Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The project was created for the first Tsumari International Art Triennial in 2000 intended to make linkage between 7 towns of Tsumari District. It required the construction of an over-sized camera vehicle (Slow Box) and an archive space (After Image).

Slow Box can fit a person inside its wooden structure. It travels across villages with the help of an agricultural tractor. With 15-30min-exposure time, it directly prints (imprint) images in the size of 1.5×1.5 Meter Square on to 5mm thick glass pane coated with photo emulsion. We asked each town to recommend their most beautiful village/community in difficult location for us to reach. 7 villages showed their interest to collaborate namely, Takakura, Takizawa, Kurokura, Kettou, Seitayama, Funasaka and Koshirakura. The journey was organized as 3-4 days in each village, taking photographs as a form of communication, just us being a group of visitors asking permissions for taking pictures, except the camera that is big and slow enough to be taken seriously.

Muxagata, Vila Nova de Foz Côa, is a small village situated along the Coa River, near the Portuguese/Spanish border at the eastern end of the Douro River 120km from the city of Port, Foz Côa region, known for its wine, olive and almond, became also well known since, the late 1980s, the discovery of Paleolithic complex along the Coa Valley which comprises thousands of engraved drawings of animal, human and abstract figures, dated from 22,000 to 10,000 years BCE. In 1995, the Portuguese parliament and government canceled the planning of a hydroelectric power plant on the river and created a park for archaeological study and public visiting.

Started since 2008, Muxagata Workshop has been organized in collaboration with the regional government and the town of Muxagata. This workshop welcomes individual collaborators from the field of arts, architecture, archaeology and filmmaking.

The aim is to speculate a new form of local rejuvenation of the town with its post-agricultural community who seek for the continuation of its identity by avoiding tourist industry or traditional farming as its future solution.

The workshop continues with a series of accumulative interventions, in respect to their unique social/cultural sustainability, working directly with many of un-occupied buildings and leftover spaces.  Currently in progress is a conversion of the historic communal oven.

Organizers: Shin Egashira, Pedro Jervell, Mafalda Nicolau de Almeida.

Fibre cement double curvature modules can be as­sembled into building elements forming walls, furniture or landscape elements. The double curvature of the shells gives them structural integrity making them self support­ed and practical to be applied as temporary elements or as a permanent devices, their modularity allows them to be used independently or in groups. Each individual module is defined by curves drawn on each face of a cube. The curves define a template that becomes the formwork where a surface is stretched and the shell cast in fibrocement. By applying this system it is possible to vary the functions within a surface just by adjusting and controlling the re­lationships between the curves that define the individual modules. A continuous surface that can develop from be­ing a barrier to generate passages and light control with­out losing its expression and structural logic. What distinguishes this system from a conventional fence and what makes it variable is its depth. The foreground defines a clear structural line that forms openings and closures, but it is the relation between the foreground and the background line that controls its porosity.

For the installation at the AA dinning room a limit­ed set of five different templates was used to define sixty different shells. The combination of the templates follows a logic structural rule based on the forming of double cur­vature. The design decisions become limited in the overall form of the combination and the puzzle designs itself by following the basic rule. In terms of fabrication what is systematic is the compo­nents that generate each individual module and not the module itself. The external curves that define the dou­ble curvature within the cube are pre-defined and can be mass-produced. A set of templates that can be put togeth­er in different combinations according to the whole panel and generate individual parts that are different from each other. Within this system, software is capable of calculat­ing the necessary combination of curves if given a starting line path across the whole surface.

The project was developed as part of the Maeda workshop 2008.

The team:  Shin Egashira, Rubens Azevedo, Isabel Pietri, Bart Schoonderbeek, Jesse Sabatier, Jesse Randzio, Faraz Anoushahpour, Camille Steyaert, Tommy Gunawan, Alexander Laing, Mehran Gharleghi, Carlos Parraga, Jerome Tsui, Korey Kromm, Matthias Moroder, Benjamin TateIsabel.

Koshirakura website

In 1996 I held the first architectural summer workshop in Koshirakura village, Japan. This soon became an annual event in the local calendar and coincided with Koshirakura’s traditional Maple Cutting Festival. Participants were drawn from the AA and other schools around the world. The workshop used the facilities of the disused local elementary school, filling a void in the shrinking community with visiting architecture students. My wish has been to contribute to changes in this community through the application of architectural knowledge and by making buildings as a continuous form of communication.

