HOUSTON, TX.- In collaboration with the Rice School of Architecture (RSA), Rice University Art Gallery has invited internationally renowned, Tokyo-based architecture studio Atelier Bow-Wow to create a new site-specific installation. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, the principals of Atelier Bow-Wow, collaborated with RSA Assistant Professor Jesús Vassallo and students to design and build an installation inspired by Houston’s historic row house or “shotgun” home, a nickname based on the small home’s corridor-like layout that allows a clear path or “shot” from front to back door. The installation traces the history of this architectural form and imagine new possibilities for its design and use.

Over the fall semester of 2014, Atelier Bow-Wow and Jesús Vassallo led students through an intensive study of the row house’s history and contemporary condition that culminated in the creation of a new installation at Rice Gallery. Bow-Wow, known for their unique methodologies and interest in vernacular architecture, re-examined with Vassallo and the students what may on the surface be a deceptively simple form of architecture due to its understated geometry (an elongated box with a pitched roof) and basic construction. Dividing into groups for the seminar, student teams studied different aspects of the row house to present as part of the final installation. One group’s “actor network” research shows the complex web of social, economic, and environmental forces that contributed to the row house’s past prominence as a form of housing generated and primarily used by African-American communities. Extensive research has also been carried out in the form of a documentary photography survey, mapping the current condition of the surviving shotguns in the third and fifth wards of Houston. Similarly, another team of students worked on tracing the genealogy of the architectural type, through the changes in its plan configuration. Finally, another student group presents Ikea-like diagrams to present vernacular construction techniques and materials used to construct shotgun homes. Informed by this research, Bow-Wow, Vassallo, and students created an installation where five row houses merge into one another at the center of the gallery, forming a three dimensional asterisk volume that visitors are able to enter and walk through. Nearly a 1:1 scale prototype of a distorted row house, each wing of the asterisk structure houses a different area of research, culminating with the student’s individual proposals for future applications of the shotgun house.

The course and installation is shaped by Atelier Bow-Wow’s international reputation for an idiosyncratic and radically interdisciplinary approach to architectural research and design, which has been labeled as “behaviorology.” Bow-Wow’s documentation of specific forms of contemporary vernacular architecture and industrial design reveal a continuous loop of exchange between a building’s form, a user’s unpredictable action and license to reshape a building, and the larger economic and social conditions. This holistic research informs Bow Wow’s own architectural designs which simultaneously adapt themselves to current social behavior, as well as hope to provoke new ways of relating to each other and our built environment, whether in private homes or public spaces. Examples of their innovative projects include their studies of small buildings in Tokyo published in the Pet Architecture Guide Book, their Machiya homes built in Japan, and their series of art installations called “micro public spaces,” like Monkey Way (2006), Life Tunnel (2008), and Rendez-vous (2010). Atelier Bow-Wow, Jesús Vassallo, and the RSA students’ study of the row house applies these complex methodologies to the city of Houston to contribute to scholarly discussions in the fields of art, architecture, urban studies, sociology, and politics that addresses issues of sustainability, affordable housing, vernacular architecture, humanitarian design, and public space. This project also continues Rice Gallery’s approach to installation art that embraces experimentation across disciplines from interior design (White Webb) to product design (Karim Rashid) to architecture (Shigeru Ban, Ball-Nogues Studio).

Since their founding in 1992, Tokyo-based firm Atelier Bow-Wow have designed over 40 private homes throughout Japan and numerous public buildings, such as the Hanamidori Cultural Center, Towada Art Center, and Ikushima Library. Their publications include Echo of Space/Space of Echo (2009), Graphic Anatomy (2007), Pet Architecture (2001), and Made In Tokyo (2001). Their work was the subject of The Architecture of Atelier Bow-Wow: Behaviorology (2010, Rizzoli). They have exhibited internationally, including the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale (2014), The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (2014), BMW Guggenheim Lab - Mumbai (2012-13), The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2012), 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (2010), Liverpool Biennale (2008), Venice Biennale (2008), and 27th Sao Paulo Biennale (2006).