surely, this is more than enough to start with no?

i mean he even blogs his buildings under construction...

curious why you are interested in them?

Icon magazine profile Apr. 2005:

Bow-Wow

| audio interview | more ...

btw... www.technorati.com can work wonders.

Made in Tokyo -
a book be A-BowWow documenting/analyzing hybrid buildings in Tokto, very cool

[Lil' Bow Wow]
Uh, say
Uh, uh, say (My name is)
Say, bow wow wow
Uh, uh, bow wow (Yeah)
Uh, uh, Snoop Dogg (Bow wow)
Yeah, uh, my name is,

Hair nappy but I'm happy pocket full of dough
From the C-O representin' So So
The girls recognize and these niggas do too
I'm the flyest thing walkin' through junior high school
So make room next to your little backstreet poster
'Cause Bow Wow's here and it's over! YA HEARD!
I'm this, I'm that, I'm all of the above
And the big body shotgun ridin' on doves
I've been seen with the baddest
Heard with the best
And I got it lock down from the east to the west
Look at my eyes, ya know; I ain't playin'
That's why all through the streets
All hear niggas sayin' is,

Chorus 2X: [Lil' Bow Wow]
Bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay
Where my dogs at? Bark with me now
Bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay
And all my girls wonderin were that love how it's going down say

Bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay
Where my dogs at? Bark with me now
Bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay
And all my girls wonderin were that love how it's going down say

[Lil' Bow Wow]
Now that the gates wide open
It is I who they runnin' from
Little with the ill, cross over like
Iverson in 2k my way and I'm the first to rock
First to drop, nice and embezzled of a g-shop
Like B.I.G. and Pac, I'm hard to forget
What makes it even worse, I'm just getting started
Yeah that's me; that's got your daughter in a frenzy
Yeah that's me; that's got her arguing with her friends about
Who? Gone, gimme when they see me
Sayin', "Do you?"
See him, "Ooh he the man!"
Thirteen, game lock, don't trick, all that and a bag of chips
Hi! My name is,

Chorus 2X

[Snoop Dogg]
Bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay
Woof motherfucker that dog came to play
Calgon calgon take me away
I'm in the dirty dirty with my nephew J
Dizzy, izzy, boy we getting busy
With Lil' Bow Wizzy, this shit is off the heezy
I threw him like a Frisbee
And, "Yeah, he came back."
Like uh, boomerang, Dogg Pound game
Hundred thousand dollar chains
What'chu say J.D.? (J.D.: Bling, bling, money ain't a thang!)
Ya ask me again and Imma tell you the same
I'm flippin' on these niggas
While I'm trippin' on these niggas (trippin')
Buck one, buck two, buck three, buck four
You standin' on the wall, nigga bust a (bus)
But you can't trust her, it's good game
And all my niggas represent yo bang
Put it up, now click clack it up
And all the niggas, bag it up
'Cause I wanna smack it up
We do it to ya doggystyle (doggystyle)
Big Bow Wow in yo mouth
Bow wow,

They gave a lecture last year at the RCA, London. Super-cool. They got a bigger crowd than Zaha.

email them and ask. They had lots of video of their inspirations as well as their work. I can't find my notes of it right now.

tsukamoto may not be the best for answering e-mails.

i have corresponded with him abit through the mail a few years ago when not as famous as he is now and it was slightly painful becasue of the timelag, though he does speak english.

last time i saw him was at a workshop with wiel arets so he is def making a move towards bigger things in the academic world and likely to be more busy...not sure if the architecture is procedding at the same pace as his career though, which is why i wonder at the interest in him and bow-wow if not the research....? his work is very nice, but not so different from the norm for here...what sets him apart is the research he uses to justify some of the design decisions and philosophy...

jump - that's a good point. i was planning to use the work of atelier bow-wow as a point of departure in comparing the traditional japanese house to contemporary manifestations of it (esp. in the way they deal with the problem of density).

and though i speak a bit of japanese i can't make sense of their blogs, unfortunately...

anyway, what do you think? is there someone else's work you think is more appropriate in this regard? are you living in japan?

d

hm, that is tuf.

yeah i live in tokyo and have been in japan since '91 (apart from a few years off doing MArch in canada, and working for awhile in london). i am canadian, but something about japan keeps me here; most recently doing phd at university of tokyo and running a small office with another architect.

anyway for what youa re looking for i guess bow-wow is pretty good, but to be honest the role of traditional architecture here is pretty much zero. to be blunt, the japanses themselves hate it. hate it. hate it.

for example i live in a flat from the late 60's built on the outside like le ville radieuse and on the inside its tatami everywhere, no hallways and incredibly flexible because of the sliding doors and cetera. i LOVE it and it is an amazingly appropriate way to deal with lack of space. but most people living in the same complex have remodelled their flats to get rid of all those things. If you buy a NEW flat i guarantee you there will be little to no tatami, a long hall that uses up a tenth of the floor space ( ! ), and doors to every room. This is not a wise way to deal with space as far as i am concerned, but for cultural reasons the western style prevails.

so finding that kind of link between trad and new is gonna be hard.

that the japanese way of responding to density and so on is unique might be more easy to argue, because of the density and the lax approach to zoning and land use, et cetera. But that has little to do with the atelier bow-wow type stuff as what they do is about as common as housing by frank gehry. that is, it isn't close to representative.

