KEIO ARCHITECTURE

co+labo radović (2009-2021) is an Architecture and Urban Design Laboratory at Keio University, Tokyo, based in the Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Systems Design Engineering. co+labo is the name of Laboratory Radović, among the Japanese students also known as Rado-ken (ラド研). The laboratory was established Professor Darko Radović in 2009, continuing efforts of Kengo Kuma, one of the founding architecture professors at Keio, and expanding the curriculum towards inclusion of urban scales and critical research, design-research projects and a strong PhD programme. co+labo practices are based on the principles of environmental and cultural responsibility. We believe that “the quality and the character of everyday life, together with spatial expressions of ordinary activities are going to be the measure of success or failure on the road towards sustainable development.”¹

Darko and his students explore critical and creative capacity of cultural otherness. As a truly cross-cultural environment with a rare stranger in Japan, the proverbial gaijin, 外人 at its helm, co+labo opens difficult questions related to the topics such as cultural and disciplinary diversity, boundaries, territories, exclusion and inclusion. An overarching aim of that approach is to think and reach beyond the simplicity of technical know-how, and to enter the sphere of critical thinking based on environmental and cultural ethics. That makes co+labo itself a live educational and research project, and some of our projects trult exciting.

co+labo prides itself with its international constituency, averaging 16-25 students. A strong PhD co+labo and Post-Doctoral group operates at the top of a standard Japanese laboratory structure, with international projects conducted in Japan and through the regular overseas workshops programme.

The name co+labo points at three main dimensions of our operation: co, as in “collaboration” (we work closely with a number of individuals and institutions in Japan and worldwide with whom we share interest and passion for environmentally and culturally responsible architectural and urban design), labo as in “laboratory” (basic cell of Japanese tertiary education, with an ethos of the perpetual workshop where ideas get translated into action), and, most importantly, the +, a red, binding symbol from our logo which signifies the core values bringing us together.

Henry Lefebvre, one of the foundational thinkers behind the ethos and praxis of co+labo, wrote about “the dignity of bearing the + sign, that of joy, happiness, enjoyment, of sensuality – the sign of life“², thus bringing, in a single sentence, many of the key-words which define the aims of our laboratory. When designing our logo, co+labo co-founder Vuk Radović added another, all-important nuance – the colour of life. As throughout the Lefebvre’s own theory of space, for co+labo, “architectural practices are to be conceptualized as transversal, that is to say cutting across ontological categories and contributing to all phases of research, programming, designing, construction, and the continuous appropriation of buildings.”³

co+labo focuses on the ways of thinking, making and living (urban and architectural) space across scales, environmentally and culturally responsible planning and design capable to support rich and humane life.

¹ Radović, Darko, “The greatness of small”, in FUTURE–ASIAN-SPACE: Projecting the urban space of new East Asia (eds. Hee, Viray, Boontharm), pp. 159-170, Singapore: NUS Press (2012)

² Stanek, Łukasz, “Introduction”, Minneapolis Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, University of Minnesota Press, 2014 (p. lix)

³ Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014 (p. 30)