KEIO ARCHITECTURE

INTERNATIONAL, INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AND DESIGN LABORATORY FOR URBAN ARCHITECTURE

–
SANO LAB is an Architecture and Urban Design Laboratory at Keio Architecture / Keio University, Tokyo, based in the Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Systems Design Engineering, also known as co+labo Urban Architecture.

co+labo was established by Darko Radović in 2009, continuing efforts of Kuma Kengo, 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.

Sano Satoshi joined co+labo and co-founded Eureka – an architectural design office based in Tokyo in 2009, after working at Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Kengo Kuma & Associates. Eureka’s major architectural works include Dragon Court Village (2013), Around the Corner Grain (2015) and Nagasaki Job Port (2018). Since 2022, co+labo is led by Sano as co+labo Urban Architecture.

Our 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.

Sano and the co+labo members explore critical and creative capacity of cultural otherness, and 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 truly exciting.

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, thus bringing, in a single sentence, many of the key-words which define the aims of our laboratory. 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.