Japan: Architecture, Constructions, Ambiances 9783955531676

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in ∂

Japan Architecture Constructions Ambiances

Christian Schittich (Ed.)

Birkhäuser Edition Detail

in ∂ Japan

in ∂

Japan Architecture, Constructions, Ambiances

Christian Schittich (Ed.)

Edition Detail – Institut für internationale Architektur-Dokumentation GmbH & Co. KG München Birkhäuser – Publishers for Architecture Basel · Boston · Berlin

Editor: Christian Schittich Co-Editor: Andrea Wiegelmann Editorial Services: Thomas Madlener Translation German/English: Ingrid Taylor (pp. 8–31), Robin Benson (pp. 32–55), Peter Green (pp. 56–169), Michael Robinson (pp. 170–175)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at . * 2002 Institut für internationale Architektur-Dokumentation GmbH, P.O. Box 33 06 60, D-80066 München und Birkhäuser – Publishers for Architecture, P.O. Box 133, CH-4010 Basel This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in data banks. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp (TCF •).

DTP: Peter Gensmantel, Andrea Linke, Cornelia Kohn, Roswitha Siegler Printed in Germany Reproduktion: Karl Dörfel Reproduktions-GmbH, München Druck und Bindung: Kösel GmbH & Co. KG, Kempten

ISBN 3-7643-6757-1 987654321

Contents

Japan – a Land of Contradictions? Christian Schittich Architecture and Aesthetic of an Island People Günter Nitschke

8

14

House near Yamanakako Shigeru Ban Architects, Tokyo

108

House in Kyoto Jun Tamaki/Tamaki Architectural Atelier, Kyoto

110

Housing Development in Tokyo Akira Watanabe Architect & Associates, Tokyo

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Japan’s Modern Architecture – from the Beginnings to the Present Christian Schittich and Andrea Wiegelmann

32

Geographical Location of Projects

56

House in Suzaku Waro Kishi + K. Associates, Kyoto

Botanical Museum near Kochi Naito Architect & Associates, Tokyo

58

House in Hokusetsu Toshihito Yokouchi Architect and Associates, Kyoto 122

Day-Care Centre for Children in Odate Shigeru Ban Architects, Tokyo

62

Art House on Naoshima Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Osaka

126

House in Kobe Toshiaki Kawai/Kawai Architects, Kyoto

66

Stone Museum in Nasu Kengo Kuma & Associates, Tokyo

130

House in Sakurajosui Toyo Ito & Associates, Tokyo

70

Sunday School in Ibaraki Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Osaka

134

Furniture Store in Tokyo Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, Tokyo

74

Gallery and Guest House in Temple Grounds in Kyoto Takashi Yamaguchi & Associates, Osaka 142

House in Tokyo Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, Tokyo

78

Mediatheque in Sendai Toyo Ito & Associates, Tokyo

148

House in Nagoya Amorphe Takeyama & Associates, Kyoto

82

University in Saitama Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop, Yokohama

160

House in Mineyama FOBA, Kyoto

86

Sports Stadium near Sendai Atelier Hitoshi Abe, Sendai with Syouichi Haryu Architect and Associates, Sendai

166

Architects Authors Illustration credits

170 175 176

House in Hadano Tezuka Architects, Tokyo

90

Weekend House in Karuizawa Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo

94

House and Studio in Kobe Go Yoshimoto Architecture & Associates, Hyogo

98

House and Studio in Tokyo Naito Architect & Associates, Tokyo

104

Japan – a Land of Contradictions? Christian Schittich

Followers of contemporary architecture in Japan are fascinated by its uncompromising concepts. Nowhere else do we see innovative solutions so radically implemented, such tiny ground plans or uninhibited experimentation; and nowhere else are structures pared down so rigorously to the barest of essentials. Avantgarde architecture in this island nation is rich and diverse. It encompasses both Toyo Ito’s media architecture and the minimalist approach of Kazuyo Sejima, as well as the unconditional spatial and structural experiments of Shigeru Ban. Also under this umbrella is the sensory exploration of material as demonstrated by Kengo Kuma, and the quiet, meditative spaces of Tadao Ando. It was Tadao Ando, resolutely starting to tread his own path around 25 years ago, unswayed by the predominant fashions, who became the first Japanese architect to exercise a significant influence on architecture worldwide. In the last ten years contemporary Japanese architecture has enjoyed its highest ever international acclaim. Today a number of its practitioners are leading innovators in the world of architecture. Yet Japan’s architecture has always been slightly different to the international mainstream, as tradition is an ever-present component in this country. On the other hand Japan has traditionally demonstrated great openness to influences from outside. Just as in the past the Japanese adopted many aspects from the culture of China, often refining them in the process (Buddhism, for example, and temple-building techniques, the art of writing and the tea ceremony), and, after the Second World War, from the culture of Europe and America, in the shape of cameras, cars and electrical goods, so, too, they have also willingly accepted and assimilated architectural influences from outside. A land of contradictions? At first the Western observer in Japan is struck by contradictory impressions: aesthetically arranged food, a love of perfection in packaging and the tea ceremony on the one hand, set against the chaos of the cities, the teeming millions in the metropolises and the legendary discipline of the population. But deeper understanding does not come from judging the country, or its architecture, on the basis of our own criteria for evaluation: The entirely different circumstances and culture in Japan require a different approach, a different interpretation. Even though the outward appearance of Japanese architecture may look familiar, he who judges it with the standards of the

West is in danger of overvaluing the aesthetic aspects and thereby literally only scratching the surface. Specific values from Japanese culture still play a large part in its architecture, while principles familiar to us have little weight. This is true also of the dogmas of the modern movement and functionalism (even though, very early on, the modern movement had great influence on architecture in Japan) which in our part of the world are still a key criterion, albeit one that is increasingly called into question: In the Far East, by contrast, these dogmas have little validity as a theoretical guideline. Generally the Japanese take a very sceptical view of dogma. Even their religions – Shintoism and Buddhism – have a more practical orientation, and show great tolerance for other beliefs. Without an appreciation of traditional Japanese values, the Japanese relationship to simplicity and understanding of form, and how these differ from the West, there can be little real insight into today´s architecture in Japan. Again and again the key to understanding contemporary design lies in traditional values and attitudes. These explain a tendency towards contradiction and the love of all things natural or raw, and also the influence of the cyclical and the understanding of authenticity. The early tea masters, for example, with their teahouse and garden architecture, still have a strong influence on aesthetic sensibilities, and today we see all around evidence of an urge to break through the existing order, of a certain love of contradiction: straight paths in a garden are sure to have an arbitrary bend in them, and otherwise perfectly planned and built teahouses or farmhouses will have somewhere an unusually twisted beam, to break the illusion. Equally firmly anchored and now virtually proverbial is the influence of the cyclical on Japanese thought and action. The most striking example of this is perhaps the holy shrines of Ise, which since the seventh century have at regular intervals been dismantled and rebuilt in the same form, but using new wood (see pp 14 ff). In addition to illustrating constant change this example also reveals another inherent aspect (shared throughout almost all of Asia): The conceptual value of a building or an object is often more important than its historical value: the symbolic content of form and colour, and religious significance predominate over age and authentic material.

