Live from the stage/my workspace
KANBAYASHI Design Studios
Starting my college education in an obscure field, Ceramic/Glass Engineering Material Science, at a focused but lesser known school, Alfred University, exposed me to a world of scientific magic. There we developed an understanding of high physics that challenged the edges of our usual logic, creating materials that seemed to have supernatural qualities, like structuring molecules of a ceramic to only take heat as hot as the sun and not give it back. Thus it could be glowing red hot but could be picked up with the bare hand, confounding intuition.
Though I switched my major to Architecture at the School of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, the alchemical lessons from Alfred University burned deep into my memory and sensibility. I found in Architecture a rewarding balancing act between logic, science, structure and organization that also required other qualities like context, history, feeling, emotiveness, spirit, and intuition to bring forth a project. Architecture requires a multitude of considerations in parallel to implement, only more so as a business product. It doesn't quite have the uncompromised ease and freedom that one feels producing Art. These two disciplines were equally important to me and yet tough to mediate into one process.
Kanbayashi Design Studios was created in 2001 in San Francisco as a multiple disciplinary business with a focus on Environments and Artifacts. We have designed many full blown architecture projects, but our approach has always placed fabrication and material exploration at center stage, thus we don't identify as an architecture studio. Too often the process of architecture detaches the designers of space from the tangible qualities of the implementation on the ground, and opportunities that emerge from every site with intuition, observation, and communication with the builders. In practice we have played the parts of engineer, inventor, artist, architect, entrepreneur, developer, project manager, site supervisor, art director, production designer, graphic designer, welder, carpenter, client rep, curator..........producing 3d CAD models, lighting , bars, restaurants, homes, furniture, fountains, sculptures, art installations, inventing processes, patinas, painting techniques, distressing, refining, editing