15 Minutes and Counting. A New Andy Warhol Museum for Tokyo. Japan

This studio will examine eastern and western pop art and its relation to the formulation of architecture by using digital techniques in an opportunistic fashion for the generation of growth and evaluation of patterns in the development of form. Digital techniques allow us to deal with the full complexity of material systems that lead to effects that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Pop Art in the West emerged in the post war period as an ironic, self-examining, but enthusiastic look at the mass imagery of our consumerist society. Pop Art stood firmly at the cross roads of the elite avant-garde of the art world and the broader interests of popular culture and society at large. Pop Art borrows from the excess of signs and symbols that we are surrounded by and that emerged from mass media, advertising, and the endless stream of iconic images that define an industrialized and consumerist culture. There was also a particular aesthetic associated with the Pop Art movement, differentiating it from other artistic trends.

Early Pop Art relied heavily of the techniques of collage and sampling, but the movement was also characterized by the use of vibrant colors, high contrasts, and stark tonal differences. Through these techniques there is a flattening of the image and through the contours of color and tone that result there is a distinct figuration.