Israel Kandarian is a master's thesis student in the graduate program at the School of Architecture at Princeton University. He has recently been awarded the Howard Crosby Butler Traveling Fellowship based on his proposal to research both prêt-a-porter Japanese fashion design and the Harajuku and Shibuya shopping and housing districts. This area of Tokyo came to life during the 1964 Olympiad as the Kenzo Tange-designed gymnasiums and surrounding village focused the eyes of the world towards this once sleepy residential suburb of Aoyama.

Harajuku and Shibuya are virtual sites, or case studies, working towards a longer term project focussed on the Lower East Side, Nolita, and the East Village in New York City. This work similarly follows the transient and chronomorphically adjusting landscape of emergent city centers alongside the development of the notion that there can exist an activist's reconsideration of the custom made and the mass-produced.