SOCIETY
Interview with Mr. Daisuke Motoki: Architecture that incorporates change and renewal
Architect Daisuke Motoki (DDAA/DDAA LAB) continues to propose products that capture the essence of potential materials and are in line with the behavior and needs of users. His idea of displaying a world-class photo exhibition with single-walled pipes has attracted attention. What is the underlying philosophy behind his work? We will talk to him together with Mitsuhiro Sakakibara (RAD), who has been in contact with him for 10 years.
Text: Rumi Yoshizawa
Photo: Nanako Saito
INDEX
PROIFILE
- Daisuke Motoki
- Representative of DDAA/DDAA LAB. Born in 1981. After graduating from Musashino Art University in 2004, he worked at Schemata Architects. In 2010, he founded Daisuke Motogi Architecture (now DDAA), a design studio that works across disciplines with architectural thinking at its core. In 2019, he founded DDAA LAB, an organization for experimental design and research, together with Mistletoe, which supports startups. In 2020, he exhibited at the 17th Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition.
- Mitsuhiro Sakakibara
- Architect/researcher. Born in Aichi Prefecture in 1984. Graduated from the Department of Humanities, Faculty of Letters, Kobe University, majoring in Art Studies in 2007. Works on architecture and urban planning, writing, proposals, project direction/management, and other areas, supporting projects through to their realization. Jointly manages the architectural research organization "RAD" since 2008. Established "Urban Function Planning Office Co., Ltd." in 2019 to support the planning and management of public facilities.
- Rumi Yoshizawa
- Born in Chiba Prefecture in 1984. Graduated from the Faculty of Letters at Chiba University. After working in web marketing for about 10 years, her love of listening to people and writing led her to become a writer. She has interviewed many people involved in manufacturing, such as craftsmen, factories, and artists. She is the youngest child and eldest daughter, and her nickname is "Ochiken." She loves rivers.
"Change is the premise" - Design that increases in value with use
Generally speaking, when it comes to interior design, furniture, and buildings, the emphasis is on safety and durability, with no flaws and solid designs, but the things that Motoki makes give me a slightly different impression. They're "unfinished."
Motoki: What we've been interested in recently is that the peak of a product isn't when the designer adds their work and says, "It's finished, please use it," but rather, we want to create something that gains value from being used. It's sad if a product's peak is when you buy it new and then its value starts to decrease.
Sakakibara: One of Mr. Motoki's defining features is that he not only designs residential and office buildings, but also many time-limited projects, such as exhibition venue layouts and shop interiors.
Motoki: For projects with limited time, we assume that changes will occur and place importance on creating things quickly. For example, in our office, we repaint the walls once a year. We often install mock-ups of the building's exterior walls inside the office, drill holes, and do various other modifications. Our office is designed with change in mind.
Motoki: This sofa was made for a Nike event. A typical sofa has a sturdy frame and fabric, but it takes about two months to deliver. Instead, I made a "sofa-like thing" that can be easily made by DIY.
Sakakibara: What is the material?
Motoki: It's a recycled product made by crushing and pressing the urethane foam inside sofas, known as chip urethane. Usually, the seat is made at a fraction of this thickness, but this was cut out as a large block and just laid out. At first, I wrapped it up in plastic wrap used to protect luggage at airports, but that didn't last long, so I started tightening it up with bubble wrap and lashing belts used to tighten truck beds. But even a little kick would make a hole in the bubble wrap. Now I've changed to Dyneema, a lightweight, tensile-resistant material that's also used for tents.
So you can change it as you use it. It keeps getting upgraded.
Motoki: Yes. I'm experimenting with transparent materials, so things may change again.
Creativity that doesn't start from scratch in an age overflowing with things
Why do you make things out of materials that aren't normally used? You make sofas out of things used at airports and luggage straps, and it seems like you're deliberately using different materials.