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The town Perhaps the most visible evidence of the process of constant change that underlies Japanese culture is to be found in the cities. Here, nothing is permanent. Buildings that only yesterday were highly prized, may be gone by tomorrow. Even in the past the Japanese did not build their houses for eternity – wood, as a degradable building material, required constant renewal, and the destruction regularly caused by earthquakes, fire and typhoons imposed its own imperative for rebuilding. Today this constant change is fuelled by exorbitantly high prices for land in the inner cities, so high that the actual building costs become almost incidental, thus leading to a fast turnover in property. The urban vision in the European sense has no tradition in Japan and there are no largescale public buildings designed also as prominent urban markers. In the past the little wooden house has been the most common type of building. And still today in the greater urban district of Tokyo, almost half the 30 million or so inhabitants live in small detached houses, sometimes only half a metre apart. Living space in these houses is often less than 80 square metres. The entire Moloch consists of a juxtaposition of super-densely-built urban centres with busy traffic and transport systems, in the midst of a sea of small houses: Designing small houses is still one of the central tasks of Japanese architects (see pp 32ff). What strikes the observer most in Japanese conurbations, is the amazing proliferation of buildings of different shapes and sizes. It all looks like a gigantic confusion that shocks yet also fascinates. Everything is packed so densely and in such a haphazard way that it develops its own aesthetic charm. Particularly surprising is that this chaos has its own order – the Japanese city functions. Nowhere else in the world, for example, are trains so punctual as here, and nowhere else is there a more efficient public transport network (each day more than three million people pass through Tokyo´s busiest station, Shinjuku). Chaos, as a sophisticated system of order, is already well-founded in Far Eastern philosophy. This constant change and tremendous proliferation mean that architects hardly need take account of established structures. Concepts of urban integration, context and regional planning are little developed. As a consequence each individual building project is generally treated as a single, isolated intervention, not as something that relates to the wider urban fabric. The immediate environment is in any case constantly changing, it is too chaotic and too heterogeneous to respond to. A land of unlimited possibilities? The lack of formal restraints imposed by the urban context gives architects in Japan a great deal of scope. Designers are also less hampered by the kind of regulations and technical standards that apply in Germany, for example (although Japan does have strict controls on building stability, fire protection and spacing). Yet those travelling to Tokyo or Osaka to see first-hand the kind of avantgarde architecture published in the magazines, and encountering instead a bewildering mass of diverse structures, will soon deduct that freedom has its flip side: for every outstanding building by a top architect that is beautifully photographed and presented (sometimes too often) in

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architectural magazines, there are thousands more that are at best mediocre. Given the number of buildings involved, only a very small percentage of highly committed architects really succeeds in exploiting this greater freedom. In addition to the greater design freedom architects enjoy, a relatively moderate climate and a more carefree approach to energy-consumption permit the use of more filigree constructions. Thermal insulation in roofs and facades, for example, is reduced to a minimum, and avoiding thermal bridges, a problem that so often complicates details for us in Central Europe, is not an issue. Single glazing for windows – with correspondingly thinner frames – is the rule, except in the northernmost parts of the country. Yet, single glazing and uninsulated reinforced concrete walls running from inside to outside do not necessarily mean that energy is wasted, because the Japanese accept a much wider fluctuation in temperature in their homes than people in the West. A temperature of less than 15°C in winter in the living room is not necessarily regarded as unacceptable. The Japanese respond instead, much more than we do, with their clothing, and, more than in the West, they respect the different conditions found in the different seasons. It´s quite common to find houses with no central heating but with air-conditioning systems installed on a room-by-room basis. Energy is used mostly in summer for refrigeration and air-conditioning systems. However, excessive reduction in detail (as published in the magazines) is not always acceptable, even in Japan. Some exponents of minimalism push things so far that signs of degradation begin to appear very soon after construction has been completed. The deep-rooted cycle of creation and degeneration then becomes a little too fast. Not always in Japan can one escape the impression that some buildings are designed solely with publication in mind, for that day when, brand sparkling new, they are presented to the photographers. This is understandable in the context of a country with a well-developed star cult, in a largely conforming and hierarchical society where fame signifies particularly high regard. Day-to-day work in a Japanese architectural office Building projects in Japan are handled mainly by the design departments of big building companies and architectural firms like Nikken Sekkei, some of which have over 1,000 employees. The smaller, independent architectural offices (whose projects are presented in this book) are only involved in a tiny percentage of the overall volume of building work. They are regarded to a certain extent as an exotic species, working at the forefront of design and developing new concepts. Financially things do not look good for this minority. During the 1980s, when the bubble economy was at its peak, ample funding was available for their projects. Public and private clients alike showed a surprisingly keen interest in architecture, and demand for unusual, sometimes even outlandish designs, was high. Great volumes of expensive building materials such as marble, granite and stainless steel were used, young unknown architects unexpectedly received major commissions and were able to give free rein to their imagination in the design. But when the enormous bubble burst, things rapidly returned to a more sober mood. Most of the young architects who trained during the boom years, are 11

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today fighting for survival. Instead of building big arts centres and company headquarters, they are designing mini-houses. European architects visiting the offices of their professional colleagues in Japan are often surprised at how few people work there. Tadao Ando, who is increasingly involved in large-scale projects outside Japan, and within his country has built one museum after another, manages with just 25 employees. In Toyo Ito´s office it´s much the same. In most of the other practices whose projects are presented in this book, there are only about three to ten architects. One reason for this low number could be the working conditions: a working day that often finishes around midnight is quite common in the leading Japanese practices. One other reason, of course, is that the job of designing the construction details is generally simpler, and also that the final planning and detail work is only to a certain extent in the hands of the architect. Much is left to the construction firms and the skilled trades, and these people also play a responsible part in the planning process. They see it as their job to work with the architect on site to develop sensible solutions for construction details and they do not automatically respond to changes to the specification with excessive surcharges, but take pride instead in implementing any changes to as high a standard as they can. Of course in Japanese architectural practices as in other businesses in Japan, space is tight. It´s not uncommon to find four or five people having to share an office of just twelve square metres in size. To look at, these offices differ little from the ones in the West. Typical Japanese features are the exception. At Ando´s office, accommodated of course in a fair-faced concrete building he designed, there is the customary Japanese threshold where people take off their shoes and slip into the ubiquitous, one-size plastic slippers. But architectural offices in Japan show all the usual variations: chaotic and untidy, ones with rolls of plans spilling out of every corner, and sober CAD workplaces with little paper at all in sight. Toyo Ito´s light, clear rooms seem in many areas to resemble a model-building workshop, where, on our last visit, the final polish was being given to the pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery, using lots of design and detail models. The rough charm and temporary air of Kazuyo Sejima´s office in an old workshop building could just as easily have been found in a converted factory or warehouse in New York or Berlin. Learning from Japan? Thanks to the qualities mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, contemporary architecture in Japan is enjoying great international recognition. This island nation in the Pacific is fast becoming a place of pilgrimage for architects from all over the world. Like few other international journals, DETAIL has been regularly reporting on Japanese architecture for many years. This book is based on that treasure trove of experience and on the many meetings in Japan with leading architects. The focus in this book is on a wide spectrum of building types, and in choosing the selection the emphasis was firmly on variety. Our goal was to properly represent the tremendous breadth of quality architecture in Japan today, in terms of concept, material and construction. As already mentioned

