April 14, 2021
Haruka Iwami (at the time of the award: 2nd-year master's student, Graduate School of Media and Governance) from the Shohei Matsukawa Laboratory, led by an associate professor at the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, received the Akiko Okabe Juror's Award at the TOKYO ARCHITECTURE COLLECTION 2021 [National Master's Thesis Exhibition].
The TOKYO ARCHITECTURE COLLECTION holds an annual nationwide exhibition and public review session featuring master's design projects and theses by graduate students majoring in architecture. It began in 2007 and is now in its 15th year. Master's design projects and theses are solicited from across the country, and about 10 of each that pass the initial screening are exhibited at Daikanyama Hillside Terrace.
Iwami's master's thesis, "A Study of Dry-Process Concrete Using Recycled Crushed Stone," was selected for the Akiko Okabe Juror's Award. Focusing on the difficulty of dismantling reinforced concrete, this is an attempt to create concrete that can be dismantled and reconstructed by joining wire and concrete waste using a dry process.
Comment from the Award Winner, Haruka Iwami (2nd-year master's student, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
The T
OKYO ARCHITECTURE COLLECTION was a dream stage for me, a place where research from graduate students studying architecture across the country comes together. Every year, the works and theses that pass the initial screening are compiled into a book and published. I remember reading this book as an undergraduate and being overwhelmed by the passion poured into the culmination of six years of study.
My research focuses on the gap between the speed of concrete's creation and decomposition, and it is an attempt to create something like concrete that can be dismantled and reconstructed using concrete waste. Specifically, I proposed a method of weaving wire to create a cage and filling it with concrete waste pebbles, allowing one to freely create intended shapes from unwanted pebbles and easily break them down.
What was memorable at the review session was when one of the jurors,
Akiko Okabe, said, "I thought, 'I want this.'" Her opinion was that since excess concrete from foundation work is difficult to dispose of, it would be convenient and desirable to have a method to freely create shapes with it that can also be easily dismantled. For me, who started this research from a large-scale perspective of the global circulation of concrete, this was a somewhat surprising opinion. I was very happy at that moment to realize with a sense of reality that events happening to individuals are connected to what is happening on a global scale.
Not just at the TOKYO ARCHITECTURE COLLECTION, but at many review sessions for architectural works and research, the jurors are different each time. If the jurors are different, the judging criteria change, and naturally, the evaluations change as well. You could say it's a matter of chance, but I believe what's important is the reason why a single person made such a judgment. Why was a particular work or piece of research praised, or why wasn't it? This became an opportunity for me to realize once again that by understanding this, the outline of what I have been working on gradually comes into view.
Published by: General Affairs Section, Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) Office