworth National and International Art Advisor Anna Waldmann Associate Director Amanda Henry General Manager – Artistic and Educational Programmes Dolla S. Merrillees Programmes Coordinator, Executive Assistant to Gene Sherman Laura Brandon Administration Coordinators Tracy Tucker and Melody Willis

SANAA Coordinator Lucy Styles Editor Fiona Egan Design Mark Gowing Printed in Australia by Southern Colour

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation providing a platform for innovative visual artists primarily from Asia, Australia and the Pacific Rim. All donations over $2 are tax deductible and will support our exhibition, educational, public and artist-in-residence programmes.

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