Private garbage handling in Japan is tied to precise garbage types, garbage bags, and collection days and times, giving a very formalized framework to the collection of the most private traces and evidence of our daily lives. This contrast becomes most visible when this framework is transgressed and the limits between private and public, the intimate and the extimate, are trespassed, for instance by not respecting the formal requirements of the rules of garbage collection or, at the opposite extreme, by stealing private records from garbage bags disposed of on the street or in the container of a condominium.
Teacher: Laurent Stalder
Microwave
The microwave reduces the dozens of different steps usually necessary for the preparation of a respectable dinner to three distinct actions, accompanied by the characteristic sound of the microwave clock and its final ping. For a short two minutes the microwave interrupts the normal flow of life, framing a gap to be filled by other, unpredictable, activities. Yet beyond its immediate impact, on the one hand the microwave reflects far larger changes in the modern food-industry chain, of which it is a final yet crucial link, and on the other it profoundly impacts on daily behavior: from the specific term for heating food in Japanese—chinn-suru—to the various spaces used today to prepare and eat a meal, such as a corner in a convenience store or a bench under an office building. A microwave is not only a heater, steamer, baker, defreezer, but also a symbol of modern efficiency. As such, the microwave is always more than just a microwave.
Balcony
The balcony extends the private realm to the outside and at the same time introduces aspects of the public realm into the intimacy of the apartment. This ambiguity is reflected, and even amplified, by the behavior of the inhabitants, who either appropriate the balcony as a space of inhabitation or, on the contrary, use it as a public stage. Similarly a privately owned place, its use is regulated in Japan by provisions, determining the possible activities that can take place or not on it. Triggered by the balcony’s status as a threshold space, users can easily exploit this ambiguity for transgressions, simultaneously revealing the ambivalent spatial status of this building element.
2019_Thing of Modernity
– Mapping the Micro-geography of Everyday Environments
The beginnings of the broad reconfiguration of the built environment in Japan—from agriculture via the food industry to architecture, from household appliances to the city and countryside—can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. Yet the factors that widely transformed society at this time were less a set of formal accomplishments, but rather a set of new fields of scientific expertise (e.g. hygiene), processes (e.g. electrification), and expert knowledge (e.g. the professionalization of architects, engineers and urban planners). These new fields allowed for the regulation of the environment through a series of systems, devices, and techniques, bringing in turn a comprehensive reorganization of architecture and urban planning: how it was constructed, how it was controlled, and how it was understood amongst the different practitioners and the users of the built environment.
These changes can be traced through the various scales at which architecture operates, ranging from the planning of infrastructure and urban development to the design of individual buildings formed from an assemblage of regulations, techniques, and technical devices, each with their own fields of discourse, systems of knowledge, and constellation of products. Not only have these transformations changed our understanding of architecture, they have also changed the way individuals and social groups experience the built environment. Therefore these transformations are not only of a technical nature but also span a discursive arc between contradictory notions of modernity.
To do justice, therefore, to this multifaceted dimension of these architectures, devices, or elements that have transformed Japanese everyday life in the last 130 years or so, we have called them “Things of Modernity”. Following Martin Heidegger’s definition, a “thing” is etymologically a concrete object, like a “piece of wood, a stone, a knife, a clock, a ball, a lance, a screw, or a wire,” or even a “railway station,” but also simultaneously a trial, an issue, and by extension a place of gathering (still called a “thing” in Scandinavian countries), where reality is negotiated. A thing is therefore not only readable as a “matter of fact” but above all as a “matter of concern,” as Bruno Latour, building on Heidegger’s distinctions, would put it, because “matters of fact” are not what we experience, rather only a very partial view of it. To understand objects as “things” would therefore not mean stripping them of their concreteness, but on the contrary adding reality to them by merging them with “the complex, historically situated and richly diverse matters of concern” in which they are positioned.
The general aim of the course was to propose a new reading of modern architecture, starting less with the ever-shifting “heroes” or “pioneers” or with the “key buildings,” but instead with a series of “things” that at the same time shaped Japanese modernity. The course lasted two terms. While in the first the movement from an “object” to a “thing”, from a “matter of fact” to a “matter of concern”, was considered in four lectures (revolving door, elevator, frame, air) and analyzed by the students through a series of short films on individual elements, the course in the second term was divided in two parts. The first addressed the topic through a series of four seminars dealing with the methods and tools of historical and theoretical inquiry, while students were asked to independently work on a historical investigation of a particular “thing,” analyzed in three different periods in time: the period before the mechanization of the house (ca. 1885–1900), the post-war boom era (ca. 1950–1965), and the near present (ca. 1995–2010). This research was presented first in the form of an atlas and as a map. The second part, which was held in collaboration with Prof. Y. Tsukamoto and Prof. K. Sasaki, proposed a synthetic representation of the research done in the first part in the form of an axonometric drawing.
Fire Escape
Open fire-escape stairs are a common and distinguishing feature in multistory buildings in Japan. Their primary purpose—to allow rapid and safe evacuation in case of emergency—seems perfectly inscribed in their position, shape, and materiality, yet the behaviors that take place transcend them by far: be it as a viewing platform accessible to outsiders; be it as an indoor area in high-density urban residences where the inhabitants casually use the stair as an extension of their living space or practice mutually accepted domestic activities; or be it as an ambiguous realm in the house, neither inside nor outside, where intimate, emotional, dramatic, and mysterious events can happen.