12

Japanese architecture can be little understood without a knowledge of the nation´s culture and history, an area which Günther Nitschke illuminates in an introductory essay on the philosophical and aesthetic foundations of traditional Japanese architecture. A second essay goes on to examine more recent architectural history and current trends. A separate chapter is devoted to the small residential house, because of its continued importance and the many innovative ideas that are emerging in this area. One thing to remark about the detail drawings we publish here, is that they cannot simply be transferred to other cultures and climates. Nevertheless they still give valuable inspiration. In Central Europe in particular (where in many areas technical standards are all too regimented) the carefree and uncomplicated approach of architects in Japan gives food for thought. The same is true of the unconventional spatial concepts of Japanese architects and their ground plans designed for the smallest of spaces, the many different ways of handling intermediate spaces and the attention paid to transitions between outside and inside. Japanese architecture is often just a touch more simple, more uninhibited and more direct …

1.6

Illustrations: 1.1 House in Setagaya, Tokyo, Toyo Ito 1999 1.2 Aura House, Tokyo, FOBA 1996 1.3 Municipal Museum Yatsushiro, Toyo Ito 1994 1.4 Tadao Ando in his office in Osaka 1.5 Office of Fumihiko Maki in Tokio 1.6 Residential house near Tokyo, Shigeru Ban 2000

13

Architecture and Aesthetic of an Island People Günter Nitschke

miyabi, Courtly Elegance yugen, Mysterious Depth wabi, Rustic Simplicity sakui, Individual Creativity

The myth of the princess of the flowering trees and the princess of the eternal rock In the history of Japanese architecture it is a little-mentioned yet deep-rooted fact that up until the adoption of Western building methods in the nineteenth century, not a single building on the Japanese islands was made of stone.1 Even Japan’s countless mighty fortresses are all wooden constructions, except for the thick defensive walls upon which they rest. Why this is so has nothing to do with any inability of the Japanese to copy Chinese stone or brick buildings. Nor with the realisation that low-rise buildings in wood are more earthquake-resistant than similar ones in stone (as we now know). Only an island people, an isolated people, can focus so consistently over two thousand years on a single material, wood, for load-bearing constructions. This indicates a deep-seated preference on the part of the Japanese for the living and the transitory, for the change of the seasons, indeed for things in their raw sftate, as also seen in Japanese cuisine. Still today the traditional Japanese aesthetic is dominated by this preference. Even back in the days of the gods, as related by Japan’s most ancient myths, the first Japanese emperor on Earth, the grandson of the Sun Goddess, chose the beautiful princess of the flowering trees instead of her ugly twin sister, the princess of the eternal rock. Myths often reveal archetypes of the human psyche. And these archetypes are the architects of our human cultures. This attitude can even be seen in Japanese urban architecture. In contrast to the European ideal of a city as urbs aeterna, or eternal city, with its durable architecture and very rigid urban structure, Japanese cities of today still bear witness to a very different urban ideal, a place characterised by dynamic vitality, rapid change, the cyclical renewal of its components and a general tendency to ephemeral structures.2 Europe’s city squares, surrounded by the stone buildings of government or religious institutions, have their counterpart in Japan in chinju no mori, or groves for the deities, small areas of forest that are dedicated to local tutelary gods, and which change their appearance according to the seasons.3 The urban dreams and projects of the Japanese Metabolists of the early 1960s that seem so unusual to Western architects depict nothing new to Japanese eyes.4 To this day, history in Japan is not reckoned in accordance with the linear Christian calendar of the West. The Japanese people of 2002 are living in the year of Heisei 14, because fourteen years ago, the coronation of

the present emperor marked a renewal of space, time and people in Japan. This cyclical consciousness has a farreaching influence on the way people think of the past and also the present. Since the Meiji era, whenever a new emperor comes to the throne, a new nengo, literally name or motto for the year, is announced. Before that era, this happened several times within the reign of one emperor. Every torii or gateway to a Shinto shrine (fig. 2.1) reminds the Japanese of renewal, both in nature and in his society. In terms of architecture, this cyclical thinking and a love of living building material is shown perhaps best in the imperial ancestral shrines in the woods of Ise. These shrines resolve the paradox confronting sacred buildings, in that they must look both ancient and new at the same time. The 115 shrines in the Ise system, most probably created in the seventh century, are dismantled and rebuilt every twenty years (originally every 21 years), and their treasures and the pebbles upon which they rest are replaced.5 This custom was introduced at about the time people discontinued the religious taboo of abandoning the old capital city with the advent of each new emperor, and rebuilding the shrine in another place. Ise architecture reflects the spatial and structural organisation of the imperial court during the Nara era, a system which is known otherwise only from archaeological excavations and hypothetical reconstructions (fig. 2.3, 2.4, 2.25).

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Fudo: Climate and culture – a holistic understanding In contrast to Ancient China, which had a long line of successive dynasties, Japan has had only one imperial house, tracing its origins back to the Sun Goddess. For a deeper understanding of Japanese religiousness and the relationship of Japanese buildings to the natural surroundings, it is important to understand that the people of Japan saw themselves as living in a kind of ‘blood relationship’ with the gods, who embody natural energies, according to a theory of Tetsuro Watsuji (1889–1960). A distinction between man, god and nature, typical of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, was never propagated in Japan, not even by Buddhism. However, with the adoption of Western ways of thinking and the imitation of European architectural forms, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the Japanese lost this eco-religious consciousness of a unity with nature in the way they build their houses, the way they live and the way they think. Just as to this day Japan has had only one imperial line, it has also had only one method of construction, characterised by timber frames and the addition of rooms in the horizontal plane. Taking its cue from European style history, Japanese architectural history has for the last one hundred 2.3

