Stepping Out
Combining teaching and practice, history and material innovation, Toshiko
Mori emerges as an architect and educator.
By Alexandra Lange
August/September 2003
The student projects arranged on the floor, walls, and benches and
hung from the upper-deck railing in Gund Hall at Harvard's Graduate School
of Design (GSD) are hardly architecture. There is some lingerie--ribbons
of blue fabric like a shredded teddy sliding off a hanger; jointed wood
dolls outfitted in stretchy Trekkie caftans; origami paper reinforced
and folded into pods, tubes, and parabolas. A chicken-wire mannequin wrapped
in cloth dangles from above. One group seems to have cheated, entering with
a cardboard-and-foam-core box that splits apart like a 3-D puzzle. But this--despite
its suspicious resemblance to a Rem Koolhaas building--later turns out to
be merely a mold for a fiberglass-reinforced bentwood chair.
The common element here is craft, or a lack thereof. Each of the students--for
this is a midterm review--has sewn, woven, knitted, glued, Velcroed, or
digitized materials homely and high-tech in their search for new structural
paradigms. If the stitches are clumsy, the curves sloppy, so be it. It is
all for the best, according to the workshop's leader, architecture department
chair Toshiko Mori. "Architects often think only about what you call
hard things," she says, "hard and heavy and strong things. So
it is interesting to have them think about something soft and light and
weak." Mori has divided the students in her class, "Weaving, Materials,
and Habitation," into seven groups to deal with the overflow enrollment
of 25 students. Two have devoted themselves to a theory of weaving, while
the rest concentrate on hands-on topics--illustrated by the alternately
crude and elegant objects described above. "Habitation" produced
the origami, "Digital Weaving" the mold, "House as a Sweater"
the dolls, and "Body," naturally, the slinky lingerie and the
prickly wire figure.
The "Habitation" group goes first, presenting their models,
arranged in rows like a flower bed, to a group of critics that includes
Issey Miyake textile engineer Dai Fujiwara, John Maeda and Maggie Orth of
the MIT Media Lab, MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli, and theorist Sanford
Kwinter. (Pierre de Meuron drops by later on for a look.) The concept that
attracts the most attention is that of "the floppy wall,"
a piece of fabric with stiff tiles first glued then Velcroed to it
that, when flipped tile-side down, holds a gentle curve. "Through
the subtraction," says Vivian Lee, ripping tiles from the fabric, "flop
is created." Antonelli says, "I see the possibility for real beauty
in structure here." Kwinter calls it "a tunable wall." Mori
adds, "This shows how we can use quote, unquote weakness as an advantage."
What Mori calls weakness may be the future of architecture. Last semester,
for example, GSD students made full-scale models of several works by Japanese
architect Shigeru Ban out of his favorite weak material, cardboard tubes.
Several of the students in Ban's workshop signed up for Mori's seminar because
his work illustrates her point precisely: Ban has figured out how to
make a cheap, lightweight, and almost universally available product into
both refugee housing and buildings of great beauty. Mori's own work has
begun to incorporate the fiberglass and carbon fibers of boat-building,
leaving the heavy beams of traditional architecture behind. "It is
a trend to think of structure as dynamic structure as opposed to static,"
she explains. "In dynamic structure, when you apply force it travels
through the material, it doesn't just sit in one place. That means you don't
need as much material. That is the direction we are going in the future.
If students don't start thinking about [new structural systems], ten years
from now certain knowledge might become obsolete."
For Mori the challenge for architects today is keeping up with the consultants--materials
engineers, structural engineers, boatbuilders, even fabric innovators like
Fujiwara, whose 3-D weaving techniques can, and will, be adapted to architecture.
At the GSD, where she has been chair since July 2002, she has brought in
many of her collaborators to give students at one of the country's most
professionally oriented programs a chance to experiment.
"I just keep saying, I want to slow it down a little bit. You can be
narrow and go through the process like this," Mori says, placing her
palms together like a diver and darting them across the table. "I can't
make it longer"--Harvard's program is already an atypical three-and-a-half
years--"but I can make it thicker," she says, moving her hands
apart. "I can actually make it denser, by creating more different opportunities
for students to experience architecture."
The fact that Mori strays back to the textile world for metaphor is no accident.
