Cultural Objects: Contemporary Detail to Aesthetics

Within this studio, we will look at new design research techniques using style transfer to manipulate, blend, weave, splice different aesthetics from cultural objects. Japan is the perfect place to look for these cultural objects. Japan’s cultural landscape has often been described as homogeneous but with extreme subcultures. This more fragmented and hybridized cultural reality requires a redefinition of space suitable for the new urban youth to thrive, allowing them to perform, to create and to drift away from preconceived ideas of normalcy and success. Architecturally, Japanese ‘disjunctive society’ can be echoed as ‘disjunctive continuity’, where different qualities at times collide, overlap or merge in order to create an unexpected whole. Contrasting geometries can be woven into one another, in order to create visual sensation. Design techniques derive from visual cues of these various cultures, generating formal, spatial, structural and material innovation. In essence, ‘Disjunctive Continuity’ can be defined as any blending of dissonant elements which creates an original, inexhaustible beauty.