16

years or so distinguished between three styles within this single method of construction and spatial organisation. Developments are divided into three stages, each one lasting around four hundred years: the Shinden style (8th–12th century), the Shoin style (12th–16th century) and the Sukiya style (16th–19th century). Up until the advent of modern architecture in the midnineteenth century, architecture in Japan was formed by ‘climate and culture’, to quote a theory by Watsuji in his book of the same name from the 1930s, putting forward the first holistic vision of human culture and climate.6 On Asia’s eastern seaboard, the Japanese live in the monsoon belt. According to Watsuji this climate has shaped their religion, their arts, their clothing and food, and also their architecture. The rainy monsoon climate which down the ages has provided the Japanese and other monsoon peoples with nourishment, is also the source of the Japanese tendency towards passive rather than revolutionary thought and action, he believes. In addition they are afflicted each year by earthquakes, typhoons and floods which regularly destroy all things made and built by man. This demonstration of the transitoriness of all existence has had a strong

influence on the Japanese, in both a practical and a philosophical way. Here, too, lies one of the roots of their understanding of cyclical change. Virtually the only thing which has lasting value is land, the plot on which a building stands. The characteristic features of traditional Japanese architecture that are evident in all phases of history are, briefly: • Floors that are raised one or two feet above the ground, enough to protect against ground moisture and give good air-circulation in this hot, damp climate, while remaining in contact with the earth. • Wide, overhanging pitched roofs made of reed, shingles or tiles above the main building; around the perimeter a veranda, mostly under a separate roof, for protection against the sun and rain, insulation and light-modulation. • Empty rooms, i.e. rooms with no free-standing chairs, tables, cupboards or carpets; the entire floor area, laid with compressed rice straw mats, is the ‘chair’, as it were. • A horizontal, additive arrangement of space, almost always without an upper storey or a cellar; rooms are divided by means of movable panels and temporary installations, not solid walls. Watsuji described the traditional Japanese sense of space in their homes as a ‘bringing together without distance’6, as all partitions can be either removed entirely or shifted aside. • Perfection in detail and in building type. In Japan, up until the introduction of the North American timber frame, there were virtually no wooden buildings with badly fitting connections. The culture of an island people is oriented inwards and not outwards. • A clear distinction between load-bearing and spacedividing elements in the construction, which facilitates replacement or renovation of areas and components within the building. This distinction also makes the structure easy to dismantle and reconstruct in another location (fig. 2.5, 2.6). • Multifunctional use of the built space – a consequence of the limited amount of building land available on the Japanese islands. SHINDEN: Feminine accent and feminine elegance in the classical period of Japanese architecture, 8th to 12th centuries In a well-observed caricature by a Japanese architect, the most important of the above-mentioned features are wittily summarised in a kind of ‘evolutionary history from the chair to the house’ (fig. 2.2). As shown in the sketch of stage one, there are many haniwa or grave goods of clay from the tumulus era from 250 to 552 A.D. depicting figures seated on high chairs or thrones. The second stage shows buildings on high pillars, known from the Yayoi era as rice stores or buildings of the ruling elite. The next stage shows the beginnings of shrine and temple building, as seen in the Ise shrine, for example, and the fourth stage is the fully developed form of a palace, but also of a domestic home. The building has symbolically taken over the role of the chair. A fifth stage, added by the author to the original caricature, shows modern living in Japan – a house that has completely lost its relation to the ‘climate’, and in most cases also its connection with ‘culture’, because of its closed exterior and solid interior walls. People live in an air-conditioned environment, in a ‘machine for living’. The chair has been intro-

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duced from the West, and the rooms are filling up more and more with domestic items and furniture. Another speciality of early Japanese architecture is also expressed in this caricature – the division of a building into two parts: a moya, or mother building, and an attached hisashi, the ‘veranda rooms’. The oldest example of such a spatial arrangement comes from the Nara era; a reconstruction by Masaru Sekino can be seen in the palace of the ruler of Fujiwara, Toyonari (fig. 2.7). Developed structurally and spatially to its full extent, this principle can be seen in the sumptuous palaces of the Heian era, and, on a smaller scale, in urban homes and farmhouses. 2.5

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Although smaller than its model, the first shishinden or ‘purple palace’ of the Japanese emperor in the eighth century was strongly influenced by the Chinese imperial palace, in both construction and name. This building became the prototype of a style of architecture that came to be known as the Shinden style, or ‘sleeping palace style’, typical of the buildings of the aristocracy during the Heian era. Although at this time column spacing did vary, excavations of the imperial palace in Heiankyo (later to become Kyoto) have revealed spans of three metres. Never again was secular and religious architecture in Japan to achieve such openness towards the outside, and such inner flexibility of space (fig. 2.8, 2.10). A key factor in the spatial impression of the imperial palace is the use of round columns and sliding, not fixed walls. Shitomido, or horizontally opening grid-like shutters on the south facade afford a unique, broad panoramic view of the whole south garden. The upper half of the shutters could be pivoted upwards and fixed under the eaves, and the lower half removed entirely – an effect that was never again to be repeated in Japanese architecture. On cold winter days, however, the panels remained in place, which virtually blacked out the whole hall. This was without doubt one of the reasons why later the sliding door and sliding window were invented. In the Heian era, interior layouts could be altered in many ways using partition walls, folding screens, fabric hangings, reed blinds and transparent or solid double doors, which were sometimes also painted. Narrative scroll paintings from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries give a very lively impression of these interiors. A number of recent exhibition concepts and projects by contemporary Japanese architects such as Toyo Ito have their roots here. The tatami, a 5 to 10 cm thick mat of compressed straw, was at this time still moved around as required. With its raised form it indicated social status and was not, as in later periods, merely a floor covering. The scroll paintings also give the impression of a predominantly ‘feminine’ orientation and elegance in society and the arts; the highest ‘priest’ in the Shinto liturgy at the imperial ancestral shrines in Ise, for example, was a woman. A distinct form of Japanese literature was developed in this period by women. Miyabi or ‘courtly or effeminate elegance’ is a description used then and now in Japanese for this aesthetic in the Heian era.

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Architectural space in Shinden architecture can thus not be viewed in terms of the outside, with its imposing construc-

tion, but in relation to the inside, with its space-defining elements of decorated fabric and wall paintings of seasonal blossom. In other words it had a ‘feminine’ aspect. Contrasting with this is the rigorously ‘male’ interior in the medieval period, influenced strongly by the samurai and Zen priests. On the scroll paintings of the Heian era, men merge into the female surroundings in both gesture and clothing. The throne is no imposing, showy Chinese Dragon Seat, but a simple straw mat draped with airy fabric hangings (fig. 2.14). FUSUI: Sino-Japanese geomancy – an early design theory In terms of overall layout, Shinden architecture is additive in arrangement, and in almost all cases set out on a 120 ≈ 120 m plot, the size of a typical block in Kyoto. Covered and open corridors link the separate buildings. The aristocrats of the time imitated the building style used by the emperor. Just as in Chinese geomantic tradition the emperor as the ‘Son of Heaven’ lives in the north on Earth – like the North Star in the sky – and looks south towards his subjects, so, too, all Shinden palaces are oriented north-south. The way Japanese domestic architecture opens up to the south is therefore not only based on rational climatic reasons, but also has religious significance, in its reflection of the Chinese-Japanese view of the world. North and south determine the East Asian city both socially and architecturally. People in the south are at the lowest end of the social scale in a rigid class society. To the south of the actual ‘sleeping palace’ is a broad open space laid out with white pebbles. Adjoining this, on the south side, is a large garden. Together this was known in Japanese as niwa, the word nowadays used to mean ‘garden’ in general. And indeed this was the first Japanese garden with pond, island, rivers and hills that could be reconstructed from descriptions. However, no original examples have survived (fig. 2.12).

