Collective managment

Environmental design is being taken into acount more and more in architecture design these days. This is something good, but we believe it should not only rely on the building's performance.
A participative managment in the environmental issues would be much more effective at long term because it builds good "environmental" habits in citizents. The user should percieve he/she is an important part of it.

Some of our relatives

In this little graphic game, a number of our projects turned into animal-like characters.

On Kawaii

The intensification of empathic relationships with objects, or the action of turning almost anything into an object of affection became a social phenomenon in Japan. Maybe there are some interesting issues that relate to our lasts posts, related to identity, interaction and the creation of objects of affection.

Nowadays kawaii (cute, mignon, liebe or süss) is everywhere in Japan. Every one of the 47 japanese prefectures has its own kawaii-like representative pet, the same as the police force or the state tv. Big commercial airplanes decorated with 6m high Pokémons are kawaii. Totoro, Doraemon, Kitty, Tamagotchi, Momo the PostPet, etc. are kawaii. Kawaii is the most used word in colloquial contemporary japanese. Kawaii is small, rounded, infant-related, soft and amusing. Every designer of the enterprises specialized in character design like Sanrio or San-X, must produce at least one or two characters a year (although some of them have been born in the good old b/w tv days).

According to Hiromura Masaaki, industrial designer and author of some of these characters, the key is communication with a maximum number of receptors: "to create a character successfully there are two basic requirements, it must be kawaii and simple; because of it we develop simple and lovable shapes, with clear and brilliant colours. Creating a character that simbolizes a communication media is a means of connectind different generations and different people who, otherwise, wouldn't communicate."

The anatomy of such characters would be as follows: globally the features of a sexless, mute and defenceless, with no corporal orifices and vaguely insinuated limbs. In a broader sense, kawaii also refers to whats lovable, simple, atractive, artificial and available, humorous and kitsch.

Kawaiiness gives personality and subjective presence to commodities that otherwise wouldn't be nothing but mass-produced and impersonal.

Risa Campaign nr. 6

Risa Sato. "Risa Campaign nr. 6".
Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Aomori, Shiga, Ibaragi, New York City. (May 1998)

On Empathy

An architectural product, a building, is a character: then we should as architects how to model their personalities, their dominant features in order to enhance their communicative capacities. Buildings are ‘urban messengers’.

Let’s see buildings as a set of ‘individuals’ with their own identity, with their own singular characteristics. Buildings do set an empathy relationship with the user. This affective relationship must belong to the specific tools of architecture. Therefore, architecture operates with objective materials and also with subjective bonds an relations with users and objecs around them. Following this line of thought, context deals with transferences between project and ‘everything else’, aimed to link user and ‘building’. These links are finally identification codes.

We could think of buildings starting from their performative capacities before the user and its context, beyond any other concern, like abstract form producing. As a matter of fact such ‘form editing’ should emphasize those performative capacities and even maybe hide those architectural codes that blur those capacities. Architectural abstraction, complexity or monumentality could be transformed therefore into something apprehensible, legible. The domestic object turned into a pet.

Baudrillard defined the object as the “perfect pet”. Objects are the only ‘beings’ that emotionally affect us without any restriction to our personality whatsoever. “Objects are the only beings whose coexistence is truly possible, because their differences do not confront people, as it is usual among the living creatures, but they tamely converge to us and sum up esasyly to our consciences”

And follows:

“The object is a dog whith everything taken out extept fidelity”

Therefore, the relationship between architecture and user, if appropiately articulated, can be intensified if perceived as an object of affection and not a presence unconnected to our own experience.

Next post: On Kawaii