Newly published book Taizo Yamamoto: Carts, Hedges, Lions details Vancouver's urban landscape
Through intricate graphite drawings, Vancouver architect Taizo Yamamoto analyzes how seemingly mundane objects speak to the city’s omnipresent issues
SPONSORED POST BY Figure 1 Publishing
Taizo Yamamoto: Carts, Hedges, Lions.
Vancouver architect Taizo Yamamoto has just released his new book Taizo Yamamoto: Carts, Hedges, Lions, with essays by Kevin Chong, Aaron Peck, and Jackie Wong, featuring exquisitely detailed drawings which offer a “field guide” to ubiquitous but overlooked elements of Vancouver’s urban landscape.
Three series of intricate graphite drawings depict, with arresting realism, real-world examples of assembled, grown, and built objects common to distinct milieus of Vancouver: shopping carts piled high with belongings that clatter along sidewalks in the downtown core; long, high hedges that insulate single-family homes from the din of arterial traffic; and sculptural lions placed for good luck atop fenceposts in front of many homes, especially on the city’s East Side.
In creating snapshots and then laborious drawings of these objects, Yamamoto was driven by a fascination with how the recurrence of seemingly mundane items speaks to omnipresent issues of housing unaffordability, densification, and the aspirations of diasporic communities—concerns that have an uneasy relationship to celebrated narratives of Vancouver but play a prominent role in residents’ everyday lives. To this work he brings not only careful attention but an architect’s eye for structural and textural details, resulting in immersive, richly nuanced drawings.
New essays and fiction from three authors engages the work through prose: Aaron Peck, author of Jeff Wall: North & West, interprets the shopping cart drawings as an appreciation of “ephemeral architecture” and sees affinities to work by Walker Evans and Hilda and Bernd Becher. Elsewhere, a short story by Kevin Chong, Giller Prize–nominated author of The Double Life of Benson Yu, imagines the lives behind the hedges; and Jackie Wong, senior editor of the Tyee, reports on the origin, production, and symbolism of the many lions dotting the city.
The principal of Yamamoto Architecture, Yamamoto is a graduate of McGill University, interned at Peterson Architects in San Francisco, worked for Schwartz Architects in New York City. He began drawing at an early age, sketching on rolls of trace paper provided by his architect father.
Taizo Yamamoto: Carts, Hedges, Lions is now available and can be found locally in stores. Visit Figure 1 Publishing for more details.
Post sponsored by Figure 1 Publishing.