Capturing the dynamics of contemporary urban living, Tokyo challenges our preconceptions for architectural domesticity amidst rapid forces of change that are reshaping cities throughout the world today. Tokyo remains a densely packed city ‘in the making’: far from being a fixed metropolitan environment that clings to an abstract idea of itself, Tokyo instead moves towards an untapped future through pliable attitudes of adaptability, architectural impermanence, and uncanny inventiveness. The result is surprisingly novel formations of everyday domestic architecture and urban life. A new generation of Japanese designers are rethinking domestic space as the venue for a radical rethinking of collective forms of living. These buildings become places of personal expression and architectural experimentation and establish Tokyo as a hotbed of innovation and experimentation unmatched in the U.S.
 

This exhibition documents two iterations of the Project Tokyo summer architecture studio (2017 + 2019). Students were asked to document their journey in Japan through the generation of a short manual. Each manual collects 4-5 actual or fictional projects chosen by the students in order to uncover, invent, and describe the explicit forces and influences that generate Tokyo’s domestic architecture towards the ordinary and extraordinary.