sia aoyama building, shibuya-ku, tokyo, japan, 2008
photo © daici ano
courtesy jun aoki & associates

designboom met japanese architect jun aoki in milan, italy on march 11th, 2009.

establishing his studio in 1991jun aoki's major works include early projects
'S house' in katsuura (chiba pre.) and 'mamihara bridge' in soyo (kumamoto pre.);
the 'fukushima lagoon museum' in toyosaka,(niigata pre.), which won the architectural
institute of japan annual award and the 'aomori museum of art', in aomori, which won
the grand award of the international competition.

db: please describe an evolution in your work,
from your first projects to the present day.

every time I start from scratch and so it's a repetition
of restarts. each time, when for instance, I design
a small private house I make over 200 models
which are very different from each other.
there are many trials that I go through to develop
the final design. more and more I conduct experiments,
because I think architecture should not take 'content'
as a basis for its ground rules. so I start with
a hypothesis and then it must be carried into action.
I call it 'genetic rule overdrive'. it is a sort of methodology
of sorts - let the rules take off on their own and leave
everything on auto-pilot.

read the interview in full


jun aoki