Taking place at the Architectural Association until November 17, the ‘Akihisa Hirata: Tangling’ exhibition is the first ever international solo show put on by Akihisa Hirata, an emerging Japanese architect. The exhibit features an immersive 1:1 scale installation – a contorted loop – to distil his architecture’s essence into a large-scale experiential structure. Over a hundred study models and conceptual sketches will be presented on and within the structure, as well as an interview with the architect and intimate films of his projects, illustrating Hirata’s view of architecture and ecology, form and function, as a complex, interwoven ‘tangle’. More information on the exhibition after the break.
Interested in creating simple, elegant and essential geometric solutions that emulate and abstract nature’s millions of years of experience – pitched roofs that mimic mountain ranges, housing clusters that echo trees – Hirata rigorously explores future possibilities for architecture and structure; to make more complex our understanding of the relationship between the natural and the artificial, and to increase architecture’s capacity to aid living and freedom, beyond Modernism and the 20th Century’s dated fixation with iconic shapes and open-plan spaces.
At a point in which architecture and society more broadly is seriously questioning its future, purpose and relationship to the natural world, the exhibition will offer an in-depth exploration of Hirata’s ideas, demonstrating his innovative formal approach and distinctive interpretation of the relationship between architecture and environment.
Curated by Naomi Shibata and The Architecture Foundation.
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- © Daniel Hewitt
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- © Daniel Hewitt
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- © Daniel Hewitt
