Architecture Before Architecture: Models, Placemaking, and the Making of Urban Life
Name of Event/Lecture
Architecture Before Architecture: Models, Placemaking, and the Making of Urban Life
Name of Speaker
Osamu Nishida
Location
SDE4 Level 5 Forum
You are cordially invited to attend the lecture event by Osamu Nishida:
Architecture Before Architecture
Models, Placemaking, and the Making of Urban Life
Date and Time: 10 Spetember 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Location: SDE 4, Level 5 Forum
BOA-SIA CPD Points: TBC
Registration: https://bit.ly/nusdoa_Osamu
Does architecture begin with the design of a building?
Before architecture takes form, many possibilities remain invisible: the distances between people, the ways places are used, their relationships with the surrounding context, and the activities that may emerge. Through models, dialogue, and observation, we explore architecture by discovering these relationships and gently shifting them.
This lecture traces our practice from models to buildings, placemaking, and the city. It considers how small interventions, everyday activities, and relationships between people and places can gradually shape architecture and urban life. Rather than focusing only on form, it asks how architects might engage with the conditions and relationships that already exist.
Architecture Before Architecture is a way of looking at what exists before architecture takes form—and asking how architecture might begin from there.
Osamu Nishida
Principal, OnDesign Partners / Associate Professor, Tokyo University of Science
Osamu Nishida is an architect and principal of OnDesign Partners, based in Yokohama, and Associate Professor at Tokyo University of Science. Through a dialogue-based design approach, his practice explores open and inclusive forms of architecture and public space that encourage people to interact and participate. His work focuses on creating places where people gather and new relationships emerge within architecture and the city. Major works include Yokohama Apartment(JIA Young Architect Award; Special Mention, Venice Architecture Biennale), Enoshima Yacht House (Architectural Institute of Japan Award), and International Student Dormitory as a Small Town (Gold Award, KUKAN Design Award 2020).