Documenting and Staging Alternative Urban Living: Miyamoto Ryūji’s Cardboard Houses and its Materiality

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Japanese photographer Miyamoto Ryūji (b. 1947) and his Cardboard Houses series (photographed between 1983 and 1996, and published collectively in 2003), examining how this body of work documents and presents an alternative form of human dwelling amid a rapidly changing urban landscape. It argues that the series illuminates possibilities for alternative ways of living that emerge in the interstices of urban space and underscores the cyclical nature of the city itself. By staging meticulously details of these houses and employing specific installation methods, Cardboard Houses invites viewers to reflect on the materiality and spatial experience of photography, as well as the impermanence of the subject matter. Situating the series within both Miyamoto’s broader oeuvre—which consistently pursues and captures the transience of architecture and the city—and a wider body of postwar Japanese works that express an enthusiasm for small-scale urban structures, this paper demonstrates how the series constitutes an aesthetically inflected and critical documentary of human dwelling, one that actively engages with the material conditions of the urban environment.

Cover Image: Kawamata Tadashi, People’s Garden, 1992 Courtesy of MISA SHIN GALLERY