I really love it when professional threads come together, even if it's momentary.

Our colleague at Keio, the architect Fumihiko Maki, is donating a sketch to Architecture for Humanity and their fundraising drive focusing on loving architecture (for a change, and about time too!)

Works up for auction include drawings by a great group, from Bjarke Ingels to Renzo Piano, Steven Holl and more.

Check out the ebay site and bid for some of the good stuff!   

Crazy busy year and I hope to catch up on it all in near future.  Studio with Maki was finished and this year studio is with Kazuyo Sejima ( ! ) In the meantime if any of you are in Tokyo I'd like to invite you to a fundraiser party this Friday to help pay for the community centre shown...

OK i know most of you aren't in the area, but just in case -  we are looking for people to help put together a community centre in Minami-san-riku. The project, led by prof Hiroto Kobayashi, is planned to run from december 24 to january 6.  In the span of 2 weeks the idea is to build...

A large part of the public transportation has stopped on 14th of March. We arrived on bikes to see the empty rooms. All the materials are here but just for a few of us. Kostas and Marcos working hard planning the future. haiku-esque reaction to the disaster on march 11, announcing the...

One of my colleagues, professor Hiroto Kobayashi (also here), took on a project this summer that brought together students from harvard university and keio to build a community gathering place in minami san-riku. the group i worked with was based in kesennuma which is a bit further north, but the...

in celebration of the new blog system i should be writing something dramatic but am going to use the space to follow up on a previous post. Over the summer the students in all the programs at keio went off to carry out projects all over the place.  a large group went to the congo, some went...

We are near the end of a very busy term.  Because we lost a month of classes as a result of the blackouts all of the courses ended up being very compressed, and with our school heavily focused on events in Tohoku and elsewhere the students were also asked to take on a fair amount of extra...

Nothing like a public deadline to spur creativity! A group of professors and students will be presenting work in progress on the projects they have undertaken in response to the Tohoku disaster.  As part of that the students from this studio are going to put up simple boards to show off...

You are probably wondering about the fish. The fish are part of a small side project the lab is working on in the city of Kesenuma. You probably saw it on the news.  It's the city that had a massive boat sitting on a street instead of in the water.  The city is struggling to recover...

Keio University was founded 150 years ago by a fellow named Yukichi Fukuzawa.  Everyone knows him.  He changed the culture of the country and is even on the 10,000 (about $100) yen note.  Which is cool. But nobody knows about the architecture school.  We are somehow flying...

This is a first stab at making a school blog using the firm profile system.  Cheers to Paul for letting me try it out.  Fingers crossed... Recently a well-known disaster response organizer let me know that right now no one outside of Japan is interested in the earthquake, the tsunami...