By CARSON CHAN

The side of the café facing Ernst-Reuter-Platz was completely glass. Momoyo Kaijima, one half of the Tokyo-based architecture practice Atelier Bow-Wow, looked sharply into her morning coffee, scrutinizing the brown liquid intensely before she began to talk. This is a person that had, in the weeks before our meeting, taken a group of eighteen students through Istanbul, constructed an installation in the center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, opened an exhibition of her office’s work in Tokyo, and after her coffee, she was about to give a lecture at the Technical University on the other side of the square. It’s hard to imagine any time squeezed in there for making buildings. Indeed, what has brought Kaijima’s practice into widespread attention has been her books, not her buildings. Today she decided to wear a black cardigan, backwards and upside-down. At 38, she’s diminutive, boy-like in appearance. Not until she was finished with her thoughts, she said, almost sighing, “There is no escape from ideas, is there?”

Her work, like that of her peers who straddle between academia and practice, examines architecture as a social system while maintaining it as a question of design. Since 2005, she has traveled with students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH) to nineteen different cities – a staggering list of locales that has so far included Beijing, Melbourne, Jakarta, Taipei, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Montreal, São Paolo, Santiago, and her native Tokyo. In each city, the students are asked to design a single-detached family house that embodies the characteristics of the local context, while aiming to meet the desires of a client, appointed to each student to simulate the dynamics of a professional commission. “I’m interested in understanding cities. When we construct a relationship between the occupants and the house, the house to the street, and the street to the city, we are shaping identities that are rooted in architectural forms. I ask my students to look for instances of the mundane, signs of misuse, and to analyze how they can tell us about the relationship between the locals and their space.” While blatant stereotypes emerge from this mandate (a boat house for a bachelor in Amsterdam, a courtyard house for a family in Beijing), Kaijima’s efforts in imagining a functional correspondence between private life and the contemporary city harken back to a period when architects were a group determined to make the world a better place, one house at a time. Reassuringly, the collapse of utopian urban rhetoric in the late ’60s did not absolve architects today from their responsibilities as social agents.

Architecture remains a discipline that draws out the dynamics of lived experience and constructs them into a form of expression. At its core, the discipline structures the desire to make the abstract and intangible into graspable forms – giving voice to a logic for a systemic world.

“Graduating in 1999 meant that we started our architectural careers with no jobs.” Post-bubble Japan, the sobering denouement to the blaze of money during the previous two decades, came like a bucket of ice water. One minute you’re jetting to the Seychelles, the next you’re sitting on a pile of deflated Beenie Babies. “At school, we were taught to look at buildings, to understand how they functioned within the city, and how to make new ones that worked within their context. In the midst of the economic crash, my partner Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and I had no choice but to continue to observe the city around us.” Tsukamoto, who was Kaijima’s teaching assistant at the Sakamoto architecture lab in the Tokyo Institute of Technology, had by 1990 established a small architecture practice, but it wasn’t until he and Kaijima released their first book as Atelier Bow-Wow, Pet Architecture (2001), that his work became known in architecture circles outside Japan. In it, the pair examined and documented Tokyo’s smallest private establishments. Restaurants the size of closets, apartments wedged into back alleys, and a real-estate agency tucked underneath a flight of stairs; places that once gave form to an urban geography fractured by capitalism’s unyielding exertion, now appear as its afterimage – cute jokes that disarm the city of its blue-collar aggressions. In the recent decades, this kind of social critique has, for several key practitioners, moved from being their side project to their raison d’être. Rem Koolhaas’ well-known urban think tank at Harvard has even spawned into AMO – a practice that produces architecture in the form of texts and research instead of buildings. One can’t help but wonder, what exactly do architects do? Walter Gropius once quipped, “Architecture begins where engineering ends,” unwittingly inviting the opinion that the architect’s work is secondary, ornamental to the physical imperatives engineers need to fulfill. In an economy of capital and speed, oftentimes, the buck of building projects ends before it begins for architects; most buildings are completed without their involvement.

It’s fated, perhaps, that as physical space gives way to a digital reality, as materiality dissolves into streams of effervescent data, architectural practices will become as much about producing information and ideas about the inhabited world as it is about designing it. As separate elements dissolve, they tend to mix into each other, blurring the boundaries that once made them different. The history of the Internet, the layout of trailer parks, the movement of birds, the development of Muzak and postwar comparative politics are topics that have structured recent architectural inquiries. Jeff Kipnis (co-curator of the Wexner Center’s famous 2002 exhibition, “Mood River”) fueled this brand of frantic inclusionism in a recent text: “From the smallest dimension to the largest and across every order of magnitude without exception, matter organizes into involvements. Nothing is uninvolved, there is nothing outside of involvement, and all involvements are themselves involved.”

Atelier Bow-Wow’s subsequent books, Made in Tokyo (2001) and Bow-Wow from Post Bubble City (2006) belong to a group of recent publications written by architects (like Kazys Varnelis/Robert Sumrell’s Blue Monday, and Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land) that aim purely to analyze the contemporary condition and theorize on its influence on architectural thinking.

Architects are currently constructing themselves as the world’s new public intellectuals. But in an atmosphere that is growing warmer year after anxious year, all this research is in danger of seeming more like filibuster than any real desire for change. At times, social research and analysis can seem particularly mute when those who make the pronouncements – the architects – are also those who are most ill equipped to do anything about the problems. We live in a time of ecstasy – war times actually – when the excitement of the newest news stands in for the adrenaline of action. Architects today don’t resist, they participate.

Out of the café, we crossed several lanes of traffic to reach the Technical University’s entrance. Did she always see herself becoming a globetrotting “architect” that would teach, write, lecture, and theorize all while designing buildings? Kaijima offered that she was “never interested in breaking with tradition,” but very much interested in expanding her experiences. “I’m interested in experiencing life.”