An Affirmation of Life

The Architecture of Moriyama

The Japanese-Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama is the creator of major, outstandingly individual buildings. An Affirmation of Life takes us into the serene, sweeping spaces of his administrative center in Ontario, and, most dramatically, into the Science North Center at Sudbury - a building structured like a snowflake spanning a huge cleft in the bedrock. The cliff faces and natural features are fully incorporated into the modern construction, and local miners were employed to create the underground passages and chambers that are a part of the scheme. The program also looks at the architect's design for a public monument, the ceremonial bell presented in gratitude to the people of Ontario by its Japanese community. Moriyama himself talks about his projects in a manner deceptively, though engagingly, direct and simple; in the past he has won a contract in competition with other architects by presenting no plans or specifications but simply arriving in person to tell the clients of his vision for their building. But clients and colleagues of Moriyama speak in this film of the depths hidden within this seemingly very modern man, like the deep cleft beneath his Sudbury building. He has spent time in India, absorbing Zen Buddhist principles, and is overridingly concerned with our relationship with nature, with ecology and the holistic integration of human life with the greater universe around us.

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.