Junko Yamamoto, a founding principal of iVY based in Pawtucket, RI, is a licensed architect in Japan and the US. She holds an architecture diploma with honorary standing from Kyoto Architectural College, a BArch degree with distinction from the Boston Architectural College and an MArch II degree from Harvard Graduate School of Design.
She has been practicing since 2005, playing a key role in the design and construction of numerous projects, including those for MIT and Harvard University campuses and commercial buildings in New England, while undertaking independent commissions from custom furniture and exhibition design to residential projects in the US and Japan. Her architecture firm, iVY, was invited to the European Cultural Center Venice Architecture Biennale in 2020.
In parallel with her professional design practice, Yamamoto works as an artist. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally in various juried exhibitions, including the recent Nakanojo Biennale International Contemporary Art Exhibition Japan, and featured in publications, including ArchDaily, CICA Museum Yellow Book, architecturephoto.net, BAC Journal and BAC Practice Magazine. Expanding her practice in art and architecture, she served as a chair of the Global Practice Network at the Boston Society for Architecture and also teaches at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Roger Williams University and Boston Architectural College.
The second core studio addresses the agency of the building to simultaneously construct new spatial, social, and material orders in the context of the contemporary city. The second core studio situates architecture as the strategic interplay of spatial and constructive concepts towards specific aesthetic, social, and performative ends. The studio seeks to create a productive friction between abstract orders (form, pattern, organization), technical systems (structure, envelope), and the contingencies of real-world conditions (site, climate, politics). The studio asks students to link disciplinary methods to extra-disciplinary issues, with concentrated forays into the realms of structure, material, and critical preservation. Students iteratively develop architectural concepts, ethical positions, and experimental working methods through a series of focused architectural design projects with increasing degrees of complexity, culminating in the design of a mid-scale public building in an urban context.
Students are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.