Koshirakura village lies in Niigata Prefecture some 200 km north of Tokyo and is one of 13 villages scattered along complex terrains carved out by the Shibumi River. A rural, mountainous region still recovering from a powerful earthquake in 2004, it is distinguished by overgrown forests and abundant rice fields. Koshirakura has 100 inhabitants (a third of its total population in 1980) and the average age is over 60. In the 10 years of its existence, the workshop has brought together 300 participants from 46 countries, who have worked on a total of 18 built projects so far (including a bus shelter, pavilion, movie screen and viewing platform), and have made artefacts, films, maps and photographs. The workshop as a  project, hopes to serve as an infrastructure for its social sustainability. It wishes to continue documenting a post-agricultural community in transition and to portray Koshirakura’s people and of the terrain they continue to cultivate.

Intercultural exchange has been a significant part of the workshops, and it was important that participants be accepted as temporary residents rather than just visitors. To achieve this, students assumed some of the duties of residents, most significantly by taking part in the traditional autumn Maple Cutting Festival. The festival, which is particular to Koshirakura, begins with the selection and cutting of a sacred tree in the mountains and carried to the village for a night of singing and dancing. The following day the tree is carried and drugged from house to house to commemorate and celebrate significant events of the previous year, whether a birth or marriage, a special birthday, the extension of a house, or successes in business and studies. Inhabitants with special reason to offer thanks provide foods for all, endless toasting of sake, water throwing and singing lend the festival an additional intensity. The journey through the village include a stop at the former schoolhouse, where the workshop activities are based, to celebrate the increasing size of Maple tree every year.

The design process of the furniture pieces is a combination of handcraft and digital tools. Every piece is firstly worked out as a hand made physical model and than developed and analysed using various software and the fabrication becomes a dialog between hi and low tech: model to computer to drawing to model to machine to prototype to drawing to manufacture to hand casting fibrocement.

Fibrocement is the material of choice because of its aesthetic and plastic qualities a material that can be handle in situ by non-specialized hands and only require of-the-shelf equipment and also can be used on an industrial process.

At Hooke Park the process focused first on bending 3/4 steel pipe into a series of frames that when combined formed a twisted loop.  Using stretchable fabric to find the minimal surfaces that form the double curvature shells.  The shells were cast by hand using fibrocement.

Comissioned: AA FAB cluster, AA Maeda Workshop, Established & Sons, Arup & Partners, Adams Kara Taylor and Land Securities.

This Playground is part of the Playgrounds and Toys project by Art for the World, an NGO that invites artists to contribute their art around the world. This playground was proposed for the community affected by the Tsunami in the Southern coast of India.

The playground is inspired by rocks, waves and the wind, and their formal relationship.

World Map, Overpass and Bed, installation at spiral garden tokyo

‘Eupkecha’, a fictional insect in a novel by Kobo Ade, is described as a leg-less beetle who lives within a completely enclosed ecosystem, slowly rotating the body, while simultaneously eating, digesting, and di

scharging its own shit. The home of this insect is somewhere in the African dessert in a village where people use the eupkecha like a clock. The whole town consumption cycle is determined by this tiny animal’s diet. Every year, just before the Spring rains, the clock flies around the village searching for a partner and time disappears for a week.

Impossible vehicle was first shown in the Spiral Garden in Aoyama, Tokyo in the Spring of 1994, following the installation in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1992. It is an over-scale clock that turns the public arena into a space which, by conducting speed and movement of floor and sound, is imbued  with a sense of anticipation. Waste from the cities consumption-such as scrap metal, bricks, floor boards, timber beams, railway sleepers and pig skin- was mapped and collected, using construction methods that are about to disappear form the world of contemporary architecture.

69 parts where put together to form three types of objects essential for vehicular travel: Bed is an engine for making love, World Map is a musical score fo

r navigation and Overpass allows for each object to be passed independently of one another, yet to function as a whole. Each element is distinct, like scattered piece of puzzles, waiting to be put together.

Click here to view the embedded video.