FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
AND

IMPERIAL HOTEL,TOKYO

This month I'm gonna take part in a design competition-'OYA-ISHI' Architectural Compe.-2006.Infact,oya-ishi is a type of stone which is found in Tochigi prefecture and hadbeen used for construction of Tokyo Imperial Hotel.So,these days I'm trying to collect info. about Wright's works in Japan and studying papers related to Wright's various styles,ranging from 'Preiry Style' to 'Maya Revival'.As a matter of fact,except Falling Water ,I knew very little about Wright's other works.

• In the pict.(from left) : front facad and perspective view of Imperial hotel and the Falling water.
• Tokyo's Imperial Hotel was the best-known of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings in Japan. The original Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was built in 1890.To replace the original wooden structure, the owners commissioned a design by Wright, which was completed in 1923.It survived the magnitude 7.9 Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Time took its toll, and in 1976, the facade and pool were moved to the Museum Meiji-Mura, a collection of buildings (mostly from the Meiji Era) in Inuyama, near Nagoya, while the rest of the structure was demolished to make way for a new hotel on the site.
  The Frank Lloyd Wright version was designed in the "Maya Revival Style" of architecture. It incorporates a tall, pyramid-like structure, and also loosely copies Maya motifs in its decorations. The main building materials are poured concrete and concrete block.
  While the Imperial Hotel was originally owned and partly funded by the imperial family, the current owner of Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, the new hotel on the grounds on which Wright's Imperial Hotel once stood, is Imperial Hotel, Ltd., which runs a chain of luxury hotels in Japan.
• THE MAYA REVIVAL STYLE : The Maya Revival Style refers to modern architecture and decorative arts that use Mesoamerican culture as a source of inspiration. Although the name refers only to the Maya, practitioners frequently blended Maya and Mexica motifs. Two prominent architects that worked in this style are Frank Lloyd Wright and Robert Stacy-Judd. Wright's Hollyhock House copied the shape of temples from Palenque, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was in the shape of a Mesoamerican pyramid, and the Ennis House is built from cement blocks that evoke the geometric patterning on the facades of Puuc buildings.

宇都宮大学・２６回学園祭... ! 建築展２００６ !!
This week-end,U.U celebrated its Annual Festival.We,the students were involved in various events.Specially Department of Architecture and Civil engg. from Engineering Faculty contributed a lot to the festival.Students of 3rd year were supposed to collect money from the sponsors and to make group-effort to design the exhibition space as well.Every year Arch-3rd year get themselves engaged to design a part of the festival ground.This year we decided to build some temporary structures in form of cube and each cube would be a single group project formed by 5 to 10 students of the class.The simplest one was of group-01,which was designed by Morihira and myself (in the picture). Its white exterior attracted little children to draw pictures on the panels and finally turned into a multi-colored mural at the end of the day !!

PORT FOLIO !!

The Portfolio is a single most important part of every architectural student's education.I knew this truth and felt the need everytime to have a magnificent portfolio full of distinguished design projects in my early days of Architecture School.The school I attend in my country was an art oriented one,inspiring the people involved in it to practice(so called!) PURE ARCHITECTURE ,and most probably,was the best one of it's type among all architecture schools of the Indian sub-continent.So the word 'portfolio' always meant to me a sort of art-work for a booklet type presentation of some other art-works.It might be one of the reasons that let me start thinkin' about it so lately.When the situation forced me to take a serious and practical move to make a collection of my works reproduced for a "printed-on-paper" format,I found that,the graphics or the aesthetic qualities of your presentation doesn't matter,rather the most difficult thing is to utilize the right potential at the right place to present 'yourself' through your works.And for that you should know the presentation technique which involves both SENCE and SKILL...

Well,I think it's the time to proceed for my work rather talking much.So let me work on my 'METAPHORE'.In the photo : THE FRONT PAGE (a-4 size)

HEALTHY WEEK-END ! !

Probably I'm gonna stop smoking!!!!!!Just no new thing happened last couple of weeks,and no new ideas came out.I was really busy lookin' for a new part-time job,and almost every evening doing my home-works after coming back from school .Last Friday after I had come back to dorm,I noticed that the last 2 ciggarettes are left in the pack,I finished all others in a single day!!You see?how stressful a working day is at U.U! I was too tired to go out again and buy a new pack.So just switched on the T.V.,finished the last 2 cancer-sticks and felt in deep sleep. I wake up at mid-night when all the vending machines hadbeen closed and I'd go to the nearest 'Lawson' half a mile away from my place!Oh.. Jesus......!!I was feeling dizzy for the first time to go out for buying ciggarettes at mid-night!!Any way,this surprised me and yea..,it also inspired me that I was going on with my design by cups of black coffee without MARLBORO!!Any way,next morning when I went to bed,I promised myself to keep up the enthasiasm for a small anti-smoking movement in my tiny studio at "U.U. International Dorm".Let me get in to a new crazy idea of "Architecture without Smoke",that sounds quite healthy but a bit smoky itself,conceptually!!!!