This event will discuss the 2022 exhibition and accompanying publication by the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum titled “Make Do With Now. New Directions in Japanese Architecture”, highlighting alternative trends in Japanese Architecture and new architecture models of social and ecological commitment.
Supported by the Swiss Embassy in Singapore and organised by Archifest in cooperation with S AM, it features a screening of a documentary film commissioned by the S AM for the exhibition, profiling five young architecture practices who are each developing unique approaches to the question of the architect’s role in society. The screening will be followed by a discussion featuring S AM curator Yuma Shinohara, Mio Tsuneyama, one of the protagonists of the film, Architect Ling Hao and Photographer Fabian Ong.
“Make Do With Now” was an exhibition originally held at the Swiss Architecture Museum, Basel from 11 November 2022 to 12 March 2023. Five films featuring emerging Japanese practices will be featured in the Singapore Archifest 2023 main exhibition.
Date: 26 October 2023
Time: 7 — 9 pm
Venue: Festival House L2
45, 47 Sultan Gate
Singapore 198493
Speakers
Yuma Shinohara
(Curator, S AM Swiss Architecture Museum)
Yuma Shinohara (*1991) works as a curator and editor in the fields of architecture and urbanism. After working at Storefront for Art and Architecture, Ruby Press, the Academy of Arts Berlin, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, he is currently a curator at the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum. At the S AM, Shinohara co-curated the exhibitions ‘Swim City’ (2019) and ‘Beton’ (2021) and over-saw the adaptation of ‘Access of All’ (2021) in collaboration with the Architecture Museum of TU Munich and the Institute of Architecture of the University of Applied Arts Northwest Switzerland. As a translator, he has translated Bruno Taut into English, among others, and worked for magazines such as ARCH+ and A+U. He graduated with a degree in comparative literature and society from Columbia University in New York.
Mio Tsuneyama
Mio Tsuneyama is a Japanese architect and founder of Studio mnm. She began her study of architecture at Tokyo University of Science (TUS), Japan and completed at École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2008 as Swiss Government International Scholarships student, where she taught as a visiting professor in 2022-2023. She worked as an architect at HHF Architects in Basel after her study until she went back to Tokyo to start her own practice Studio mnm in 2012. Mio has built her career in the academic field since then as she taught at TUS as Assistant Professor and Junior Associate Professor since 2013. She also teaches at several private universities in Japan and has begun to teach as a guest professor at EPFL in 2022.
Ling Hao
Ling Hao was born in Kuching, Sarawak. After graduating from the University of New South Wales in Australia, he moved to Singapore to work with Tangguanbee Architects. He established Linghao Architects in 2000. It will soon be three decades of living in and working from Singapore as a base. The practice is an ongoing encounter with this world, bringing in bigger trajectories to be part of each project where actions or decisions are quickly layered over, transformed. One such arc is the relation between the exterior and the interior. It has become commonplace to experience them as separate and divided, led by desired habits and mechanical and electrical systems. In the everyday life of a city dweller, this has become a smooth confrontation that occurs intimately as part of the daily rhythms. How is it to imagine scenarios where it is more directly related? From where can this begin? What are the possible effects?
Fabian Ong
Fabian Ong is an architecture-trained photographer from Singapore. Upon obtaining his Master’s degree from the National University of Singapore, he practiced design at several notable architectural firms and conducted research projects and workshops in the Singapore University of Technology and Design. In 2016, he was invited by the Japanese periodical A+U and Shinkenchiku to be their in-house photojournalist based in Tokyo, Japan, while covering projects in Europe, North America, and Asia. Fabian is concurrently developing his art photography practice with a focus on natural and constructed landscapes. In his Archifest exhibition “Building Building” he asked “when does architecture emerge?”, “when is architecture, if ever, completed?” It invites the viewer to perceive architecture not as a predetermined outcome but an evolving phenomenon by exposing moments from their construction process before they reach their state of “completion”.
