Sometimes, when you’re readiong those seminal histories of post-modernism, you find long chapters exploring the way architecture is one of the heralds of a change in zeitgeist. How strong does an idea have to be to work its way into a major architectural achievement? For that very reason speculative architecture can be a fascinating approach. Here’s more from JUXTAPOZ:
Over the past four decades, Nomata has developed a hybrid architectural language that fuses the industrial, fantastical, archaic and futuristic. The starting point of the artist – who sees ‘imaginary architecture’ as a visual language in its own right – is in Tokyo where he spent his childhood. In a commercial and industrial area where town factories and traditionally designed housing coexist, he became interested in a lexicon of structural elements such as chimneys and steel towers. Especially in Tokyo in the mid-1960s, urban development was actively carried out before the Olympics, and with expectations for a new city raised high in the construction of Tokyo Tower, Nomata seemed to access a glimpse of the future.
Rendered with meticulous precision, his scenes often feature towering edifices, intricate skeletal frameworks, spherical forms or wind-powered machinery. The distinctive colour palette that Nomata employs is muted and atmospheric – shades of stone-grey, white and sepia interspersed with subdued blues and greens – which enhances the dreamlike quality of his constructed realms. The artist’s use of a relatively flat style and shallow depth of field further enforces this impression of the constructed world, a dimension of which is the theatrical. Bathed in a focused, directional light, structures such as those in Continuum-1 (2024) come to resemble pieces on a stage set against simulated backdrops of hazy cloud and sky formations.
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