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Universe of Words
von • by Emmanuelle Moureaux

www.emmanuelle.jp

Last summer, the popular Japanese soft drink Calpis cele-

brated its 100th anniversary. On the occasion of this cente-

nary, French-born architect Emmanuelle Moureaux, who

lives in Tokyo, designed one of her colourful installations.

Universe of Words was exhibited in the premises of the well-

known 3331 art gallery in Tokyo. For the design, Moureaux

drew inspiration from the tradition of the Tanabata Festival,

which is celebrated every year on the 7th of July. On this day,

the Japanese articulate their hopes, dreams and desires for

the future and write them down on coloured strips of paper,

which they then attach to a bamboo branch. This is sup-

posed to bring good luck and, of course, the fulfilment of all

the wishes put down on paper. Moureaux has now reinter-

preted this tradition and transferred the idea of Tanabata

into a spatial installation of floating "characters". She chose

the simplest of the three Japanese lettering system: Hira-

gana, a syllabary consisting of 46 different base characters

that Japanese children learn first. Universe of Words con-

sisted of a total of 140,000 hiraganas arranged in a regular,

three-dimensional grid. Visitors could move through the in-

stallation along paths that were kept clear – accompanied by
the feeling of infinity, because the installation apparently

had no beginning and no end, and surrounded by an impres-

sive silence that resulted from the installation's sound-ab-

sorbing structure. The installation was visually loosened up

by the architect's special colour concept comprising exactly

100 shades, which had already been used in her work on a

wide variety of scales in the past.