Motoki: There are already so many good things in the world, so I honestly don't think there's any need to make zero-based proposals. It's too high-calorie. I even feel guilty about making something new, so I think it would be better to look at what already exists as materials and discover new ways to use them and new value. For example, if you don't see the white wall of the building opposite as the "facing exterior wall," but as a screen onto which you can project, it suddenly becomes a theater.
Sakakibara: In 2011, Mr. Motoki also made proposals that consistently centered on "changing metaphors," such as viewing a soccer goal in a park as a framework for safely accommodating evacuees in the event of a disaster. Should we see it as a goal or as a framework?
So roles aren't decided from the beginning, but are added later?
Motoki: There's no "this for this" thing, so I feel like I'm looking at everything as something that can be customized. The towns in particular are already completed, but the level of completion is quite low, so I think there's a lot of room to improve them.
What do you mean by "the city is not fully developed"?
Motoki: For example, the use of roads is limited to "walking," and there are only people who go for a walk or move around. There are almost no benches in the streets of Tokyo, so you can't stop. I think that just having a table or a bench could make it possible to put something down or generate some kind of activity.
"Bombing" public spaces
Sakakibara: So that's why you installed benches on the road. Is that the one on the sidewalk in front of your office?
Motoki: We also installed this. The office is made of glass, so we just let it extend over that area (laughs). However, the office is on a hill, so an old lady with a bad back uses it, and the neighbors also make good use of it.
Sakakibara: There aren't many places in the city where you can easily take a break.
Motoki: Graffiti writers call their graffiti "bombs," but we call this project bench bombs. We've designed various items that can be easily removed by simply hanging them up or tightening them with a belt.
When you're thinking about installing something in a public space, it's important that it can be quickly removed. Is that because it also means that it can be easily installed?
Motoki: I think it's normal to install it with tools. It seems kind of lame. I'd actually like to do some welding or something (laughs).
Sakakibara: Where is the money coming from for this?
Motoki: No, I paid for it myself. I was just doing it out of curiosity, but now it's a project for DDAA LAB, a research and development team that doesn't do any client work.
A margin for accepting noise is necessary for "unfinished designs"
Sakakibara: Are you interested in temporary situations and the facilities required for them in the long run, or are you interested in the process by which a city is established? I wondered if the temporary aspect resonates with something like "provisionality."
Motoki: I think the good thing about temporary structures is that the way they are used is not fixed, and the affordances of "please use it like this" can be changed. In a certain European city, there is a hole in the ground in the station square, so they set up a morning market there with a steel pipe tent, and remove it around noon when the market is over. If it is not temporary, the use of the place will be limited to stores, right? The function as a square will be lost there. If you say "This is a market, we have designed it to be very easy to use, so please use it," it will eventually no longer fit if the interface changes in the future, or if the way of thinking or distribution changes. I think that being able to update little by little to suit your lifestyle is necessary for "unfinished design." To do this, I think it is better to be able to accept a certain amount of noise, or to not be too neat, or to have something that does not lose its quality even if something unpredictable comes in.
An expandable system with no limited functionality is scaffolding
The legs of this table are generally used as scaffolding. Are they made from steel pipes that have been assembled and painted...?
Motoki: It's plated, 18k gold. To be precise, I polished it, removed the existing plating, and used a thinner pipe because it's a bit heavy. I tried various things to make it.
Sakakibara: Yes, I got the impression that you paid a lot of attention to detail. This is separate from what Motoki-kun said earlier about the temporary nature of the structure, but the material of scaffolding, which is a "symbol of the temporary," also looks cheap because it is temporary. I think it's a very interesting value transformation to turn a cheap material like scaffolding into such a luxurious form, but why did you choose scaffolding here?
Motoki: This was originally made for the venue of an art event called "Art Photo Tokyo". Since it was an art event held in an abandoned building for only three days, I thought something temporary would be appropriate, so I used single-pipe pipes, but the pipes alone were too rough and it was meaningless because it was exactly the same as the context of the abandoned building. So I thought I would use materials used at construction sites with as many different finishes as possible.
