Julian Worrall - The Japan Times

December 11, 2023

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Julian Worrall

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Julian Worrall

Julian Worrall is an Australian architect and writer based in Tokyo since 2000. He is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Waseda University's Institute for Advanced Study, and runs the research-based design practice LLLABO, dedicated to "distilling the logic and magic of the Asian metropolis."

For Julian Worrall's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

Japan Times

CULTURE / Books

Mar 25, 2017

'Tokyo: A Biography': Tracing the life of a city

Cities are intrinsically inviting subjects for a writer. Part human, part natural; arena of history and mantelpiece of memory — cities provide the setting for the archetypal encounter of the individual with the masses.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Books

Feb 13, 2016

Art Place Japan: The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the Vision to Reconnect Art and Nature

In an era of relentless urbanization, global travel and weightless images, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale has pioneered a ground-breaking model of place-based art curation that aims to cast a little edifying rural grit into the oyster of contemporary urban affluence. Centred on a declining, depopulating mountainous area of Niigata Prefecture around Tokamachi city, the project aims to bring people, energy, ideas, money, and ultimately pride to the region, using contemporary art as its chief instrument.

Japan Times

BUSINESS / DAVOS SPECIAL 2016

Jan 20, 2016

Le Corbusier's Japanese ghost lives on in Ueno

The Swiss-French architect and artist Charles Eduoard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, was by any measure one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century.

Japan Times

LIFE / Style & Design

Jan 30, 2015

Japan's fertile architectural evolution

Today, Japanese contemporary architecture enjoys an outstanding international reputation, but the story of its emergence to a position of such accomplishment and acclaim has not yet been told comprehensively. A pair of exhibitions at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa presents a postwar history of Japanese architecture — "Japan Architects 1945-2010" — and the tendencies that are gathering momentum now and will shape the future — "Architecture since 3.11."

Japan Times

LIFE / Style & Design / ON: ARCHITECTURE

Aug 29, 2014

Checking in on Tokyo hotels old and new

The news that the Hotel Okura in Tokyo will be redeveloped in time for the 2020 Olympics has been greeted with dismay by surprisingly far-flung and influential group of admirers — an indication of the status of clientele that has patronized the hotel since it opened in 1962, U.S. President Barack Obama recently among them.

Japan Times

LIFE / Style & Design

Jun 16, 2014

Venice Biennale lays down the past

The Venice Architecture Biennale, first staged in 1980 and recurring every two years, has grown to become the world's largest and most influential gathering of architectural thought leaders. The event has come to be seen as providing a global snapshot of contemporary practice and as a weather vane of emergent currents. Yet for Rem Koolhaas, the curator of this year's Biennale, which opened June 7, these characteristics are precisely the ones that he has sought to disavow.

Japan Times

LIFE / Style & Design / ON: ARCHITECTURE

Apr 28, 2014

Japanese architecture on show in Venice, and the loss of a legend

Architects often claim to be deeply concerned about protecting the distinctive soul of places and regions, which would seem to imply that architects should stay close to their roots. Yet the export of architectural services and the global circulation of architects has never been higher. This paradox provides the backdrop to today's column.

Japan Times

LIFE / Style & Design / ON: ARCHITECTURE

Dec 30, 2013

Building on strong foundations in 2013

The end of the year is traditionally a time of review and new prospects, a time to weave memories of the past with plans for the future to form the narrative cloth of a coherent identity.

Japan Times

LIFE / Style & Design / ON: ARCHITECTURE

Oct 28, 2013

Tokyo's new National Stadium faces opposition

Now that the celebrations surrounding the announcement that Tokyo will host the 2020 Summer Olympics have died down, attention is turning to the physical transformations that this will bring the city, for better or for worse.