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Sino-Japanese geomancy determined the placement and orientation, both physical and social, primarily of all built objects: graves, farms, palaces and capital cities.8 The ideal arrangement was like an armchair ‘shaped’ out of the surrounding mountains and hills: the west, east and north were protected against uprisings, and, gently sloping land to the south opened up to the warmth of the sun. Such a landscape configuration was also chosen for the capital city of Kyoto. In planning the layout of the imperial palace in the city, the ideal natural situation was created using buildings set out to form the outline of an armchair. As the social order dictated, the central imperial throne was the single focus of the rigorously symmetrical complex. However, not only palaces and cities were built in this first great wave of Chinese cultural influence in the Sui-Tang Dynasty, but also Buddhist temples, and finally also Shinto shrines (fig. 2.13). The armchair figure as a design principle was taken up, too, in the large temple complexes in Nara and the impressive Amida Buddha complexes in Kyoto that were to follow, with their gardens designed to represent ‘Pure Lands’ or paradise on Earth, in the Buddhist sense. Both complexes show the same symmetrical layout, with covered corridors surrounding a large courtyard to the south of the Buddha hall. This courtyard was used in the Nara era and afterwards for large-scale religious ceremonies, but in

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the Amida temples in Kyoto it was laid out with extensive gardens featuring hills, ponds and islands. Architecturally and symbolically all religious buildings in Japan – as also in China and Korea – take their cue from the seat of the only secular world power in this era, the palace of the ‘Son of Heaven’ (fig. 2.11).

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But this symmetrical and formal composition was soon to be broken up in Japan. The individual buildings in a Shinden-style complex were essentially large single rooms erected for a specific function. There was no spatial division by means of fixed walls, and suspended ceilings were only rarely found. The buildings were linked by covered corridors. Towards the end of the Heian era and at the beginning of the Kamakura era, this clear composition was replaced by a merging of buildings and their roofs into a continuous sequence of spaces. Corridors sometimes developed into separate rooms. Also lost was the principle of symmetry in design that had originally been copied from China (fig. 2.15). This break with symmetry cannot, however, be ascribed to the typical Japanese preference for the asymmetrical, as originally proposed by Toshiro Inaji.10 The original complex should be regarded as the basic form. Asymmetrical compositions developed over the course of time, as a result of external constraints, like for example when lack of space dictated that only one half of an ensemble could be built. Meditation and the sword: Feudalism as a form of state organisation and discipline as religion In 1185, to the south of Tokyo, an independent military government was founded in the city of Kamakura, which gave its name to the Kamakura era in Japanese history. The shogun ruled the country from this city, although Kyoto was to remain the official capital for several centuries more and the emperor remained at least as the ceremonial head of state. An era dominated by men was ushered in. These men were the shogun and the warrior class of the samurai, and also the priests. Linking these diverse classes was their shared emphasis on discipline: the samurai and their discipline of killing and loyalty to the feudal lords, the Zen priests and their discipline of meditation and obedience to their master. The Zen school is one of the schools of meditation in the Far East that is based on the Indian tradition of yoga. It is no coincidence that even in India the gods of yoga were male, and all famous practitioners of this way of meditation, like Buddha himself, came from the warrior class. By contrast, the gods of the Tantric path of devotion from India and Tibet were depicted either as female or as a couple. In the first phase of the introduction of Zen from China in the thirteenth century, the Japanese monks withdrew into their new monasteries on remote mountains, in order to escape the ‘temptations of the flesh’ and political influence. Yet as early as the fourteenth century, the first inner-city Zen temples were founded in Kyoto. The Daitokuji and Myoshinji temples, both belonging to the Rinzai sect, were built in the Muromachi era in accordance with Chinese models. In these large-scale complexes, which took up whole districts in the city of Kyoto, the hojoshoin of the various abbots were to become the new centres of culture.

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The Kamakura and Muromachi eras experienced a second wave of influence from China. Karamono, meaning literally ‘Chinese things’, even became the word for ‘modern’. Delicate porcelain and tea-making utensils, incense burners, vases, pottery of all kinds and especially landscape paintings in ink became the most important art objects, proudly brought back by the Zen monks from their excursions to the realm of the Middle Kingdom. The SHOIN: Architecture for men, warriors and priests in the Japanese medieval period, 12th to 16th centuries With the country’s shift towards a medieval feudal society, its architecture also changed. Two forms emerged, both closely linked: the buke-shoin, or villas of the shogun and samurai and the hojo-shoin, the living quarters of the abbots in the large Zen temple complexes. Like the earlier Shinden palaces, both forms of shoin have a garden, albeit much smaller, on the south side. However, they have no centrallylocated focus like the imperial seat that determined all the symmetry in the complex.11 The spatial and social centre of a shoin building is the most important corner of the main room; this focus is always eccentrically located. The name ‘shoin’, originally a term used for small writing niches, was not used until the middle of the nineteenth century. The shogun and the samurai in this period did not consciously try to develop a new style of architecture. On the contrary – they imitated down to the last detail the ideal of the Shinden style of the Heian aristocracy, although on a more modest scale. The round columns of the Shinden palaces were gradually replaced by square ones, which

enabled better connection details with the sliding doors and windows that were gaining ground. The fold-up shutters, too, were only used where they could function as a status symbol in architecture for the aristocracy, on the main or south facade of the residence hall. This process of change from round to angular columns and from folding shutters to the now archetypical sliding doors and windows of Japanese architecture is seen best on the much quoted reconstruction of the villa of the Ashikaga shogun Yoshinori in the Muromachi district of Kyoto (fig. 2.15). KE and HARE: Spatial and social differentiation in Shoin architecture One important architectural development in the late Heian era was to subdivide the original single-space structure of the Shinden palace (fig. 2.16). This articulation was not undertaken in an arbitrary fashion, but linked to the construction; it also reflected the rigid social differentiation in the feudal society of the time. From then on the original single large space could be split north-south by a wall directly below the ridge line or it could be divided east-west, in three strips. It was not long before both options were combined. Although it cannot be proven, this subdivision of the large space was probably only made possible by the invention of the suspended ceiling. In the religious architecture of the time – the Buddhist temples – the large halls or Buddha halls started to be split into a front room for the believers, and a back room for the actual statues of Buddha, the ritual accessories and the decoration. Such a horizontal differentiation took place on the principle of the differentiation of all built space and social behaviour in ke and hare

