Decayed student text book, 1975 (found 1996)
{ idiom } : forays in Japanese urbanism and education
Tokyo, Japan, 1996 to the present (ongoing)
{ idiom } uses a decayed book from 1975 as the departure point for a poetic foray into Japanese urbanism and education…
In 1996, Michael found a bilingual examination practice paper on the rooftop of Tokyo’s iconic Dōjunkai apartments; a crumbling pre-war housing block situated on the famous Omotesando fashion strip in Harajuku (sadly demolished in 2003 to make way for a shopping complex by Tadao Ando). Built in 1923 in a Japanese rendition of a Viennese international style, the Dōjunkai was Japan’s first modernist housing block; becoming an urban icon of creativity and emancipation, embodying the promise of pre-war modernism, then post-war reconstruction and cultural rejuvenation. Riddled with traces of lichen from the ivy that once covered the Dōjunkai, the decayed ‘relic’ includes literary fragments in English with accompanying Japanese translations, alongside chemistry equations, mathematical diagrams, and student handwriting filling out multi-choice questions and missing word prompts. Using various ‘idioms’ of expression, the project explores the poetic potential of a singular artifact, as an imaginary unfolding of the Dōjunkai and its transcription within the fabric of Tokyo itself.
[ Text: Michael Hornblow and Julian Worrall ]
Project Background:
The project began with the book’s discovery in 1996, alongside other items of detritus from the roof of the Dōjunkai. Some of this contributed to the costume for a 6-hour durational performance, : plugins, drifting… through the late-night street cultures of Shinjuku and Kabuki-Cho. This was reworked for a series of experimental television ad slots (see below), combining the performance video with Super8 filmed on Japanese subways. The book relic also provided visual content and text for an experimental theatre production, =peripheral city at the 1998 Wellington Fringe Festival in New Zealand.
Michael returned to Japan in 2002 for Min Tanaka’s Bodyweather summer school, and lived at the Dōjunkai for several months afterwards while working as a street performer around Kabuki-Cho and Shibuya. The book relic itself lay dormant for many years, until an opportunity appeared to work with Professor Julian Worrall, a specialist in Japanese urbanism and architecture. In 2019, they led a team of Advanced Design Research students at the University of Tasmania, analyzing the Dōjunkai in its urban, architectural and historical contexts, with a range of speculative design outputs exhibited as part of a touring exhibition at Design Tasmania – Japan: Archipelago of the House.
“Aiming to illuminate the history of the Dōjunkai Apartments and speculate on its meaning in modern Japan, our research combines fact and fiction through the form of a tansu – a traditional Japanese cabinet. This piece of cabinetry can be seen as an abstract representation of the Dōjunkai Apartments themselves, through which the viewer is taken on a journey across scales between object and building, accompanied by the historical narration of an ‘heirloom’ scroll and an architectural fairy tale.”
– Tansu Hausu, research catalogue, Advanced Design Research team (2019)
Development:
An example of pages and fragments from the student text book can be seen here (26 pages, for project development / reference only, not to be shared or distributed without consent). This shows 15 physical elements from just one of 14 double-sided acrylic panels (600 x 600 mm), in which the original book is mounted. A full archive of approximately 300 elements is available in a 292-page PDF on Google Drive.
