BIArch Journal: Architectural Behaviorology

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow was the guest speaker at Tuesday night’s second BIArch Open Lecture in the Auditorium of La Pedrera. Tsukamoto delivered a delightful sampling of his research on unique urban and architectural conditions of his native Tokyo, as well as a brief overview of Bow-Wow’s built projects. The title of the lecture was “Architectural Behaviorology”, alluding to the way buildings — just like people or climatic conditions — express certain types of “behavior”, precisely by bringing together human and environmental interactions, whether at the scale of a single building or an entire city. According to Tsukamoto, if buildings are observed across a certain time span, they reveal shared architectural languages and patterns, along with their own peculiar traits. By tracing repetitions, a cyclical sense of time can be introduced into the study and practice of architecture, without recurring to linear historicism or pastiche.

After a brief introduction by Dominique Boudet, former editor-in-chief of AMC Le Moniteur, Tsukamoto went over Atelier Bow-Wow’s professional history and the development of their creative processes. He began with examples of the team’s early research and publications, including books like Made in Tokyo and Pet Architecture, which respectively chart local Tokyo architectural hybrids and vernacular micro-buildings that pop up in even the tiniest slither of free urban space. These two books, published in the early 2000s, were fundamental in making Bow-Wow the household name it is today.

Tsukamoto explained that through their research work, Bow-Wow started landing a series of commissions for small-scale installations, such as the “Furnicycles” –bicycles-turned-urban furniture– created for the 2002 Shanghai Biennial, a wooden “Monkey Way” bridge that was wrapped around Niemeyer’s Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo for the 2007 São Paulo Biennial or the White Limousine Yatai, a jumbo-sized mobile street food stall presented in the Echigo Tsumaari Art Triennale 2003 in Niigata, Japan. These built experiments allowed them to try their concepts and findings through actual design processes.

Their observations on the peculiar urban conditions of Tokyo have also influenced the majority of their built projects, from the small houses in Japan to various larger-scale projects abroad. Some of their most endearing buildings, like their own Tokyo house-atelier or the Garden for Pony project, are prefect examples of Bow-Wow’s heightened sensibility towards the living context of a building.