Architecture-school crits are a famously bruising rite of passage for aspiring design professionals—unless, apparently, your professor is from the renowned Japanese firm SANAA. In the introduction to The SANAA Studios 2006–2008 (Lars Müller Publishers), the Dutch architect Florian Idenburg recalls a crit from his student days in Rotterdam, conducted by SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima:

I remember Sejima sitting, quietly smoking, listening to an exhaustive argumentation to justify one of the less elegant proposals. After a long silence her response was liberating. Pointing first to a sketch and subsequently to a plan she spoke softly: “This … I like … this … I do not like.”

For Idenburg, steeped in the “paranoiac-critical method” of Rem Koolhaas, the directness, simplicity, and seeming intuitiveness of Sejima’s judgment came as a breath of fresh air. He ended up interning at SANAA’s Tokyo office and eventually became an associate at the firm. (He’s now a partner at SO-IL, in Brooklyn.) And, in 2006 and 2007, he helped bring the firm’s understated method to the United States, co-teaching the first two of its three spring studios at the School of Architecture at Princeton University.

But this slim volume—which Idenburg edited, and whose full title is The SANAA Studios 2006–2008: Learning from Japan: Single Story Urbanism—actually provides relatively few glimpses of Sejima and her partner, Ryue Nishizawa, in the classroom. Its focus is not so much what the Princeton students learned from SANAA, or how they learned it, as what the rest of us can learn from the firm’s work and Japanese architecture in general. Read more…

Even before the arrival of the New Museum’s latest installation, I was uncomfortable taking the stairs between their third and fourth floors. It’s a notoriously narrow space, measuring 50 feet long and only 4 feet wide. Sandwiched between tall walls on the museum’s north side, the stairwell has barely enough room for two people to squeeze past each other. And despite the efforts of SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa to open up the space with high ceilings and light, standing at the base of the stairs and gazing up its slender passage  induces mild panic in a claustrophobe like me.

Now the artist Rigo 23 has taken that constriction to a new level with a site-specific piece built into the stairwell, called The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice Becomes. Those are the words of Herman Wallace, one of the three black men dubbed the Angola 3 who were imprisoned in late 1960s Louisiana, and whose nearly 30 years of solitary confinement and hunger strikes have fixed an unflattering spotlight on the American penal system. Read more…