From Transgression to Template

Tezuka Architects’ lecture followed how an extremely simple idea, “an architecture for sharing,” could develop from a simple act of responding to a client’s joy of perching on a (dangerous) ceramic roof to a new pedagogy for educational programs. One of the pair’s most famous projects shared with the audience, the Fuji Kindergarten, initially challenged several standing regulations. Ceilings were pushed to the legal minimum, allowing children to see and be seen. Background noise was embraced as part of developmental ecology. When the project was internationally recognized as an exemplary design, the architects themselves were invited to help rewrite the standards.

The modus of operation for the office seems clear: observe acts of appropriation and then figure out ways to design a template of that transgression. As transgressive acts of architecture transformed into a new template for schools, rule-bending becomes a form of civic responsibility. Architects do not have to submit to regulations; they can show regulators a future worth legalizing.

For the pair, an architect’s work was as much a task of observation as it is of design. Although the lecture was an architecture of sharing, “sharing” does not just happen in the spaces of Tezuka Architects, but in the feedback loop between architect and client.