« Photographie d’architecture — Architectural Photography — 建築写真 »

le 17 janvier 2025 de 9h30 à 11h30 (heure française) et de 17h30 à 19h30 (heure japonaise)

Lieu : Waseda University (Tokyo) / Zoom

Address: 早稲田大学政治経済学術院〒169-­‐8050東京都新宿区西早稲田1-­‐6-­‐1、3号館6階604号室

Waseda University, School of Political Science and Economics, Building 3, 8F, room 808 Nishi­‐Waseda1­‐6­‐1,Shinjuku­‐ku,Tokyo〒169-­‐8050

Lien zoom : voir le programme ci-dessous / Zoom link: see program below

Moderators: Cecile LALY (Kyoto Seika University, Sciencescope, Japarchi), Sylvie BROSSEAU (Waseda University, Japarchi), and Catherine GROUT (ENSAP de Lille-université de Lille, Lacth, Japarchi)

• 9:30-10:30 (France) / 17:30-18:30 (Japan)

Erez GOLANI SOLOMON (Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem, School of Architecture, Senior Lecturer), Photographing Post Growth — The Japanese Empty House

• 10:30-11:30 (France) / 18:30-19:30 (Japan)

Atsuko SAKAKI (University of Toronto, Professor), Trajectories of the Gaze and Body within Architecture and without — Takashi Homma’s “Kanazawa 21- seiki bijutsukan” and Risaku Suzuki’s “Aomori Museum of Art”

ABSTRACTS

Erez GOLANI SOLOMON (Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem, School of Architecture, Senior Lecturer) (on site)

Photographing Post Growth — The Japanese Empty House

Architecture is arguably amongst the first sites to reveal the influences of Japan’s current epochal transition from growth to post-growth. Whether implicitly or explicitly, architecture is marked by emptiness, dilution, shrinkage, abandonment, reduction and disuse, as well as aging and other tendencies characteristic of post-growth conditions. Within this context, the architectural typology that is particularly performative is the empty house.

Drawing inspiration from the centrality and the strength of the ‘Japanese House’ in Japanese culture and in how it manifests by means of photography [see for example the JAPARCHI presentation in May 2023 of photographer Jérémie Souteyrat: Japan Archipelago of Houses], my presentation will focus on the position of an inverse site: the ‘Japanese Empty House’, and how it is currently being explored by means of photography.

There are currently about 10,000,000 empty houses in Japan. Houses are left empty because of the demographic consequences of low fertility and an aging population, because they are losing the competition with new developments, entrepreneurial urbanism, investment interests, and fashions and trends. They are empty because of the relative weakness of sustainability schemes, due to legal obstacles, due to the changing demands of potential tenants, and even because demolition is expensive. The empty house in Japan is an accurate expression for the consequences of a post-growth period and, as mentioned, there are approximately 10 million such expressions.

For the past 5 years I have been teaching architecture and photography classes with a particular focus on ‘The Japanese Empty House’ in Tokyo and vicinity. My presentation will center on photographic representation of post-growth. It will focus on the outcome of these classes and how the theme is explored in the projects of about thirty young, university level, Japanese and non-Japanese photography students.

Atsuko SAKAKI (University of Toronto, Professor) (online)

Trajectories of the Gaze and Body within Architecture and without — Takashi Homma’s “Kanazawa 21- seiki bijutsukan” and Risaku Suzuki’s “Aomori Museum of Art”

This paper compares two books of architectural photography—Kanazawa 21-seiki bijutsukan (Kanazawa 21-seiki bijutsukan, 2006) which includes Takashi Homma’s photographs of the titular museum designed by Sejima Kazuyo and Nishizawa Ryūe/SANAA; and Risaku Suzuki’s Aomori Museum of Art (Jun Aoki Complete Works [2], Inax Publishing, 2019), featuring photos of the museum, designed by the architect Jun Aoki, and of its environs. I focus on trajectories of the gaze and the body both of the photographer on site and of the viewer of each book. I consider how photography can represent works of architecture as embodied and experienced space-times (Lefebvre, Husserl), enabling viewers twice removed from architectural entities to virtually experience the sensation of walking through and around them by turning the pages of a book, rather than by visiting galleries in person to share space-time with printed and mounted images of those entities.

BIOGRAPHIES

Erez GOLANI SOLOMON

Erez Golani Solomon is currently a Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design and Theory at the School of Architecture and the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. Erez earned his Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Tokyo in 2006 and has since been involved in teaching and research projects in Japan. His research work encompasses a range of issues concerning architectural representations, the contemporary city, and the ramifications of architectural developments under contemporary cultures and politics.

Atsuko SAKAKI

Atsuko Sakaki is a Professor in East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada, and the author of The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature (Brill, 2015), and Train Travel as Embodied Space-Time in Narrative Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).