shashasha

The first photobook featuring the architectural photographs by photographer and Provoke co-founder Koji Taki.

“Searching for the Language of a House” comprises photographs taken by Japanese photographer and critic Koji Taki between 1968 and ’79, featuring 17 buildings by architectures such as Hironori Shirasawa, Kazuo Shinohara and Toyo Ito. The black-and-white photographs – taken with great imagination, highlighting each space’s individual character and sometimes daring to dip into the abstract – work both as illustrative images of architectural spaces as well as artful photographs of their own, but were originally not meant to be published in this form. Rather, as his own daughter as well as an essay by anthropologist and cultural critic Ryuta Imafuku point out, Taki preferred to abandon these works (originally taken as a sort of visual reference for Taki’s writing on architecture), with Imafuku comparing the act of this book’s publication as similar to Max Brod deciding not to burn the writings of his friend Franz Kafka’s death.

“[W]hen I looked at the unique composition and unusual close-ups of these ‘anti-architectural photographs’ that transformed concrete structures into abstract morphological designs, I could hear the echoes of various works that Taki had persistently referenced in his texts: the inorganic forms and surrealistic innovation of Blossfeldt’s ‘botanical photography’ discussed by Benjamin; the tactile perception that sparkled in the mechanical movements that Fernand Leger presented in his ‘Mechanical Ballet’; or the physicality of abstraction that Oskar Schlemmer advocated.” (from Ryuta Imafuku’s essay)

In addition to Koji Taki’s photographs, the book also includes an essay by Koji Taki, an afterword by Ryuta Imafuku, and detailed information and floor plans for each featured building (all texts available in Japanese and English translation).

Note: This book is bound using a codex binding in the spine and adhering the cover directly to the last page, giving priority to the opening and handling of each page.