Award-winning Japanese architect Hitoshi Abe, chair of UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, was the first Japanese [national] chair of architecture in a US university. (The original article, from UCLA International Institute, indicated he was the first in an American university. But Jaime Lerner, an architect/urban planner from Curitiba, Brazil, whom I interviewed in May, wouldn’t like that particular usage of the word America. Therefore consider this usage of US as cross-cultural.)
One of Abe’s initiatives includes the creation of a Laboratory for Cross-Cultural Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, in which design culture is expanded through the development of cross-cultural programs, Wendy Soderburg’s UCLA article indicated. The city chosen as the center’s first focus of study is Tokyo, an area Abe knows well.
“Each year, UCLA will collaborate with one city outside the U.S. to create a new architectural and urban design methodology,” Abe said. “Large-scale cities along the Pacific Rim, like Tokyo, offer amazing opportunities for research because they are designed differently than current designs based in Western culture.”
Let’s hope there’s more of this in architecture schools henceforth. We certainly don’t need more so-called Mediterranean Revival that so plagues towns like Sarasota, Fla. (Why don’t they just fess up and call it Mediterranean inspired? Kind of like the town’s idea of Moderism. We’ve already gone through Post-Modernism, so let’s come up with a new, truer moniker?)
Filed under: architecture, design
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