On Saturday, November 14th, Mazzocchioo.Talks #12 will take place at 4:30 PM, at the Auditorium Hall of the National Museum of Romanian Art, featuring lectures by Japanese architects Go Hasegawa and Junya Ishigami.

GO HASEGAWA approaches architecture through the subtle relationships between space, material, light, and everyday life. His buildings often begin with familiar architectural elements—a roof, a wall, a courtyard, a structure—and transform them through unexpected proportions, openings, or relationships between inside and outside.

Since founding his Tokyo-based practice in 2005, Hasegawa has developed an architecture that is both precise and open-ended. His projects are less concerned with producing a particular architectural image than with creating conditions for different forms of life to unfold. Scale, atmosphere, material, and the surrounding environment become active parts of the architecture.

Teaching has been an important part of Hasegawa’s practice. He has taught at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and has been a Visiting Professor at the Academy of Architecture of Mendrisio, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, UCLA, Harvard GSD, and Princeton. His long-standing engagement with architectural education runs parallel to a practice shaped by an interest in how architecture is experienced, discussed, and transmitted.

JUNYA ISHIGAMI works at the point where architecture begins to dissolve into landscape, structure, and nature. His projects question some of the basic assumptions of building: where a building begins and ends, what constitutes a room, how a structure can occupy a landscape, or how architecture might respond to phenomena that are usually considered outside its control.

After working with Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, Ishigami established his own practice in Tokyo in 2004. His work moves between architecture, landscape, and installation, from the KAIT Plaza and the Serpentine Pavilion to the Water Garden, Park Groot Vijversburg Visitor Center, and Zaishui Art Museum. Across very different scales, there is a recurring interest in creating spaces that feel unusually light, continuous, and open to their surroundings.

Ishigami’s architecture often begins with a radical rethinking of familiar relationships: between structure and gravity, building and ground, interior and exterior, or architecture and the natural world. Rather than separating these conditions, his projects tend to bring them together, producing environments in which architecture can become difficult to distinguish from landscape.

Hasegawa and Ishigami belong to the same generation of Japanese architects and emerged from a context profoundly shaped by the work of figures such as Kazuyo Sejima and SANAA. Yet their practices have developed in markedly different directions. Where Hasegawa often starts from the scale of everyday life and from the architectural elements that organize it, Ishigami pushes architecture towards landscape, atmosphere, and a more radical ambiguity of form.

Their encounter offers an opportunity to look at two distinct positions within contemporary Japanese architecture—and at the questions that connect them: how can architecture create space for life without prescribing too strictly how that life should unfold? How can buildings become environments rather than objects, and how might structure, landscape, material, and atmosphere participate in the same architectural idea?

Mazzocchioo examines architecture at the crossroads of academia and practice, collecting precise and meaningful cultural fragments from its history and ongoing production through texts, drawings, and conferences.

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The Mazzocchioo.Talks concept envisions each conference as having its own character. Structured around two guests, each edition develops a distinct theme emerging from the intersection of their paths. Every conference, held in autumn, is accompanied by a small publication featuring interviews.