"Make Do With Now" highlights a new generation of architects and urban practitioners in Japan. This generation, which largely entered the profession after the Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, is developing a range of critical, ecological, and social approaches that creatively "make do" with limited resources, available materials, and existing spaces, while also seeking appropriate responses to the urgent challenges of the present. Moving away from the traditional image of the architect as an author, these architects articulate a new agency: they work from the periphery, exploit gaps in the system, and take on new roles in the process that have previously been ignored. Through newly commissioned photographs, films, and models, the exhibition provides a professional and social portrait of this generation of architects and presents options for action regarding what architecture can – and should – be and do.

Yuma Shinohara is the curator of the exhibition "Make Do With Now." After studying at Columbia University in New York and working at various institutions, including the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the CCA Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and the Academy of Arts in Berlin, he has been working as a curator at the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel since 2021.

The guest lecture is part of the course Building Theory and Cultural Action in the Building Theory module, where we examine the productive interactions between curating, collecting, and exhibiting and the production of architecture. How can the design and development of exhibitions be understood as research in architecture? What role do exhibitions play as conceptual and spatial testing grounds for articulating architectural positions?

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