SPACING TOKYOa design investigation

RMIT LOweR POOL DesIgn sTuDIOLanDscaPe aRcITecTuRe

seMesTeR 2 2011

Studio Leader: Rhys Williams

Rhys joins RMIT this trimester as a higher degree research student. His research concerns the creation of a ‘designerly history’ of Tokyo’s early-modern public spaces: 1876 to 1932. Prior to arriving in Melbourne he taught in the landscape architecture program at the Victoria University of Wellington, NZ.

* VIew FILM TRaILeRs aT THe cOuRses BLOg www.SPACINGtokyo.tumblr.Com

This sTudio pRovides a basic inTRoducTion To The condiTion of exTeRnal space paRTiculaR To Tokyo and iTs anTecedenT Edo.

With the aim of articulating the condition’s varied manifestations and distinct tendencies from a spatial perspective, enquiries will be undertaken through the medium of design. Specifically, strategies will be used that privilege the concerns of landscape architecture, rendering this largely unreported condition: spatially, temporally and relationally defined.

Distanced, physically and culturally, from its subject, this studio’s activites will be sited in representations of Tokyo/Edo found in the films of auteurs such as Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu.*

Studio activities will be structured across 2 linked projects:

Project 1: partipants will be challenged, through structured experimentation with a variety of representational strategies, to establish a Spatial Reading of a selected example of external space represented cinematically.

Project 2: a Spatial Exposition will be proposed that articulates, through the medium of landscape architecture, the spatiality of the subject studied in project 1. This ‘event’ space will constitute the immersive content for a hypothetical ‘exhibition’, located in Melbourne, profiling Tokyo’s condition of external space.

Image:The North bank of the Tamagawa River in Southern Tokyo (R Williams).

sTuDIO TIMesTuesDaY 13:30 to 16:30FRIDaY 13:30 to 16:30