Hope your New Year is off to a great start!
B01 would like to offer our heartfelt thanks for your support and kindness in 2024. We hope that this year will be filled with joy and prosperity for everyone. As we begin this year with anticipation and excitement, let us share some of our New Year’s resolutions.
2024 was indeed a rollercoaster year for B01, full of new beginnings and happenings. A year began right out of the starting block with a January 2nd trip to Saudi Arabia, where we participated in an international competition with the final result yet to be determined; far shot, long written off but a wonderful collaborative effort. After a space design consultation for a post-luxury hotel and another, more domestic competition for a ferry terminal, we were more than content to concentrate on finishing up the phase-3 optimization for a villa in Nagano and a residential new-build project in Niigata.
Ferry Terminal Proposal
International Housing Workshop @Chiang Mai University, Thailand
Kaz started at Japan Women’s University as an associate professor-in-practice, and kickstarted the new KazLab with talented and adventurous students. From a design workshop in Thailand to students and faculty visits from British Columbia University and Syracuse University, signing a MOU to collaborate with the latter, as well as a new lecture series under this year’s theme of “Practice”, it was an eventful year at the newly founded laboratory. This year, we have so far plans to participate in a symposium and exhibition in Seoul, an international workshop in Hanoi, five students will begin their thesis projects, and one student will study in Belgium for a year. We are only in January! Nonetheless, we are open to whatever else that may arise along the journey.
The new year has brought about calmness and introspection, hopefully before the perfect storm. While we are inundated daily with images and talks of simulated realities, artificial sentience (yes exaggerated), polarized provocations, staged theatrics…what has become more and more critical and important for us recently is the thought of being “real”. Creative speculations and conceptualizations are undoubtedly an imperative part of our discipline, but we have to constantly strive to produce real experiences, real relations, and real objects in the widest meaning of that word. How to be real. That has become a quintessential theme, at least for us these days. We happily encourage the mastery of array of tools available to us, but not to be controlled by the very tools that were meant to empower or streamline our labor. “I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” (Joanna Maciejewska) So, here is an ordinary kind-of-duh declaration from us. We will make real, creative things. We will interact as real, conscientious human beings. We will generate real, consequential ideas. We will face real, essential problems. We will engender real, memorable experiences. We will create real, vivacious spaces together. We will always stay real, and the only thing that will not be real, per se, will be our pure imagination. We want to make collective housings to villas, churches to temples, products to paperbacks, interiors to parks, fashion to foods, and anything else that can cast a shadow of existence. Let’s get real!
We, at B01, enjoy saying out loud these pipe-dreams, unabashed and without reservations. For pipe-dreams may one day become realities. Though through tireless effort alone does this usually happen, it is believed in Japan that uttered words have power, perhaps by the effects of inculcation or autohypnoses. By the virtue of our resolute utterances, may this year be a healthy, creative, and fun year for us all. Thank you for your kind attention, and looking forward to hearing from you wherever, whenever, meeting the real you in person if possible, working together, and supporting each other in these tempestuous, spectacle-filled times. Thank you for your time and until next time, when we restart the newsletters with original contents!
Author: Kaz T. Yoneda, FRSA
Reviewed: Yuki Nakamura
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Thank you for your time and kind attention.
Until next time!