Interview by Patrick Loo & Sarosh Mulla
Held at the University of Auckland
19th May 2010

In times such as these it is interesting to look back on how practitioners have survived difficult times in the past. When Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein moved to Tokyo shortly after finishing their studies at the Royal College of Art in London, the economy seemed to be soaring and Japan was seen as the epicenter of that growth.  Shortly after their immigration to Tokyo the bubble burst.

Then, like now, many young practitioners found themselves in a difficult situation. However, Klein and Dytham not only survived that depression but formed a practice which is noted for its resourcefulness, humour and marketing skill. Founders of both Super Deluxe and Pecha Kucha, the pair have reached beyond the often insular architectural community to become a lightning rod for talent.

Far from being just lucky, Klein Dytham has shown the particular skill of being able to extract the most from whatever opportunity is presented to them.

Mark Dytham discussed culture, practice and humor with us on a recent visit to Auckland¹

When you decided to travel to Japan, what outside of architecture in Japan was drawing you?

Well the key thing about going to Japan was first of all it was the furthest place away from the UK. It was about the fact that there were no planners there, visual planners. And the fact that you could build anything it looked like from the magazines. I’m a modernist and I wanted to see pure temple architecture or where I think modernism sort of came from, so it was to see the bubble architecture but also the pure, pure base for all things. At that point I was an architectural geek in that sense, but because Astrid studied interiors and we went together, she wanted to go for Shiro Kuramata who did all the stores for Issey Miyake and so there was an interior thing going on there as well.

When you arrived in Japan, how did you find the other young architects in Japan by comparison?

We were ahead of the curve, I can remember that.

Were they more structured?

We met Ito not by chance, but we met about 10 architects we wanted to work for and Ito gave us a job, our own project in his office that we ran under our own name and we could already do that, whereas for architects in Japan, you work for somebody for eight years as an apprentice before you’re allowed out on your own. So for us to come out of college, arrive and work on our own projects was quite different I think. I’m not saying we were better, we were just different and we had the get up and go to do that and that’s changing now, young kids are coming out of college and working for a couple of years and then doing projects. So the age of anyone establishing an office has really, really dropped in Japan in 20 years, which is quite different.

Is that due to their education changing or their confidence?

I think it was to do with the economy that people couldn’t get work so they set up on their own or they found themselves in a more unstable position. When you’re in a bubble and everybody is fully employed there’s very little growth or innovation in any way, because everybody is too busy and then the whole thing collapses and the big companies don’t want any more staff but the talent is still being produced and then it comes up like shoots. It will come up in all sorts of different ways. So that’s why recessions are pretty good, they’re most interesting things.

How did you survive those years as a new practice?

Yes that was tough, I did an earner in Hong Kong, stuff that’s not really published and then in ’94 we worked on Tokyo Expo, and we were doing 15 buildings with Ito and Sejima and that was going to be our big debut onto the world stage and then it all got cancelled because of the Kobe earthquake, there was a Sarin gas poisoning and the economy was down. We did about 150 drawings, it was on site and the mayor of Tokyo decides he’s going to cancel it, so it got cancelled 18 months before it was going to open. It would be like them cancelling Shanghai just before, so that was a big blow but we were insulated because we’d seen Zaha not build anything and Peter Cook not build anything to that point. It was just normal, that’s how architects worked, nobody saw it built, so it felt okay.

So you were given some grit by seeing that.

Yeah it was just normal but we got some drawings, got foundations in the ground, that’s more than they got. And that led to ’96 when our first building got built, so that’s when it kind of started I’d say on our own.

I’ve read that you put down some of your creative insight into Japan, or into Tokyo in particular, as coming from your foreign-ness or kind of detachment from being born in Tokyo, do you see yourself as Japanese now after 22 years.

No I don’t think so. I wouldn’t be British if I went back either. It’s just interesting going to Sydney to see the Biennale and talking to David Elliot who’s the artistic director there about the notion of the whole Biennale, it’s the beauty of this distance, it’s being able to see your work from outside your skin. It’s trying to get outside your body and see things from a different perspective. The beauty of displacement allows you to do so. We’re displaced in a different culture so you can see that culture in a different way. That’s why we don’t do things that Japanese people do because they can’t see what we see and likewise they see Japan in a completely different way. I see London in a different way when I go back now too, so leave the cab door open because it doesn’t have the automatic closer on it and why are the subway tickets really large or why the chimneys or why the clouds are puffy and flat grained. So we say that we’re a Tokyo office and not a Japanese office and not a European or British office. We’re based in Tokyo, we live and work in Tokyo and are inspired by Tokyo, which is very different to being a Japanese inspired office. We don’t do Kendo or Judo or any of those semi-religious Zen-esque things that most German people come to Japan to do.

Did moving to Japan change the way you actually view what constitutes culture?

