Timing + Playing - Obataimu

Timing

+ playing

When you gotta go, you gotta go. In Japan, one of the top signs of a good city, a welcoming city, is good public toilets. Often top architects are proudly invited to compete on creating imaginative toilet scenarios open to the public. The Japanese don’t shy away from ‘poo’ and everything that comes with it. It has always been celebrated, as a playful bearer of good luck—an indication that better things are coming. This observation on our first trip out to Japan twelve years ago sparked our overall approach to design: start designing any business, in any industry from the “poo-up.” Let the waste problem, be your creative starting point.

Let’s consider for instance, the idea of a heated public swimming pool and a supermarket ; both produce wasted energy. One from heaters, the other from coolers. Two solitary guzzlers in the same neighbourhood. Could they both be designed next to each other, designed to barter energy gained for energy lost? Could the hot air extracted from refrigeration in the supermarket not sufficiently heat the swimming pool? The technical engineering answer to this question is yes. And yet, the overriding contemporary logic of industry doesn’t approach problems this way.

So what is the overriding logic of industry today?

Poo-down.

Getting as much as possible for as little as possible as quickly as possible without considering the cost to the environment or the human spirit. Since Henry Ford’s implementation of the assembly line for automobiles (drawing inspiration from the meatpacking industry), the industrial revolution kicked into over-drive (in the way that monocropping triggered the agricultural revolution or in the way that ‘the selfie’ opened the pandora’s box that is the social media revolution). His method for mass-production started within one company, one factory and one industry. And soon the ‘race for repetition’ it proposed, took over all production systems. It became a pervasive artificial intelligence of sorts, enabling mass-consumption and hyper-capitalism. In a flash, for better or worse, the world was thrown into excess, instantaneity and never ending consumption.

The later discovered by-product of this was the birth of standardized over-production of goods (which implies a total denial of the limitations of natural raw materials) and a mass slowing of skill learning and upward mobility for labor classes in producing economies. The reduction of play and pleasure from production processes; make these jobs less and less desirable. So now, the globe is split between lands of producers and lands of consumers. Their realities most often could not be further apart.

Everyone knows that in India cows are given right of passage on sidewalks. A cow run-in on an evening walk in Bombay’s crowded Nanachowk market (full of makers from cane crafters to metal welders) prompted us to use a random cow fact to elucidate just how counter-intuitive industry is today. Did you know that cows can climb up stairs but are not biologically programmed to go down stairs? So let’s say you were to walk a cow up to a roof-top for a gander. The only way to bring it back down to the ground level is to harness the cow to a helicopter, lift it off the building and then fly it back down. So this would qualify as one of the least practical decisions a human ever made. Yet most global trade systems seem to work this way: Climb now, worry later, then blame it on gravity.

coloring

+ dressing

Scientist Andrew Parker’s book, In The Blink of an Eye, explains that around 540 million years ago all living creatures on earth were soft bodied (gooey like worms) and blind. Until the Cambrian period of evolution when the trilobite was born—a distant relative of both the spider and the shrimp—said to be the first animal to develop both eyes and hard-bodied swimming parts. Shortly after, in a blip, a phase just over just 5 million years (called the Cambrian Explosion) everything changed : an endless slew of brightly coloured, vision bearing, bone bearing, underwater beings animated the Earth’s oceans. Infinite new species were clad in bold colours with the intent to attract their potential mates or repel their potential predators.

Speaking of love and war; we learned from Kenya Hara’s book White, that the Japanese word for colour, iro, by happenstance also means ‘lover.’ In our own observation of Japan and India, we found two countries with opposing urban colourscapes (except for the school kids in drab uniforms and the crows in both cities). While the Japanese approach to colour is generally to use it sparingly and intentionally, the Indian approach is to use it liberally and emotively. Yet both arrive at these divergent positions form a long cultural history and understanding of colour as a powerful bearer of energy. In India, for the Hindu community for instance, the multiplicity of feminine divine power is celebrated in part by wearing a particular colour each day for nine auspicious days in the year, called Navratri (determined by the lunar calendar). During Navratri The city of Mumbai turns into an urban designer’s wet dream—with all the transportation routes mapped by hundreds of thousands of women wearing sarees in one color each day—for instance imagine being surrounded at the station on your way to work by hundreds, yes hundreds of women in variations of yellow. Each of the nine colours denote a different face and feminine power of the goddess Devi.

Few things are loaded with potentiality like colours are. For the Japanese, the strategic removal or chosen absence of colour often becomes more impactful than its actual use. We like to think of this like the lingering desire for someone you once loved but regret never to having explored when you had the chance; the planned use of negative space in a painting; the conception of a garment with missing seams; or the architect’s decision where not to build being more impactful than the actual construction. In his book, White, Kenya Hara speaks of the use of the colour white in relation to the concept of ‘emptiness’ in everyday life and things in Japan:

‘Emptiness as Limitless Potential

An empty space possesses a chance of becoming by virtue of its receptive nature. The mechanism of communication is activated when we look at an empty vessel, not as a negative state, but in terms of its capacity to be filled with something. The ancient Japanese religion of Shinto worships the “ eight million gods” within nature, but when we look at it from a different angle, we can understand it as a technique of communication, an imaginative power that invites wandering gods from everywhere. How then is empty space constructed in Shinto architecture?

A Shinto shrine, jinja, is a central space hosting people’s religious activities. It is also called shiro, or yashiro, and its basic principle is “to embrace emptiness.” In its original form, four pillars were raised on the ground and their tops tied with sacred ropes, leaving an “empty space” in the center. Precisely because this space is designed to be “empty,” there is always the possibility that something may enter it. This “may” is crucial too – it can be seen as the essence of Shinto, the thing that activates people’s minds and leads them to prayer.’
—Kenya Hara, White, Pages 038 – 039

Birds are attracted to brown twigs and green leaves, the popping colors of fruit, and love to live nestled in the trees (like some of us). As Tokyo is very built up and there are not many spots with a lot of trees to welcome birds. Many birds seem to have left Tokyo’s grey-scape in search of nature’s hues. Yet the crows, otherwise known as the rats of the sky, stayed. Being a dense yet highly orderly city, the crows were not only lacking in trees but also in food found easily on the streets. They had to go study garbage in dumpsters very minutely— it’s a hard-knock-life for the Tokyo crow. On one of our first trips to Tokyo, we had the good fortune of witnessing a phenomenon of sorts—crows across Tokyo started selecting brightly coloured twiggy wire clothes across the city’s bins and started dressing up neighbourhoods with the most elaborate nest sculptures made of hangers; since they had no twigs.

The incidence of colour in the guise or disguise of a species has always been a clue for survival, a tool for attraction, nature’s way to feel and express the present tense and a strong marker of evolution.