Most housing here is mass housing; prefab individual houses that look like they are made from plastic, or big ol concrete bunker stuff. and bow-wow's work sorta plays on that THAT reality rather than offer a blend of old and new. i think the exisiting street patterns impose an interesting twist to things, generating the small leftovers of land that atelier bow-wow documents; but it isn't really enough to make a strong argument with, and the government is keen to get rid of them anyway as far as i can tell. more to the point, that sort of thing is strictly an urban happening.

i am racking my brain to think of a way to make the link you are looking for, and i think there is something to it, but it might need a different tack; something about attitude rather than form maybe...

i know, not very helpful...

as for other firms...a few come to mind...

waro kishi has done tonnes of small jewel-like homes over the years, though not as provocative as bow-wow (i think because his clients have more money, really).


and maybe more theoretically minded the work of riken yamamoto , who did a series of interesting homes before he got real big. His thing at the time was to reconsider the concept of the individual and the group and make housing that dealt with it using japanese concepts as the building blocks. lots of books show that work, with some quite intelligent use of the engawa and separation of rooms that still feels to me quite japanese in spite of the resolve to remove communal living from the pattern, maybe because he didn't do it just by putting doors in a wall. lots of books on him that show those early works if interested....

and his new work takes us to a more recent attempt by a lot of famous architects (including ito and sejima i believe) at codan shinonome in tokyo, to make communal housing in the city at a large scale, something like this:


but is that really unique to japan? and is there any connection to japanese traditional architecture? i think it is closer to le corbusier and jon jerde than to the imperial villa at katsura...but there were no foreigners involved in the project at all...

if you are willing to take a further tangent you might find some links to the work of coelecanth , especially their schools which use quite complex and interesting programing that is slightly akin to the openness of a traditional house...

the thing is, most houses here deal with density so you could look at almost any architect's early career and find projects that respond in interesting ways to the city, but very few of them will use the engawa, and none of them will use the romantic notions of japanese architectural history; no one will be dealing with "ma" for instance...

anyway,, that's all i got. good luck.

!

Have you checked out their excellent "Made in Tokyo" book?

there's a book called tokyo. towards totalscape
it has around 2 of atelier bow-wow's works

in spite of my prof being one of the authors in towards totalscape it is really an awful book. perhaps the first book i have ever purchased on line that i wanted to return (i didn't...because my prof was in it; yes i am a hypocrite...;-) ) and i have a lot of books ! but it really isn't worth reading.

There's a couple of decent essays in there. I thought the Superflat one was good, and which ever one talks about paranoia of the environment.

ok, there are a few good ones that got in there by mistake, but it was such a let down becasue its mostly complete and udder rubbish.

i have i think been in japan too long. the romantic view of this country was always silly but now it just annoys me. i am tired of solacing the french scholarship students when they can't find any pet architecture, ANYWHERE (i am only half joking, i have to take them to it cuz it is like the only place they feel they have found the REAL Japan, whatever that means, cuz 30 million people worth of city seems more than real enough to me...), and nothing looks like toyo ito designed it, and when it IS Ito, it doesn't like like he did it either (why is that big green bridge in front of TOD'S? can they really DO that?..). all the wailing and crying, it wears me DOWN...

but seriously almost anything printed about japan is totally taking the piss, and if you don't live here you just can't tell. And the thing is REALITY is much more interesting than the slightly-real view the authors believe everyone wants to read. its become an industry of cliches, of which totalscape is just the most rubbing...

ok, i admit i just stayed up all night cuz a client called at 11.30PM about a small small project in basel, and i was sooo drunk because i had a dinner meeting that got out of hand (and was a serious blast), but still had to get a surprise presentation ready for 10am the next day. and they were totally blown away but i am soo exhausted and sick of this crazy city....so i might be biased...right now...

but totalscape DOES suck. ;-)

asked a friend about the topic and he suggested milligram studio might appeal as similar in style and context to bow-wow.

Whatssamatter jump, you don't like tiny pink monochromatic pictures? haha. I agree tho, about the romanicism. Tho the survey (buildings and essays) in Totalscape seems more pessimistic than anything else.

you can also find ol skool Bow-Wow in the brilliant Peripheriques edited In-Ex series, especially the Your House Now books.

Tsukamoto-san was my teacher in Japan for quite some time and I pretend to know his work reasonably good….so I would say that there is no question Bow-Wow produce some good quality work but 80% of their popularity in Japan is due to Tsukamoto’s amazing personality.
I think “Made in Tokyo” is their best achievement so far, but the connection between theory and real project is many times missing…his explanations are quiet charming, but rather strange and sometimes not even logical…
All these explains why he is getting more popularity outside of Japan than in his own country…because in Japan everything is Bow-Wow
But their office is coming big time…I hope they get it right!