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(fig. 2.19). This Japanese principle corresponds roughly to the better known polarity of yin and yang. Although hare originally meant fine weather and ke bad weather, today hare, in the social context, means the public, or formal area, and ke the private, more informal area. For Japanese organisation of space this difference is shown clearly by a south-facing L-shaped building, laid out in Shinden style and with an entrance in the east. The whole eastern part of the complex was for public use, the west for the private sphere.12 The lower a man’s position in the social hierarchy, the closer he sat to the door on social occasions. Through placement and orientation the shoin reflected social position. In the Shinden and Shoin styles the whole building was a status symbol, from the imposing entrance gates to the tatami border. Ordinary people were forbidden under pain of death to imitate even the Shinden-style shutters on their own house. The hojo-shoin, the living quarters of the abbots of the great Zen temples in medieval Kyoto, were arranged around a line of enormous gates, Buddha halls and lecture halls used by all the monks. These quarters were very simply designed. The main hall of the Daisen-in temple (Great Hermits Temple) inside the Daitokuji complex of the Rinzai sect, for example, shows the aforementioned division of a large room into two north-south-oriented zones and three east-west strips. Also, unusually, the shoin is surrounded on all sides by a karesansui, a dry landscape garden. Temple and garden are said to have been erected around 1513 by the priest Kogaku Shuko (fig. 2.18). Some of the room-dividing sliding doors are decorated with ink paintings by Soami (d. 1525). Thus in the room itself, one is in the midst of two kinds of ‘nature’: the painted nature inside the room and the planned ‘nature’ outside. The middle room contained a statue of Buddha. This entirely new type of garden from the Kamakura and Muromachi eras is not a pleasure garden or a promenade garden with artificial lakes and mountains, suchas was a part of Heian palace architecture. It was designed to be contemplated from very specific rooms within the building, and thus was composed as an integral part of the architecture.

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Two types of dry garden developed in connection with Shoin architecture in Zen temples. One was an abstract composition and the other a composition in miniature of a scene from nature. The garden of the Daisen-in is of the second type. It depicts a highly impressive sequence of scenes from natural landscapes and at the same time symbolises human life in the form of a dry ‘river’ of sand. Arising in the stormy peaks, it flows over deceptive waterfalls and through rapids into a quiet sea of sand, signifying the possibility of enlightenment and deepest insight. This drama begins in the north-eastern corner of the garden and ends in the southwest, under a Buddha tree. In stark contrast to the courtly décor and feminine elegance of Heian art and architecture, the gardens, rooms and paintings of Shoin architecture ushered in a new aesthetic ideal in Japan. Termed yugen, this ideal seeks out the beauty that is in the mysterious, the hidden and the profound. The arts no longer revolved around a naturalistic,

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colourful representation of seasonal change and the annual feasts and ceremonies of a courtly society, but reflected instead the kind of sadness we feel when confronted with the realisation of the transience of all existence. Yohakuno-bi, an appreciation of the beauty of empty rooms, of barren spaces, is also a part of the aesthetic of this time. It can be sensed not only in the empty spaces in ink paintings and dry Zen gardens, but also in the quiet, calm style of dancing and in the peacefulness of the music of Noh theatre. Zeami, the father of today’s Noh theatre or senutokoro-omoshiroki, says it is ‘the places that are not there that are of special interest’. 2.18

The development of a modular arrangement of space and prefabricated construction The Muromachi era lasted from 1336 to 1573. It was a time of civil war, murder and devastation of the towns. In the middle of the fifteenth century Kyoto was also destroyed. And yet it was during this period that the foundation stone for modern Japanese culture was laid, as it was at this time that the architecture, garden style and many new arts that we today feel to be typically Japanese first emerged. These include the tea ceremony, Noh theatre and a separate academy of Japanese painting. In terms of architecture it was the karesansui or dry gardens of the Zen temples and the treatment of space in Shoin buildings. In the interiors, fully developed Shoin architecture at the end of the sixteenth century showed a range of new spatial and decorative qualities that had originally developed independently of each other. Typical of a classical Shoin room is the joza-no-ma, or literally ‘the room with the raised level’, such as the guest hall of the Kojoin Temple inside the larger Onjoji temple complex in Otsu (fig. 2.21). The individual elements of this room are: • Tsuke-shoin, a low wooden writing table, built into a niche with sliding windows and often projecting onto the veranda; amazingly this ‘study corner’ has lent its name, like a pars pro toto, to the whole of Muromachi architecture. • Tokonoma, a windowless niche, raised by one column’s width and often painted, in which a flower arrangement or scroll painting was displayed, the most important decoration in the whole room. Two elements contributed to the formation of this social and spiritual focus in the home: on the one hand the toko, a slightly raised floor as a status symbol, and the oshi-ita, a shelf on which to display valuable works of art. Still today, even in the simplest house, the seating arrangement in relation to the tokonoma is of utmost importance. • Chigaedana, a windowless niche with overlapping shelves and drawers, a place to display valuable books and artistic utensils belonging to the tea ceremony. • Chodaigamae, painted, opaque wooden doors that enabled the master of the house easy access to the shoin from a room that was otherwise kept secret. • Fusuma and shoji, sliding doors with unpainted or painted surfaces, and grid-like wooden doors covered with translucent Japanese paper are now common but they were developed first in the Muromachi and Momoyama eras (fig. 2.21, 2.22). Social status was highlighted by raising the tatami floor by around 15 cm. In many shoins there was not only a jodan, a room of highest status, and a gedan, a room of lowest

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status, but also a chudan, a room of intermediate status (fig. 2.19, 2.22). Other height gradations do not occur in traditional Japanese architecture. It is these tatami, or compressed straw mats – nowadays synonymous with the floor itself – that since the Muromachi era have blended the entire room together into a single visually balanced unit, both in terms of modular arrangement and proportion. In this modular system – called kiwari-jutsu in Japanese, which means literally a system of dividing wood – there was never an attempt to impose a single construction system on all buildings. There were five types of construction, each clearly separate: gateways, Shinto shrines, Buddhist monastery complexes, pagodas and houses. In Japanese domestic architecture there has long been an attempt with the kiwari system to achieve aesthetic proportions for all parts of a building. Column spacings, prefabricated wooden components and the modular requirements of the tatami system all had to be carefully tuned to each other. The Japanese ken, or column spacing, changed not only with the continually changing Japanese system of measurement, but also with the search for standardised dimensions in timber which could facilitate prefabrication and connections. Finally a column spacing of 197 cm was agreed for the towns and 181 cm for the countryside. In the classic kiwari system, which we know from the shomei carpenters manuscript of 1608, the size of the column cross-section, too, was fixed – at one tenth of the column spacing, or ken. With this all other dimensions and proportions in a building could be scaled up or down accordingly. Of course, modifications to the size of tatamis also had a significant influence on the universal ken. The size of a tatami derived originally from the proportions of the human body, and not for any reasons determined by material. As it was not possible to find an ideal tatami size, two tatami modules were developed, to match the two column spacings: one for the town measuring 190 cm ≈ 95.4 cm, and one for the countryside measuring 181 cm ≈ 90.9 cm. The cross-section of wooden columns was also standardised. On entering a traditional Japanese house with tatami mats the untrained eye will hardly notice the tiny differences in modular construction. But the system does not call for perfection. It is based on handcraft work and not industrially prefabricated components of always identical dimensions. Tatamis that differed in size from the norm were made by hand, small boards then filled in the gaps in the flooring. Castles and teahouses: Golden splendour and rustic simplicity in the 16th century From the middle of the sixteenth century, the daimyo princes fought each other in a series of opposing alliances. Only around the turn of the century, in 1703, did a new central power emerge in Edo, today’s Tokyo, brought about by the princes Oda Nobunaga (1534–82) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98) under the shogun Tokugawa Leyasu (1542–1616). While marking the beginning of 250 years of peace, this dynasty also spanned a period of total isolation 26

for Japan from the outside world. Edo became the new political and cultural centre of Japan, with the emperor, now totally deprived of power, residing in Kyoto until the middle of the nineteenth century. This short transition period from 1573 to 1600, often referred to as a golden age, is called the Azuchi-Momoyama era, named after the most important castles of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi. The fortress castles of the daimyo took on the role in Japanese architecture that had previously been filled by the palaces of the nobility, the shogun villas and the priests quarters from the Heian to the Muromachi eras.

