An archive is all about relationships. We see archives as inexhaustible repositories of ideas, provocations, inspirations, and trials and errors. And much of our work originates in the collection, both in our curatorial practice—selecting and applying a topical lens to collection material in order to discuss issues of contemporary relevance—and in our activity as a research centre—seeking ways to multiply the connections and relationships within this body of material, making it as widely accessible as possible, and facilitating multiple readings of it.
You might remember a series of conversations titled Meanwhile in Japan that were part of our CCA c/o Tokyo program. Conceived by the program’s curator, Kayoko Ota, the aim of these conversations was to document and learn from the work of three architects who, in the late 1970s and 1980s, were particularly attentive and responsive to the demands of an increasingly urban, consumerist society. Hiroshi Hara, Itsuko Hasegawa, and Toyo Ito, opened their archives to a group of young architects and scholars who in turn interviewed these protagonists and engaged in a long debate around their different readings of the archives. We’ve been collecting these conversations in our CCA Singles book series and the one with Toyo Ito is just out.
We are very happy to announce that Toyo Ito has decided to donate to the CCA the part of his archive that documents the work produced by his office between 1971 and 1995, with the intention to continue to encourage new research, new readings, and new conversations around this body of work, and to put it in dialogue with many other works in our collection.
“The CCA is an architectural museum and research center I have the utmost trust in. Upon this donation, I received requests from many Japanese architects and researchers, asking if it is possible to keep those archives in Japan. However, I have the confidence that CCA offers unparalleled accessibility for future researchers from around the world to study my works.” —Toyo Ito
As these materials prepared to leave Tokyo, and before they could be re-activated from their new home in Montréal, we decided to expand the Meanwhile in Japan conversations with the architectural historian Koji Ichikawa, the architecture critic Makoto Ueda, and the architecture partnership formed by Maki Onishi and Yuki Hyakuda—each putting forward a set of arguments on Toyo Ito’s work supported by a significant selection of material within the archive. Their findings are collected in a series of video interviews.
Following these engagements, the same group gathered with Toyo Ito to discuss what they found and reflect on the moments when the selected projects came about. The exercise of exposing the archive to three interpretations followed the model of our Find and Tell program, which was initiated by the CCA in 2018 with the aim of highlighting the contemporary relevance of particular aspects of an archive. Read the conversation between Toyo Ito, Makoto Ueda, Koji Ichikawa, Maki Onishi, and Yuki Hyakuda, that took place at the Ito Office in Tokyo, here.
The archive of Toyo Ito is set to arrive at the CCA in a few weeks and our archivists will facilitate access to it as quickly as possible. We are already thinking about the many relationships that this material will form in our collection. It turns out that Ito-san already presented some of it here many years ago, during the Anyplace conference that we hosted back in 1994, and the archive of Anyone Corporation that we hold in our collection allows us to trace the debates that surrounded that presentation. Several other archives will soon be arriving that will allow for new relationships to be developed and provide opportunities for new readings and arguments to be explored. Among them are the archives of Bernard Tschumi, Gandelsonas Agrest, and Studio Works—major additions to our collection we’d like to tell you more about soon.
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