West of Japan, East of Europe Exhibit

An exhibit presented during the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016 at the University of Venice, including photographs of German architect Bruno Taut’s Kyu Kyuga Bettei, a villa in Atami, Japan.
My photographs were shown alongside new, complete drawings of Taut’s design for the villa by Italian architect Marco Capitanio.

The exhibit, curated by Capitanio, was devoted to the only existing project that Bruno Taut realized during his three-year stay in Japan in the 1930s. The villa embodies Taut’s deeply personal reflection on Japanese architecture, mediated through his European sensibility. Juxtaposing drawings and pictures, this exhibition, which was organized by co+labo Radović at Keio University and The Formwork cultural association, helped visitors distinguish between the project’s form and proportion and its materials, textures and colors. In addition to participating in the exhibit, I gave a presentation about photographing historic architecture in Japan as part of an international symposium about Kyu Hyuga Bettei and other projects that relate to designing for and within a foreign culture.

urbophilia 07 (editor Marco Capitanio, co+labo PhD candidate) entitled West of Japan, East of Europe focuses on the work of Bruno Taut and, in particular, his Villa Hyuga in Atami, Japan (1936). The magazine brings essays by Marco Capitanio and Darko Radović and extracts from their discussion on Taut’s work with Kengo Kuma, along with selected photos of Villa Hyuga by Dave Clough and a set of detailed technical drawings of that building by Marco Capitanio and co+labo students. This issue of urbophilia was inaugurated on 9 September 2016, as a catalogue of an exhibition on Taut at Università IUAV in Venice. 

Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, participated in the West of Japan / East of Europe Symposium via video