University of Louisville
Morgan Lecture Series
2010 Lecturer:  Dana Buntrock

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The 2009-2010 Morgan Chair of Architectural Design is Dana Buntrock, who is visiting from the University of California at Berkley.  Dana Buntrock began her studies of Japanese architecture more than twenty years ago, her first visit a month-long trip that took her to tiny corners of the country to see avant-garde and out-of-the-way works. Buntrock’s first book, Japanese Architecture as a Collaborative Process: Opportunities in a Flexible Construction Culture (E&FN Spon, 2001) looked at professional practice and what it said about a nation’s culture. Her second, Materials and Meaning in Contemporary Japanese Architecture (Routledge, 2010) is concerned with the art and craft of architecture, and how these are used to reflect the particularities of places.

2010 Morgan Lecture Schedule:

Thursday, January 28, 2010, 6 p.m.
Speed Museum Auditorium

Tradition and Today: Materials and Meaning in Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Professor Dana Buntrock of UC Berkeley

Japan nurtures two distinctly different poles of architectural practice.  Innovative and up-to-date structures underscore modernity and a new social fabric, an international architecture with a purist bent: spare, state-of-the art structures, smooth and swooping, scholarly and scientific, skinned in sparkling aluminum, steel, and glass.  Other architects allude to an older Asia, to Japan’s religious roots or residential realms.  They accept ruin and idealize age, an architecture that is regionally responsive.

My book, Materials and Meaning in Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Tradition and Today, looks closely at the work of Kengo Kuma, Terunobu Fujimori, Fumihiko Maki, Jun Aoki, and Ryoji Suzuki.  I introduce a number of wonderful works barely known in the West and I explain why these architects look both forward and to the past in their architecture. 

Thursday, April 15, 2010, 6 p.m.
Speed Museum Auditorium

Four small structures bursting with big ideas, SUMIKA: Professor Dana Buntrock of UC Berkeley

In Spring of 2007, Toyo Ito asked three others to join him in an architectural event in Utsunomiya, a small city an hour north of Tokyo.  Ito himself would offer up a structure to serve as a starting point for tours of three exhibition houses the others would design.

Ito’s pavilion was to be a temporary spot, as if under a tree.  His design evolved into something like a small grove, four arboreal columns supporting spreading canopies of branching beams, six to a stem, almost equally angling outward.

Terunobu Fujimori’s house embraces a tree trunk that is barely barked and resplendent in rough tool marks.  Fujimori advocates a rudimentary and unrefined approach, in opposition to an international architecture that has grown, he asserts, too lean and attenuated, too cerebral for the common man.

For Taira Nishizawa, another of the four, nature is an active force.  His approach is a crudely scientific one: he plans for prevailing winds and plots azimuth and altitude to choreograph his interior, shafts of sunlight like spotlights on a stage, highlighting inhabitants’ movements through the day.  He underscores nature’s essential elements: a breeze flutters through fins along the ceiling; shafts of sunlight stand in stark contrast to an enigmatic black surround; inhabitants traverse a tiny island of interior lawn in order to reach the toilet. Nishizawa’s architecture is an apparatus, an unsophisticated application of expertise.

Immediately adjacent to Nishizawa’s simple structure is Sou Fujimoto’s: ten tiny cubes, unceremoniously stacked in overconfident cantilevers as if by a child.  Fujimoto’s offering is the show-stopper on the tour.  Its primitivism is in its apparently naïve organization, in enjoyment of the snakes-and-ladders-like way one must engage with it, up a ladder, down a stair.

These four structures offer a revealing snapshot of architecture in Japan today, brimming with big ideas, each articulating the values of a different era.  In this lecture, it is my hope not only to explain the architecture, but also to add insight into the nature of Japan’s generations and their oddly different approaches.