Research

  • ArchiteXt: The Readable, Playable, and Wearable Architecture of Japanese New Wave
  • GRANTEE
    Lisa Hsieh
    GRANT YEAR
    2018

Makoto Suzuki, ArchiteXt 00, 1st square, 1972. Courtesy of ArchiteXt.

ArchiteXt: The Readable, Playable, and Wearable Architecture of Japanese New Wave rebuilds the lost architecture magazine ArchiteXt 0, 00, 1, 2 and Extra (1970–72), self-published by the Japanese New Wave nongroup ArchiteXt. With contrasting "Japan-ness," ArchiteXt staked out a position on the margin of neo-avantgarde architecture. With lighthearted presentation, informal graphics, and playful rhetoric, ArchiteXt sparked off polemical debates, productions, and challenging architectural conventions. Consider ArchiteXt as the emotional blueprint for ArchiteXt's work, the book embeds building productions in their emotive context to cast light on architecture's power to absorb, adapt, abreact, appease, alleviate emotions. As a history project, the book charts a distinct discourse on architecture's desires, dreams, and struggles in the largely unexamined New Wave of Japanese architecture.

Lisa Hsieh is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota. She received her PhD in history and theory of architecture from Princeton University in 2013. Her writings, which range from research, criticism, fiction and non-fiction, have been published in Log (Anyone Corporation), Architectural Research Quarterly (Cambridge University Press), Young Architects 5 (Princeton Architectural Press), and Thresholds (MIT Press). Hsieh was previously a design principle of Butterfly (ar-ch) Studio. In 2003, she won the Young Architect Award (aka Architectural League Prize), sponsored by the Architectural League of New York. Her design works have been published in New York Times and Shinkenchiku, and exhibited at the Urban Center Gallery in New York City and the Banvard Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. Hsieh has been a freelance writer for the Star Tribune newspapers and is a frequent juror in design competitions, including American Institute of Architects Merit Awards and Architectural League Prize.