The thrust of her research for the last ten years has been the combination
of material and making, fabric and fabrication, seen in publications like
Immaterial/Ultramaterial (2002), derived from discussions at the GSD; in
exhibition designs for Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles
at MoMA and an upcoming show on Josef and Anni Albers at the Cooper-Hewitt;
even in the use of the polymer film, which turned her Soho Pleats Please
store for Miyake into a now translucent, now transparent aqueous box. Workshops
like Mori's current one, or the studio she has cotaught with German engineer
Matthias Schuler (of Transsolar) that combined her input on design with
his on sustainable technology, are the beginnings of her influence
on the school.
"In her introduction to the studio, she said: 'We are teaching as an
architect and an engineer, a Japanese and a German, a man and a woman,'"
Schuler says. "If you don't connect engineering to design for students,
they learn it but they forget it tomorrow. If they integrate it into design,
it gets much deeper into their minds and creative processes."
Mori's didactic strategies come from her own education at Cooper Union.
"My ideas come from John Hejduk," Mori says, citing the late legendary
head of the school's architecture department. "He actually invented
what you would call parallel curriculum. He had writers, poets, even doctors
and judges coming to teach courses. That's the base I am coming from, the
education of an architect as humanist rather than as technocrat."
When Mori was appointed, she became, along with Nasrine Seraji of Cornell
one of two female academic leaders for the profession in the Ivy League.
Her turn as a role model, however, seems to have taken her by surprise.
When Mori went to Cooper Union (she earned her B.Arch. in 1976 and an honorary
M.Arch. from Harvard in 1996), she was one of a handful of female students.
"We were all called by our last names. We weren't conscious about gender
issues at all because there were so few of us. It didn't matter who you
were, you just had to do the work," Mori says. "All my mentors
were men."
In the last five years women have pulled even with, and sometimes surpassed,
the number of entering male students at leading graduate architecture programs.
Men are still the majority at B.Arch. and advanced-placement programs, however.
"Women tend to start architecture at the graduate level, so obviously
there is a slow awareness of this particular profession and of women thinking
it is an appropriate thing to do," Mori says. "All of a sudden
it became clear that it is a flexible discipline. I have a small firm
so it is flexible in terms of hours--I can work long hours one day,
but then if I have to take the kids to school in the morning, that's OK.
You have to put in the time, but you can control it."
Asked about the prospects for women in architecture, Mori describes her
own path as the multitrack ideal: corporate work, solo practice, academia.
She has a 20-year-old daughter, now in college, with husband James Carpenter,
a well-known architectural glass designer. Mori worked for Edward Larrabee
Barnes after graduating from Cooper Union, then opened her own practice
in 1981. She began teaching, at her alma mater, in 1980.
Mori's positive attitude may be derived from her slow but steady progress
upward but also from her sense that any success is gratuitous. "I have
a double stigma: I am a woman and a minority. Either way, I can't win!"
she says, smiling. Mori gets asked far more often about her Japanese heritage
than about her gender. She says people view her design sensibility, in a
term coined by Fredric Jameson to discuss that of Tadao Ando, as "Japanese
exceptionalism." "It is late Modern, but at the same time it has
more of a cultural language imbued into it that is slightly different than
traditional American Modernism. People point out that I deal a lot with
horizontal elements and issues of floor, and it's true."
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Pleats Please
128 Wooster Street, New York
Currently working on new concepts for Issey Miyake, Mori's application of
lumisty--a polymer film that alters transparency--to the windows and interior
surfaces of the Soho store incited pedestrians' curiosity.
Chris Buck |
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Mori's addition to Paul Rudolph's 1957 Burkhardt Residence.
Paul Warchol |
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Martin House
Buffalo, NY
An addition to the Frank Lloyd Wright house of 1903, the Visitors' Center
(above) rests in an idyllic neighborhood planned by Olmsted. Inverting the
shape of Wright's roof (below), Mori uses an innovative
material--carbon-fiber-reinforced fiberglass--to construct the form. |
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Keystone Film Productions Inc. |
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Cohen Residence
Casey Key, FL
Another addition to a Modernist landmark, Mori designed the longitudinal
guest house adjoining Paul Rudolph's 1957 Burkhardt Residence (above
and below) in 1999. |
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A second addition to the site is currently underway. |
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Top, Paul Warchol; middle, Toshiko Mori |
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