Little Tokyo Design Week: Future City celebrates the power of cutting edge design and technology now emerging from Japan and its intersection with current trends materializing in Los Angeles. Design’s ability to move us towards a more sustainable and creative urban lifestyle is at the heart of this five-day festival, which will include exhibitions, symposiums, film screenings, and designer installations.

@JANM: Wednesday, July 13 – Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Ultra Expo is a primary component of Little Tokyo Design Week: Future City, a multi-institutional event that will include artists, designers, architects and other contemporary Japanese cultural protagonists. Curated by Sylvia Lavin, Chair of the Ph.D. in Architecture program and Professor of Architectural History and Theory at UCLA, Ultra Expo will explore aspects of the Osaka Exposition of 1970, the first world exposition to be held in Japan. One of the best attended expos in history, it did not so much expose Japanese culture to the rest of the world as stage a veritable implosion of East and West, high art and popular culture as well as new technology and traditional ways of life. As did the 1970 event, Ultra Expo will seek to go beyond conventional exhibition formats to create an unorthodox way of displaying historic material, emphasizing its contemporary currency rather than nostalgic exactitude. Of particular emphasis in the exhibition installation will be the use of film, video, and photography to produce anew the no longer extant atmospheres of this once exemplary architecture of the future.