The 2007 award was won by Alex Bank, of London Metropolitan University. Alex was chosen by a jury of David Leventhal (KPF), Ellis Woodman (Building Design) and Rowan Moore (The Architecture Foundation). Sara Shafiel, a student at The Bartlett, was selected as runner-up.
Alex Bank
Sara Shafiel
Report from the 2007 Award winner, Alex Bank
The
KPF/Architecture Foundation Travel Award has helped me sustain the
thinking about public space that I began during my architectural
diploma. The Urban Figure design project I submitted last year aims at
being close to life, to challenge a priori beliefs about public space
and appropriate densities for a public building in the heart of London.
Informed by Renaissance Paris' hôtels particuliers, the
proposal took the form of a figurative building of generative void
spaces, robust to changes in use, embedded in a decaying city block
towards the Piccadilly Circus corner of Soho. I continue to explore
ideas about the city and its public realm in my professional work as
part of Florian Beigel and Philip Christou's Architecture Research Unit
at London Metropolitan University, and on my travels.
Talking of which, the bursary helped finance a trip two summers ago
from London to Tokyo, between arguably the capitals of the occidental
and oriental world respectively. I spent seven weeks in Japan, my time
divided between two contrasting social and spatial contexts; Tokyo and
a remote mountain village called Koshirakura in the Niigata prefecture.
On reflection, Tokyo can be thought about as the stage on which the fall of public man
has reached its apotheosis. Conversely it is also a city rich in clues
for urban salvation. It is a city in which I imagined Richard Sennet
developing spatial bipolar; one eye weeping while the other, over stimulated, blinks excitedly in civic awe.
Tokyo is the epicentre of those quintessentially Japanese social phenomena like karoshi (death
from overworking). Specific to contemporary urban Japan, these social
disorders talk about the difficulty with which Japanese culture skirts
between tradition and a technocratic modernity. Of spatial intrigue, hikikomori,
an extreme disorder of epidemic proportion, illustrates the alienating
potential of the contemporary city. Loosely meaning an acute state of
self-imposed anomie, it is a condition into which an increasing number
of young Japanese fall. Sustained in secret at home by ashamed parents
and technology, this complete public withdrawal into the intimate,
private realm lasts 4 years on average.
In the spirit of things, I gained personal opting out of society experience through early mornings spent in Tokyo's ,manga cafés
- a hybrid combination of western internet cafés, magazine libraries,
video/computer game rental stores and service station cafés.
Opportunistically located in the subterranean bowels or dizzy crowns of
mixed-use high rises, these extraordinary open plan spaces consist of
small terraced cells enclosed by 2 metre high partitions. Each cell is
equipped with a personal computer, internet, phone, games console,
hi-fi, satellite television, dvd player and mandatory head phones.
Rentable hourly (not yearly!), the manga café demonstrates clearly how
technology fixes you in individual space.
Worrying
retreats into the private realm aside, Tokyo has a truly public
urbanity that I found reaffirming. Tokyo remains an enigmatic entity, a
cacophony of incompatible building forms and materials; irregular
winding streets, alleys and the constant bustling mass of humanity.
Tokyo possesses the perfect preconditions for sociability. Remarkable
spaces like Shibuya or Shinjuku privilege difference. They are sensate
environments of high density with the possibility for the uncontrolled,
the unpredictable and the spontaneous. A prerequisite for a vital
urbanity, this participatory, spatial experience is exemplified in
Tsukiji (Tokyo's largest fish market) with its co-existence of active
bodies against marooned marine life.
Exhausted, the stillness of the remote village of Koshirakura in
Niigata (a mountainous region north of Tokyo) was openly welcomed. That
is a stillness broken for three hot summer weeks by the sound of the
precise pull of Japanese saws and knock of chisels. The workshop,
founded and co-ordinated by the Architectural Association's cult tutor
Shin Egashira, then in its 11th year, combines communitarian and
architectural ambitions. Participants stay in an abandoned school
building, take part in annual community rituals and build things. Each
group aims to leave the village of approximately 80 elderly inhabitants
with a useful public structure that relates to the landscape: a
roadside watermelon cooler, an ephemeral cinema screen, a stargazing
platform. All are constructed from timber and incorporate translations
of vernacular details, eschewing screws and nails!
The project that year was the first to take place in an existing
building, an abandoned farmhouse with an ancient core given over to the
workshop. It was the beginning of a long-term project to create a real
public building for the village. It took the form of a series of
architectural interventions that were about making the house habitable
in the imagination.
One project involved inserting inside the house an 8 metre high tree
trunk that passed through intermediary floors to connect the ground
floor and roof apex. An external intervention took the form of a
delicate, vertically slatted screen leant on the house. In its near
vertical position, the screen protects the glazed elements of the house
from the destructive pressure of deep winter snow. Animated in the
summer months, it slides down the façade to provide a shrouded space
and a table from which to serve sake. All interventions endeavoured to
bring the village into the house and the house into the village.