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The joka-machi, or towns that sprung up around a castle, developed into new centres of creativity in secularised art and architecture, characterised by the rising class of wealthy traders, businessmen and craftsmen. Around 95 percent of Japanese towns today can trace their origins back to the castle-towns of this period. The power- and pomp-loving shoguns Nobunaga and Hideyoshi surrounded themselves with the best paintings of the period, significantly on gold-leaf backgrounds. They also showed a strong interest in nature, simplicity and asceticism. For both of them the tea master Sen-no-Rikyu (1522–91) was the highest cultural advisor. He was the founder of wabi-cha, the simple, natural tea ceremony, soan, the plain, grass-hut style teahouse, and roji, the associated ‘dewy path’ or tea garden.

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Wabi is the highly individual Japanese aesthetic of simplicity, naturalness and reserve, expressed by Sen-no-Rikyu in a particular way of preparing and drinking tea, in the utensils used and in the teahouse and its garden. The essence of this wabi aesthetic is perhaps best captured in the master’s words: ‘Never forget that the Way of Tea is nothing more than boiling water, making tea and drinking tea’; and: ‘The tea ceremony conducted in the smallest of spaces serves primarily the practice of meditation and its goal is enlightenment.’ Better than all the leading Buddhist teachers of that time, Sen-no-Rikyu, a Zen layman, managed to redefine meditation, by instilling consciousness into the simplest of actions people carry out in their daily lives. For him no learned prayer or recitation of holy texts could bring forth such heightened human alertness. Herein lie the origins of Japanese integration of thought and action, and of the aesthetic of handcrafted objects (fig. 2.20). In Japan the garden has traditionally always been a part of the architecture, and the architecture a part of the garden. It is perhaps useful here to consider the relationship between the tea garden, a completely new prototype of the Japanese garden, and the teahouse, also a new type of building. Originally the tea garden was a functional, modest path that led to the tea arbour. It was set out neither as a walk through nature, nor for serious contemplation from a fixed viewing point within the building, such as was the case in the two previous examples of Japanese gardens from the Heian and Muromachi eras. The model for the roji is a lonely mountain path which leads us out of our day-to-day trials and tribulations and into the peace and seclusion of nature. 27

Although everything in the tea garden – gateways, stone lanterns, stepping stones, ponds and even the toilets – seems to have been designed and built with the greatest of care, there was in fact originally nothing particular to admire or discover. At least at the time of Senno-Rikyu, the garden was very natural. This changed, however, with his successors. The only design principle that was subsequently added to the tea garden was miegakuri, or the succession of ‘attractions’ alternately hidden or revealed to the eye. The tea garden cannot be taken in at one glance, but opens up, often in the tiniest of spaces, as a series of surprising miniature views and glimpses that can be experienced while stepping over the tobi-ishi, or selected stepping stones that direct movement through and views of the garden. These modest experiments with a new building and garden type and the mie-gakuri design technique were the precursor of the later promenade gardens of the daimyo princes and the shoguns. These park-like gardens with teahouses and pavilions were the largest ever seen in the history of Japan. Viewed from the outside the tea arbour of the Wabi Way of Tea seems like a humble hermit’s hut, but one nevertheless senses that everything in it has been carefully designed. Crawling through the official entrance, the nijiri-guchi, a small sliding door about 60 cm ≈ 60 cm in size, one enters a tiny space. Often this space is only two tatami mats in size, the materials used inside all being left in their natural state: wooden pillars, earth walls, bamboo ceiling and paper windows. There is no view of the garden. Attention is therefore focused on the host, the sound of the boiling water, the taste of the tea and on the people themselves.13 SUKIYA: The free plan – individual creativity in pre-modern Japan, 17th to 19th centuries Amazingly, it was this rustic grass hut with its modest tea garden and tea path that was to release Japanese architecture from the dictates of a formal tradition, giving it new freedom in design and utilisation. In the twentieth century, it was then to influence modern European architecture (fig. 2.24). Basically this new architecture, called sukiya-zukuri, meaning sophisticated or elegant building style, was to do away with overwrought ornamentation and usher in the free ground plan, bring light into the whole of the interior and penetrate the building with views of the surrounding garden scene. In stark contrast to the small, closed teahouse, where attention was directed entirely inwards, these new Sukiya buildings opened out towards the garden, and indeed are unthinkable without this aspect.12

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But Sukiya architecture was also imbued with a new consciousness, described by Itoh Teiji in his monograph on Sukiya architecture.13 This new consciousness, or sakui, ‘individual intention in creativity’, thus no longer reflects the pursuit of a formal tradition which is monitored by a craftsmen’s guild. Just as personal style and expression of even the most insignificant action, such as the way in which a tea bowl is cleaned with a cloth, is now important, so the names of master builders are now linked with their buildings. Sen-no-Rikyu was honoured as a man

of great originality and creativity, as every aspect of his tea ceremony, garden design and teahouse architecture bore witness to sakui. It could even be said that the tea masters of the Momoyama era were the first individualists ever in Japanese arts. The highest goal in the way of tea was no longer the copying of old forms, but innovation. Teahouses and buildings in the Sukiya style were therefore never copied. However, this respect for individual creativity was to disappear again for about one hundred years, with the imitation of European building styles in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the end of the sixteenth century the Sukiya building style brought forth a new form of ensemble, composed of the formal shoin building, a modest rustic teahouse and the actual Sukiya building. This ensemble, together with the garden, came to be known as the Sukiya style. The design technique of mie-gakuri used initially in the tea garden was then also used effectively for linking the individual buildings of the new ensemble together. Charming vistas and complex visual interplays resulted. The Katsura Villa in Kyoto is probably the most mature example of Sukiya architecture. Its present diagonal form developed over a period of forty years, starting with a small ‘teahouse in a melon field’, and growing to include the Old Shoin (fig. 2.17; 1620) of Prince Toshihito, the later Middle Shoin (1641), Music Instrument Room and the New Shoin (both between 1640 and 1650) of Prince Noritada (fig. 2.24). The Japanese word for this style of

