Naoya Hatakeyama & Toyo Ito – Under Construction

From the essay by Toyo Ito: “Whenever Hatakeyama visited the construction site he never once thought of what he was doing as recording the process of construction. As he picked his way through the steel, the scattered plates and welding sparks, the puddle of rainwater on the floor and the protective sheets billowing in the wind, he kept his eyes focused on the reality immediately at hand. What he saw was always a tangible landscape in itself and never a narrative leading to the image of a completed piece of architecture. Each picture captures a real landscape that belongs only to a single moment. And yet in photographs showing only rain puddles on the site he manages to show us another piece of architecture peeking through. In the pieces of steel plates, the ceiling sprayed with sound proofing materials, and even the yellow crane stationed in the center of the site he continues to search for [an] other architecture. Hatakeyama took photographs of the Sendai Mediatheque both during and after the construction process, and yet this distinction hardly holds in his work. His photographs convey instead the desire that architecture should always be ‘under construction’.”