Motoki: We were concerned that if we prepared the venue too carefully, the construction period would be short and the imperfections would stand out and make it less enjoyable. So we came up with this design as a mechanism to accept the noise and enjoy the slight imperfections.
Sakakibara: This was born out of the Art Photo Tokyo project. The relationship between context and values.
Motoki: I had the idea for a while that it would be cool to gold-plate a single tube, but I thought it would be better to create it within some kind of context.
That's what worked for me. It feels like it's just the right balance.
Motoki: The good thing about scaffolding is that it's not a complete product, but an expandable system. It can be used as a bookshelf, a partition, and of course as scaffolding. It's a system that can be used in any number of ways depending on how you use it, so I think it was a great fit for this project.
An office that will never be completed and will be operated as is
Are there any projects you are thinking about now or anything you would like to do in the future?
Motoki: The Ikejiri-Ohashi space that I have been involved in since 2018 is being built with the concept of "never being completed." It is a place for a community called Mistletoe, which supports and invests in startups. Since what they want to do is to see and learn about technology and new business models on-site, they are not building it as a typical office, with the idea of experiencing the field and the real thing, rather than typical desk work. They launch it in an unfinished state, start projects as needed, and think about and create new things.
Sakakibara: Is that something DDAA LAB undertakes?
Motoki: Yes. There are three things that DDAA LAB does. The first is "updating the place." This office will never be completed, so we will continue to be involved and update it when something happens. The second is that many startup companies do not have the resources to devote to extra presentations or design, so we design presentation and product ideas and implement them here. The second is that it can be used for their presentations and also leads to serendipity among the community. The third is that, like the benches and town plans I mentioned earlier, we make suggestions on our own, like "Maybe if we do this, our lives will be richer."
The fun of expansion is the "ingenious combination" that the times demand
Motoki: There is a stool called "Stool 60" by Alvar Aalto that has a simple design and can be stacked, and is still popular even after more than 80 years since its release. One time, we were talking about needing about 150 stools to hold an event for 100 people, so we held an idea workshop to discuss what kind of chairs would be good for the venue before buying them. Some people said that it would be good to have chairs lower at the front and higher at the back because 100 people would be lined up, or that they wanted a small table to take notes, or that they wanted to hang small bags on a chair because it would be too much work to build a cloakroom. When we listened to their stories, we realized that what they wanted was not a stool that could be used in any situation, but a place where they could respond to each individual situation.
Motoki: There is almost no need to make new stools anymore. Because there are many masterpieces, and now you can buy a stool that looks just like Stool 60 at a mass retailer for less than one-tenth the price. We are also working on a project to design ideas for stool extensions that can be attached to both real and cheap stools, and to make the 3D data of the drawings public so that anyone can print it out if they want to make it. We currently have 300 sketches, and from those, we have actually made 100 ideas, so we plan to exhibit them.
Sakakibara: Expandability is linked to provisionality in a positive sense. Like the gold plating of the single pipes, this idea is also based on something extra, but is your current creative work centered on creating new value by intervening in things that are already in circulation?
Motoki: Not everything is this approach. I choose which approach is appropriate for each project. However, just like with coordination, there are ways to wear the same shirt unfashionably and ways to wear it stylishly. I think there are cases where the surrounding situation can be improved even if the added element is small, like a bench. This is a pretty basic idea in graphic design, and depending on what color you put next to red, the original meaning and impression can change drastically. I want to cherish this approach. I feel that this kind of approach is becoming more and more common in the times.
| What is "POP UP SOCIETY"? | "POP UP SOCIETY" is an irregularly published magazine that ASNOVA ran from March 2020 to March 2022 with the aim of getting the general public interested in the industry and contributing to the mid-to-long term shortage of young talent in the temporary construction industry. It introduces unique and experimental initiatives from Japan and abroad through interviews with people and companies, experience reports, and more, focusing on temporary construction. |
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