I guess so because you know the whole gross national product, there’s a writer that was talking about Japanese manga and made culture so it did make me think that those types of things are culture whereas I hadn’t understood that maybe living in the west, that cartoon manga could be a really big part of someone’s life or could be mainstream contemporary culture. To understand that contemporary living can be seen as a culture.

For me to go to Japan would be a massive scale shift. Is that how you felt going from Britain to Japan, like an amplification?

I never thought about it like that. I think because the Tokyo we touch is kind of smaller because we don’t necessarily read and write and interact with all of it so we live in a quite tight circle and we even do in the architectural world too. We live in the Ito biosphere and that doesn’t mean we can go to Isozaki’s parties, you know there’s quite a clear defined social group, so your worlds are not massive but you’re in a massive place. So culturally we’re kept in like, to some extent, the foreigner biosphere which is linked to an Ito biosphere and I think that’s why many people belong to clubs and their fashion is an affinity to bring, maybe that’s what’s going on that they’re using that to reduce the scale of the city. So I think that maybe one reason that people search for kind of a club or a connection to keep it small. I’ve only just thought of that. I’m not sure if that’s right or wrong. I don’t know. Good question.

 

“We live in the Ito biosphere and that doesn’t mean we can go to Isozaki’s parties, you know there’s quite a clear defined social group, so your worlds are not massive but you’re in a massive place.”

 

Well I guess while we’re on the topic of kind of relationships, how do you see the role of marketing within architecture? Specifically in context is SuperDeluxe.

Yeah I guess that again I think SuperDeluxe² was, or Deluxe as it was to start with, was to do with not having the Royal College of Art on the doorstep or we were trying to build a mini Royal College.

And then that’s how that started. So we made a collective and I think having the events there once or twice a month was about building a network, of friends, acquaintances, artists which would help build our network for the office so we’re not born in Japan, we don’t have, our parents are not famous, rich or influential. How do you build that through so it was a conscious subconscious tool for building a network in Japan fairly quickly, artistically and also a place that we could entertain because you can’t entertain at home, so all entertaining is done out of your home. You can’t invite people around because you live in a small apartment so it was all a part of

The ultimate club house?

Yeah it was our front room is what deluxe really became. Pecha Kucha¹ was only when we set up the new space SuperDeluxe and we didn’t have enough events and that’s really the reason we set it up because we were still in the red. It was a marketing tool, yeah it was definitely a marketing tool because we always showed at the end, we showed our work every night so it was a marketing tool at that level. We never thought that it would become a thing that went round the world.

It’s a balance and so of course we want people to know we’ve done it but we’ve also got to keep the distance from it. It’s lucky that we do fairly good work because we can’t be seen surfing on other people’s coat tails. But there’s also a casualness to it we want to keep and that’s why our website hasn’t been updated recently but we’re not too worried about that because it gives a more relaxed approachable feel to it. That’s an excuse, because we haven’t updated it.

Playfulness is present in lots of your projects, is that a thoughtful decision to make the work light hearted?

We want to do things we enjoy, things that other people enjoy and make a smile on the face and people remember those types of things. You don’t remember bad experiences, you want to remember good things.

Do you think that’s the way to engage the public? Or a wider public?

Well it’s one way and I think we have to use many, many tools to engage the public, whether it’s the tallest, thinnest, but I think no-one is engaging the public in that way at all. But when you look through a magazine, if you look at an advert on TV, half of them are humorous so there must be something there about attracting people’s attention and to keep delivering a message. So we think humour and twist, as opposed to jokes. Most people are very afraid to use colour in any way, shape or form. They’re all tools that we want to bring to the table.

Would you say that you’re looking for opportunity?

Well you’re always trying to, we see around us, every building we look at is a lost opportunity in Japan, 90% of the architecture in Japan is built by construction companies, not by architects and they’re very well done but every time it’s a missed opportunity. We could have done something better, something more interesting, something more colourful, something that engages it to the correct scale. We’re trying to make something out of the tiny little grains of whatever we’re given. I think that there’s not enough of that, people not trying to hustle a living and this is all about trying to do more than you’re asked to do.

1. Mark Dytham visited as a speaker for the Communiqué lecture series held at the University of Auckland, 19th May 2010, Engineering Lecture Theatre.
   His talk was titled “My Design Life” where he presented an overview of recent KDa projects. [↩]

2. • SuperDeluxe is …
   • a place of experimentation.
   • a noisy thing
   • an intimate ballroom with wholesome food.
   • a network of all sorts.
   • a place to enjoy.
   • a place to enjoy others

   [↩]

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In times such as these it is interesting to look back on how practitioners have survived difficult times in the past. When Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein moved to Tokyo shortly after finishing their studies at the Royal College of Art in London, the economy seemed to be soaring and Japan was seen as the epicenter of that growth. Shortly after their immigration to Tokyo the bubble burst.

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