Georgina Baronian, assistant professor at Rice University School of Architecture, co-organized an exhibition debuting at Whitehouse, Tokyo, and a83, New York City this fall. Whitehouse, now an exhibition space, was first built in 1957 in whole or in part by the renowned architect Arata Isozaki (1931–2022). Baronian’s practice clovisbaronian—along with the cocurating, Tokyo-based practice GROUP—took Isozaki’s life and built works as the inspiration for this exhibition titled Correspondence. For this presentation, architects from Japan were paired with colleagues from North America not only to learn about Isozaki, but also to create new works.
“A small, focused school, Rice Architecture is also a think-tank with a global footprint. Our faculty create works, environments, and discourses worldwide, using both the urban platform of Houston and the global agenda of contemporary issues to test new forms of design research. Such is the work of Assistant Professor Georgina Baronian, including her recent installation in Japan, Correspondence,” said Igor Marjanović, the William Ward Watkin Dean of Rice Architecture. “An interplay of historical preservation, cultural memory, and cross-cultural dialogues, this project is both a formal and a technical exercise, speaking to the urgency of synthetic, holistic thinking that works across scales, borders, and time periods.”
The four pairs of architects exchanged texts and images through an online file sharing website to discuss Isozaki and to plan their own contributions to the exhibition, which is also being hosted online at distance.media. The participants from Japan are Suzuko Yamada Architects, Korogaro Corporation / Kengo Sato Architects, Rui Itasaka, GROUP and those from North America are ANY, Chibbernoonie, Departamento del Distrito (of which Rice Architecture Professor in the Practice Nathan Friedman is a founder), and clovisbaronian. Correspondence was conceived as a conversation among transnational architects who were keen to address not only the past vis-à-vis the work of Isozaki, but also the present moment in their shared profession.
The exhibition opened Friday, October 13, 2023, and closes Sunday, November 5, 2023, at a83 gallery in New York City. Georgina will host a gallery talk on the final day of the exhibition: Sunday, November 5, 2023, from 4–6 p.m. (EST). View a83’s exhibition page with details and the project’s press release here.