Toward a Minor Architecture

The Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s Arguments lecture series ended its summer run on a gentle note. Fuminori Nousaku and Mio Tsuneyama presented the work of their Tokyo design practices—Fuminori Nousaku Architects and studio mnm—which are distinct yet intertwined, overlapping in the perennial project that is making holes in their house. “There are memories in materials,” Nousaku said softly to a room of attentive students and professors. With slides consisting of construction details (drawn and photographed), broken concrete, and earthworms and elegantly chronicled policy and industrial histories, the partners deftly illustrated their precise optimism for the work of the architect at present. There is an urgency underpinning their bricolage activity tempered by the lucid historicity of their intentions. Elaborating on their theme of “urban wild ecology,” Nousaku and Tsuneyama pointed to the tremulous labor of excising a swatch of sidewalk for a plant bed. This transformation of the dead, planar city into a deeply entangled, living place, they suggested, was both ordinary and profound.