Schwarz
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No matter how the work of Atelier Bow-Wow (the mild-mannered, brilliant husband-and-wife team of Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima) tends to be interpreted or misinterpreted -- an exploitation of contextual constraints, an elaboration of personal quirks, an exploration of the potential of narrow spaces, and so on -- it is above all based on taking things seriously. Being serious, as Susan Sontag has said with regard to literature, includes being funny, but excludes being cynical. The houses of Atelier Bow-Wow may embody a subtle critique of the city that spawned them, yet for all their compositional humor, they always avoid subverting or mocking the desires of their clients. Quotidian pleasures and individual idiosyncrasies are all treated equally.
Like many of their contemporaries, Atelier Bow-Wow draw inspiration from French philosophical thought, yet not from the theoretical ambiguities and compositional analogies provided by figures such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Instead, the texts accompanying Atelier Bow-Wow projects often directly and indirectly reference canonical works of sociology such as Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, or Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life and The Production of Space. Indeed, the current exhibition of Atelier Bow-Wow's work at Gallery MA is called Practice of Lively Space. This is architecture to be judged as a platform for enabling activity rather than for its sculptural beauty.