| During a lecture at Kyoto University about ten years ago, Mark Burry (currently director of the RMIT Spatial Architecture Information Lab, a board member of Gehry Technologies, and executive architect for the ongoing construction of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia) addressed the subject of organic forms in architecture. Burry made a comparison between the reasons for introducing high-end modeling software into the work of Antonio Gaudi and Frank Gehry: while both offices use computers for resolving difficult three-dimensional forms, the former works with intricate, complex geometries whereas the latter methodically removes any trace of geometrical rationality in order to produce irreducibly unique shapes. From the audience, Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama asked, "If a particular freeform is chosen, is it then still a 'free' form?" The question didn't receive a definitive answer, nor should it have. It's a paradox that every architect -- whether they work with crayons or with computers -- is aware of, yet rather than requiring a solution, it's something like a Zen koan that is most productive when left suspended in the designer's mind.
Takeyama calls his own office Amorphe, indicating his interest in non-standard forms and simultaneous awareness that all architecture is an exercise in formalism of some kind, whatever the justifications. Rather than using the rhetoric of "form follows function" (which has been used to explain the rigid orthogonal profiles of early Modernism as well as the smooth contours of recent digital design), Takeyama intuitively and unashamedly works with shapes for their own sake. He highlighted these interests with a recent exhibition at Art Space RURI in Tokyo, which included drawings and paintings based on the many sketches he makes during the design of his buildings.
There were two main sets of work in the exhibition. The first comprised green and yellow drawings of cityscapes, the kind of compositional improvisations and abstractions that Takeyama has long produced. He describes them as "vague, unconscious images of architectural forms, rather than ones for any specific project." The second group is the focus of the show, a series of blue and red watercolors he made while working on his short-listed submission to the competition for the Centennial Hall of Yamagata University Faculty of Engineering. The shapes in the paintings are reminiscent of lily pads, squashed circles each with an offset hole, a composition reflected in the roof plan of the large model of the Centennial Hall also included in the exhibition. Takeyama again:
"The blue and red drawings are images of emerging spaces. If there is a spatial object perforated by a hole, it becomes a room. If there are several rooms and they are given a configuration, it will become architecture. One perforated body is named 'win,' two are 'winwin,' and three are 'winwinwin.' The 'win' is a life, or a creature of architecture. There is an architectural dialogue within 'winwin,' and architectural relationships within 'winwinwin.' I define architecture as a relationship of spaces."
The exhibition treated these architectural sketches as artworks in their own right, independent of, and parallel to, the building design process. The implication is that in some cases the selection of architectural shapes may legitimately be based on nothing more than perceived beauty. Just as for a customer in an art gallery, the choice may simply be the most visually appealing piece within a series of variations on a theme, a choice that requires no deeper explanation.
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