Japan Times

LIFE / Style & Design / ON: ARCHITECTURE

Jul 29, 2013

Kenzo Tange centennial celebrations

Kenzo Tange, one of the most significant Japanese architect of the 20th century, was born 100 years ago this year. Tange spent much of his childhood in Imabari, Ehime Prefecture, on the Seto Inland Sea, and all of the most significant of his early works dating from the 1950s, from the Hiroshima Peace Center to government offices in Takamatsu and Kurashiki, are dotted around the region.

Japan Times

LIFE / Style & Design

Apr 30, 2013

Hall of fame: Toyo Ito, Sou Fujimoto, Setouchi, OMA

With Toyo Ito winning this yearu2019s Pritzker Prize last month u2014 u201carchitectureu2019s Nobelu201d u2014 Japanu2019s architects continue to bestride the international architectural world as colossi.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Apr 23, 2013

Shigeru Ban: between function and beauty

Architecture is rooted in the basic human need for shelter. But the profession today pays little attention to situations where the need for shelter is most urgent, such as after a disaster.

Japan Times

MULTIMEDIA

Nov 10, 2011

Breathing life into the nature of architecture

Staging an exhibition of architecture, perhaps more than any other art form, demands a curatorial grasp of space-making. In the inevitable absence of the built reality, stand-ins in the form of drawings, models, photographs and film are drafted in to explain and evoke architectural ideas and experiences. While often interesting in themselves for their graphic, sculptural or material qualities, these things bear the pathos of being forever subordinate to their absent referents.

Japan Times

MULTIMEDIA

Sep 29, 2011

Metabolism: When the future was still ahead

The word "fukkō" ("reconstruction") — is once again in the air. Ubiquitous during the postwar period, it enjoyed an earlier vogue a generation before as Tokyo was rebuilt after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. But while the word may be the same, its meaning and spirit changes from era to era. A new exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in the Roppongi district of Tokyo gives a visceral sense of just how substantial such generational shifts can be.

Japan Times

CULTURE

Sep 15, 2011

Building future cities from grains of sand

As the last of the debris is cleared from the Great East Japan Earthquake and plans are drawn up to reconstruct the devastated towns and communities, architects and planners are pondering not just to how replace what was lost, but how to improve upon it. With fortuitous timing, Tokyo this September is hosting a feast of architectural exhibitions and discussions looking to the present, the past, and the rest of the world for ideas and inspiration by which to rebuild Japan for the better.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art / ART BRIEF

Dec 10, 2010

'Dominique Perrault: Urban Landscape'

Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Nov 26, 2010

Looking beyond art's boundaries

Art, it is often said, is a lens through which to see the world differently. "Differently" could mean more intensely, or more clearly, or in a new and unfamiliar way. This inevitably requires a separation between the artwork and the world. Art so understood thus sets up territories and borders, the lines that define where the ordinary world ends and the art one begins. Mostly, this is straightforward enough: A painting has its frame; a sculpture its plinth; even in the more challenging categories of installation and performance art these boundaries are typically that of the space that the artwork and its audience occupies.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Aug 27, 2010

Perceptions of space, from Japan to the world

"I'm a kind of iguana. But I'm the kind of iguana that travels."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Aug 20, 2010

In search of society's true affluence

"When I was 40, my father died. When he died, he was working on a project for a children's campground on the island of Naoshima. When I returned from Tokyo to Okayama to lead the family company, I inherited the project. As I lived and worked with the locals, my thinking went through a 180-degree reversal. I realized that my life in Tokyo, which seemed so full, had in fact been impoverished, and everything that was meaningful was right here in the Inland Sea."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jan 29, 2010

Structure as natural philosophy

"Cecil Balmond is seen as being almost divine in Japan," says Shino Nomura, the curator of the latest exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.

The Climate Action Network holds an event at the venue of the U.N. climate change conferences in Dubai on Sunday to give its 'fossil' award to countries including Japan.

Feeling anxious? Wastewater, heat and Japan’s year in climate

Tokyo Healthcare University professor Takayuki Mifune explains how he is trying to re-create bonito broth from 1,300 years ago.

The quest to re-create what the Japanese ate 1,300 years ago

By Alex K.T. Martin

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