The Lives of Ephemeral Form

Since its inauguration in 1986, the Architectural Institute of Japan’s Architectural Culture Week has brought architecture into dialogue with the general public through exhibitions, symposium, tours, and other events across Japan. Held annually, architects, researchers, students, and the wider public are brought together on this occasion. In the year of the AIJ’s 140th anniversary, The Lives of Ephemeral Form begins a two-year exhibition project examining how architecture persists and remains active through its records. 

The exhibition brings together Michino Aoyama (Itsuko Hasegawa Atelier), Takahiko Kanemaki (Kanagawa University), Yurika Kono, Taishin Shiozaki and Saeco Kobayashi (atelierco), Yu Shinoda (Meiji University), and Book Shop Boys. This first phase initiates research, dialogue, and the launch and proceeding of various new works that will continue over two years.

A moving-image archive of postwar Japanese houses
One starting point is a body of moving-images made surrounding experimental houses in postwar Japan. From the 1970s onward, photographers, poets, filmmakers, graphic designers, and residents themselves turned their cameras towards capturing houses by Kazuo Shinohara, Toyo Ito, and Hiroshi Hara. Works by Kiyoji Otsuji, Shirouyasu Suzuki, Sakumi Hagiwara, and Kiyoshi Awazu expand the landscape of video-archive beyond drawings and canonical photographs of completed buildings to encompass inhabitation, personal observation, everyday life, and experiments with techniques film and video.

As buildings change or disappear, how do they persist through these records—and what happens when the records themselves are rather precarious? Buildings are subjected to changing economies, technologies, uses, and material conditions. Film and videotapes deteriorate; playback technologies become obsolete; photographs, drawings, models, and documents are dispersed, restored, digitized, reclassified, or even forgotten. The exhibition begins with this double-instability, approaching documentation not as simple, neutral preservation but as an active process through which the image and history of architecture are continually reconstructed.

For six days, a temporary screening space within the Architectural Museum extends these questions through a selection of moving-images. Alongside works by Otsuji, Suzuki, Hagiwara, Awazu, and Toshio Matsumoto, the program presents the Japanese premieres of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Reportage amateur (maquette expo) (2006) and Elettra Fiumi’s Radical Landscapes (2022), as well as Babette Mangolte’s Visible Cities (1991). A group of short films connected to the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam considers preservation, reproduction, material deterioration, and changing ideas regarding the social role of architects.

Another strand of the exhibition investigates, and replays moving-image materials preserved by Itsuko Hasegawa Atelier, making visible the process of archival research itself. These works appear alongside photography, drawings, archival materials, installations, talks, guided programs, and research conducted publicly in the gallery.

Beyond the exhibition
The project also launches an open call for written contributions through its dedicated website. Submitted texts will enter the project’s ongoing research and dialogue, to encompass wider perspectives and providing sources for the development of its second phase. In this way, the gallery and website operate as concurrent spaces for research, discussion, and production beyond the space-time of this exhibition.　　　　　　　　　

The Lives of Ephemeral Form asks not only how architecture might be preserved, but what acts of preservation themselves facilitate—what enters the record, what remains outside it, and how architecture continues to exist when buildings, inhabitants, uses, and even the media entrusted with their capacity to carry memories are, in the end, subject to change.

The Lives of Ephemeral Form  
October 2–8, 2026  
Architectural Museum Gallery + Courtyard, Architectural Institute of Japan  
5-26-20 Shiba, Minato-ku, Tokyo  
Admission free / No reservation required

Curators: Dai Katsuragawa (Land-ing / STUDIO大), Haruka Inagaki (records from nowhere)
Installation: Yuta Kunishige
Organizer: Architectural Institute of Japan  
Special sponsor: YKK AP  
Sponsor: Architecture Center CoAK