What’s the Damage?

The mission of Tokyo’s Window Research Institute (founded in 2007 by the manufacturer YKK AP, Inc.) is almost breathtakingly prosaic. As a bulleted list of aims published on its website indicates, the WRI both provides funding to individual researchers and cultivates a serious tenor around the bogus-sounding field of “windowology.” This it does through awards, fellowships, exhibitions, and panels—often in partnership with institutions like the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. Last week, the WRI and CCA concluded its “Above/Below/Between: Light on a Damaged Planet” fellowship program with a few fascinating, if myopic, excursions. elaborated on the discursive role of windows in countercultural earth shelters, which he described as radically “disloyal” to existing building codes, and inveighed against the “undermining urbanism” of uranium mining towns in the Northwest Territories. Despite the event’s theme of illumination, the Q&A took a dark turn when Gourinovitch observed that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were assembled with Canadian uranium. And again, when Atelier Bow-Wow’s (who is a member of the CCA-WRI committee and acted as a respondent during the presentations) compared Dutto’s desert-dwelling analysis to the underground meth labs in Breaking Bad. “You can have a perfectly conventional building with respect to code for a methamphetamine lab,” Dutto replied, much to the audience’s amusement.