The Gallery

Plan & Section

Design scheme

Daido's work often deliver a sense of stark and contrasting within itself, which is considered throughout the design.

The building consists of three parts, gallery in the front, middle courtyard and the apartment at the back. The material used for construction is mainly precast concrete and glass, the same cold, stark sensation that can be found in Daido's art works.

The gallery has series curved shapes with varying slope which represents the traditional Japanese culture that has gradually changed under the influence of foreign values in modern society. In addition, the curved shapes are also in contrast to the apartment at the back, designed in a more conservative order with rectangular forms.

The courtyard is positioned in the middle with several advantages:
1. providing sufficient sun light for the gallery and the apartment
2. private outdoor space that enables interaction between people and nature
3. connecting the two distinguished space as a bridge
4. ideal for public/private events

It is very natural to set the apartment at the back, away from the noise and privacy is secured.
the office has a direct access to the gallery, without walking into the courtyard. However the bedroom and owner's studio are completely isolated at a higher floor with minimum disturbance from the gallery. The dinning room/Kitchen is positioned right next to the courtyard and the living room which could be handy when there are activities involved.


Design Features

Exhibition space

The gallery has three exhibition spaces: the main exhibition space with double height is bounded by the ramp and ready for large art pieces; the ramp itself functions as a gallery with art work installed in the wall. the changing of the slope in every direction represents the traditional value that has varied through time. By walking up the ramp while looking at the art pieces, it strikes beholder's mind as they are going on a journey of history; the small gallery between the main exhibition space and the courtyard is bounded by a whole set of glass walls, which brings the nature to the gallery and please people's mind.

The roof is cut with carefully designed openings which projects both light and shade to the interior space, serving as ornaments that bring the forms alive.

Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama
‘Hokkaido’
1978


Daido Moriyama
‘Nikko Toshogu’
1977


Daido Moriyama
‘Tono’
1974


Daido Moriyama
‘Hawaii’
2007-2010


Daido Moriyama
‘Hawaii’
2007-2010

Daido Moriyama was born in Osaka in 1938, often regarded as one of Japan’s leading figures in photography. Witness to the spectacular changes that transformed postwar Japan, his photographs express a fascination with the cultural contradictions of age-old traditions that persist within modern society. Providing a harsh, crude vision of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters, his work occupies the space between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real.

Moriyama takes pictures with a small hand-held camera that enables him to shoot freely while walking or running or through the windows of moving cars. Taken from vertiginous angles or overwhelmed by closeups, his blurred images are charged with a palpable and frenetic energy that reveal a unique proximity to his subject matter. Snapshots of stray dogs, posters, mannequins in shop windows, and shadows cast into alleys present the beauty and sometimes-terrifying reality of a marginalized landscape. His anonymous and detached approach enables him to capture the “visible present” made up of accidental and uncanny discoveries as he experiences them.

Moriyama emerged as a photographer in the 1960′s at the tail end of the VIVO collective, a revolutionary and highly influential group of Japanese artists who reexamined the conventions of photography during the tumultuous postwar period. William Klein’s loose, Beat style images of New York City in the 1960s also served as a major turning point for Moriyama, who found inspiration in Klein’s free-form photographic style. Taken by these innovative approaches at home and abroad, Moriyama ultimately went on to forge his own radical style.

Text from Luhring Augustine Gallery

Model

Project 2 Submission

Narrative

The solitary man sits in a concrete block gazing at the conservative order through the window. He is no friend of the outdated world, in fact he does not deign to bother as long as his castle stands.


Design Concept

What I want to achieve here is to design a series of spaces for the solitary man who rather stays in his contemporary "Castle" than get involved in what he calls the "outdated world". The site is placed in the traditional residential area of Tokyo, Japan, due to the land limitation the buildings within this area are built right next to each other, which indicates his "Castle" is surrounded by so called "conservative order".

In the painting, the guy appears sitting alone in a rectangular prism made of concrete with large openings on the wall. This is to me, the representation of modernism in contrast to the surrounding obsolete order. Therefore rectangular shapes are intensively adopted in the design symbolizing the contemporary order.

The cube in the drawing below represents the surrounding conservative order where activities are contained as a whole under one single roof. To differentiate from this conservative order, the rooms are separated and sorted according to their functionality. An inner courtyard is bounded in the middle as nature no doubt plays a significant role in every day's life, even for the lonely man. However he only wants to stay in his little world, so bringing the nature into his castle is essential. Based on this idea, the courtyards have been positioned very carefully: large openings are created at both sides facing towards the middle courtyard, so the lonely man can enjoy nature without going out to the conservative world. Another reason for this arrangement is letting the light into the interior spaces, there are also some small openings on the roof designed to serve this purpose. the front courtyard is a more private outdoor space connecting to the living room which also ensure that there is sufficient light in this room.

The contact between the "Castle" and the outside obsolete world is limited, as stated in the narrative, the solitary man does not want to be bothered, his privacy has to be well protected. This is done by only employing opening (entrance) at the front facade following a long narrow corridor to the left and three small windows at the rear facade where the hypocritical man can sit on the roof and observe the outside world if he has to. Basically everything he needs for everyday life is included in his "castle", light, trees, beautiful view of the courtyard...therefore he can comfortably live his life in the way he wants.

Ground Floor Plan 1:100




First Floor Plan 1:100




Section View 1:100




Axonometric 1:200

The site

My site will be located in a typical residential district of Tokyo, Japan. An ultra modern city and yet contains a trace of heritage order, a high intensity residential area but in an ordered manner...