Architectural Behvioroloy – a statement
Atelier Bow-Wow founders begins with a statement on behaviorology as a tracing tool for their works over the years. Like most architects, they concern about the future of architecture and the contemporary urban space that they are involved with. They ask whether or not harmnious urban space and “happiness buildings” have disaapered, in the face of continous fever of new architectural expressions. The architects answer these questions by looking into their own works in order to find a denomiator, which is best desribed as “behaviorology.” This terms has become a method of study of the atelier, and is influenced by biology, sociology and anthropology all at once. Specifically, they categorizes it further into behaviors between human beings, behaviors of the natural forces and ones of buildings within their contexts. The study would need to synthesize all these three categories in the context of the built environment.
In these three categories, the architects look generally into the micro-scale levels, such as the micro-phenomena of physics in natural elements, the daily behaviors of human beings, and the “behaviors” of buildings, which are considered as types and living organisms instead of a mechanistic device (buildings of certain kind share a kind of “genetic” property such as typology, but evolve and “behave” differently in different urban contexts).
Although the architects seem to look at phenomena close-up, they logically develop their thinking into the relation of time and space, acknowledging the different biological, social and “cultural” rythms of people, building, and nature. Architectural behaviorology aims at synthesizing these discreete systems of behaviors and produce the desirable outcome, which is specifically “forms which support behavior.”
The studio also acknowledges that behaviors cut across systems and categories but are not confined in any single one. By citing the example of people going to a flower festival, they argue for the potentialities of generting urban space or buildings when the frequency of the various rhythms and “correspond to a suitable material or location.”
The studio began to realize the “housing behavior” in their experience of the small spaces and gaps between buildings in Tokyo. They see another kind of metabolism other the “Core metabolism” of the 1960s japanese movement, which they call “Void Metabolism.” The architects locate themselves in the “fourth generation” of housing stock in Japan, and criticize head on the negative impacts that modenism has marked on the houses of the previous generation, especially for leaving spaces between building unable to produce urban social interactions as well as family gathering activities. It is their mission to redefine these gaps.
They also argue for the behaviors of the users as mechanism to generate “micro public spaces,” which they use as a concept to study people flows and various spatial forms that these behaviours intertwine like mobile structures or small buildings.
Atelier Bow-Wow’s urban research projects are also mentioned in the statement, since they produce many new concepts while being conducted over the years, such as “Environmental Unit,” “Generational Typology” (describing the transformation of machiya types in Kanazawa), and “Flux Management,” which investigates “large-scale elements flowing throughout the city” like common socio-infrastructural projects such as dams, reservoirs and so on.
Behaviorology aims to positions architecture within the ecosystem of behaviors. Its potentiality, according to the architects, is that it could unfold the “real protagonists” of specific spaces. Though a bit vague in defining this approach as “ecological,” the two architects clearly renew the interest of looking at the built environment in its totality and more importantly, of experiencing urban space firsthand.
