Takaharu Tezuka, Tezuka Architects

Beyond Architecture

The future of architecture is not about what we architects are capable of but, rather, about what we can achieve with architecture. The real future lies in daily life that we have never seen before but which looks familiar.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have begun to regain real feeling of touch. The twentieth century was a time when machine was still in control of human life. We had to adjust our lives as machines operated efficiently. In the movie TRON, the hero was sucked into a computer and fight as fluorescent green and orange line data. Such a computer-aided-design character used to be the representation of the future. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the image was reversed. In the movie The Matrix, the world in the computer is much more real than the real world. In the program called Matrix, even smell and taste are real. The computer-aided world describes reality to fulfill the human life which has been lost in the real world. In the twenty-first century, technological-looking design no longer represents the future. Technology supports us as we embrace a rich human life that we have never experienced. Our technology should exist everywhere as air. The technology no longer represents our design anymore. The human being is the ultimate purpose of the design. The future lies in daily life - not in the unknown future. This lecture will show our way to seek for our future a real human life that is nevertheless backed up by the latest technology.

Takaharu Tezuka

1987 B.Arch., Musashi Institute of Technology
1990 M.Arch., University of Pennsylvania
1990-1994 Richard Rogers Partnership Ltd.
1994 Establish Tezuka Architects
1996-2003 Assistant Professor, Musashi Institute of Technology
2005 & 2006 Visiting Professor, Salzburg Summer Academy
2006 Visiting Professor, University of California, Berkeley
2009-present Professor, Tokyo City University