jagged diagonal layout is ganko-kei, which literally means goose-flight formation. This formation is actually only the last logical step in the development of a ground plan that had begun with the Shinden Palace of the Heian era and its perfectly symmetrical armchair figure without a single dominating central point, and developed through the medieval period with the Shoin style of the warrior class and the Zen priests towards an L-shaped or one-armed chair figure, with eccentric focus. From the sixteenth century onwards, this then emerged into an open, flexible, expandable and free ground plan, with an asymmetric and multifocal character. Looking at overall composition, the history of traditional Japanese architecture traces a development from an embracing of the garden to an interpenetration with it (fig. 2.23). The Sukiya style of building, released from any obligations of status or religious ornament, is the quintessence of the Japanese architectural preference mentioned at the beginning of this essay for the natural, the living and the raw. Now untreated wood is again being used for columns, floors, ceilings, sometimes even with the bark still on it, such as in teahouses. This new aesthetic seeks to reveal, through the hand of man, the natural beauty of the materials themselves, not to hide it through ornament. Lightness pervades all aspects of Sukiya architecture. In fact it’s difficult to use the word ‘style’ here. On reaching the end of a long development process and path of learning, playfulness is the only style, to paraphrase Paul Scheerbart.

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Notes/Literature: 1. Nitschke, Günter, ‚ISHI – Der Stein im japanischen Garten, Material oder Lebendes Wesen‘, archithese 6, Zurich, Dec. 2000, pp. 20–25 2. Nitschke, Günter, ‚rockflower – Transience and Renewal in Japanese Form‘, Kyoto Journal, Kyoto, May 2002 3. Nitschke, Günter, ‚CHINJU NO MORI – Urbane Götterhaine (Urban Deity Groves)‘, Daidalos 15, Berlin 1997, pp. 70-9 4. Nitschke,Günter, ‚EKI – Im Bewusstsein des Wandels: Die japanischen Metabolisten‘, Bauwelt 18/19, Berlin 1964, pp. 499–515 5. Nitschke, Günter, First Fruits Twice Tasted – Renewal of Time, Space and Man in Japan‘, From Shinto to Ando, London 1993, pp. 8–31 6. Watsuji, Tetsuro, FUDO – Wind und Erde, Der Zusammenhang von Klima und Kultur, Darmstadt 1997, pp. 117-38 7. Nishia, K. and Hozumi, K., What is Japanese Architecture, Tokyo 1985 8. Nitschke, Günter, Japanische Gärten – Rechter Winkel und Natürliche Form, Cologne 1999, pp. 32–61 9. Inoue, Mitsuo, Space in Japanese Architecture, Tokyo 1985, pp. 66–87 10. Inaji, Toshiro, The Garden as Architecture, Tokyo 1998, pp. 1–60 11. Hashimoto, Fumio, Architecture in the Shoin Style – Japanese Feudal Residences, Tokyo 1981 12. Yoshida, T., Das japanische Wohnhaus, Berlin 1969 13. Teiji, Ito and Yukio Futagawa, The Elegant Japanese House – Traditional Sukiya Architecture, Tokyo 1978, pp. 44–84

Japanese eras EARLY PERIOD Asuka Era Nara Era Heian Era

552–710 710–794 794–1185

MEDIEVAL PERIOD Kamakura Era Muromachi Era Azuchi-Momoyama Era

1185–1392 1392–1773 1573–1600

PRE-MODERN PERIOD Edo Era

1600–1868

MODERN PERIOD Meiji Era Taisho Era Showa Era Heisei Era

1868–1912 1912–1926 1926–1988 since 1988

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Illustrations: 2.1 Gateway to a Shinto shrine, with a ‘sacred rope’, Shiga prefecture. Photo: Keiko Uehara 2.2 Caricature on the development of traditional Japanese architecture. 2.3 Inner shrine of Ise. Old shrine next to New Shrine. Aerial photo from 1973 2.4 Ground plan and elevations of the mikeden, Hall of the daily food sacrifice within the compound of the Outer Shrine of Ise. After Toshio Fukuyama from 1940, from: G. Nitschke, From Shinto to Ando, 1993, p. 25 2.5 Perspective section of a typical single-storey house, from: Yoshida, T., Das Japanische Wohnhaus, Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin 1969, pp. 71, 131 2.6 Perspective ground plan of a typical single-storey house, from: Yoshida, T., Das Japanische Wohnhaus, Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin 1969, pp. 71, 131 2.7 Palace of the ruler of Fujiwara, Toyonari, from the mid-8th century. Reconstruction by Masaru Sekino 2.8 Hypothetical spatial organisatiaon in a Shinden-style palace, from: Yoshida, T., Das Japanische Wohnhaus, Berlin 1969, p. 26 2.9 Todaiji in Nara, erected in the Nara era. The present construction dates from the Edo era and its proportions are about one third smaller than the original. 2.10 Shishinden, as it looks today, with ceremonial courtyard. Last reconstruction in the Edo era 2.11 Sketch of a geomantically ideal location for anything built in a natural setting, of Kyoto and, on a smaller scale, of the imperial palace. 2.12 Oldest perspective reconstruction of a Shinden complex by an architectural historian from the late Edo era, 1842 2.13 Todaiji, the Great Buddha Temple in Nara in the 8th century, 18th-century woodcut. 2.14 ‘Feminine’ spatial quality in the Shinden style, from: kasuga gongen kenki e-maki, an illustrated scroll of 1309 about the wonders of the Kasuga Gongen, National Museum, Tokyo 2.15 Hypothetical subdivision of the Shinden residence of the Ashikaga shogun Yoshinori in Kyoto. Round columns in the front, formal area, angular ones in the rear, private zone 2.16 Social and spatial stratification in Shoin architecture 2.17 Old Shoin, view into the room with the irori fireplace 2.18 The Daisen-in as a shoin, surrounded by dry garden, 16th century. 2.19 Villa of the shogun on a rakuchu-rakugai, ‘Folding screen with representations of Kyoto inside and outside the city limits’ in the Uesugi version of 1574. Uesugi Museum of the City of Yonezawa 2.20 Japanese teahouse, three tatamis in size, with a 2/3 tatami area for the host: A: guest entrance, B: tokonoma niche, C: fireplace, D: host 2.21 Joza-no-ma of the guest hall in the Kojoin temple, Otsu 2.22 L-shaped raised area in the kyusui-tei, the far pavilion in the Shugakuin villa 2.23 Development of traditional Japanese architecture: from Shinden to Shoin and Sukiya styles 2.24 Katsura Imperial Villa, interior of the Shokintei teahouse 2.25 Inner Shrine at Ise, during reconstruction in 1993

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Japan’s Modern Architecture – From the Beginnings to the Present Christian Schittich and Andrea Wiegelmann

Utopia and Obstinacy – Its Development up to the Present Modern Japan arose out of the continual interplay of Eastern and Western influences as the country increasingly opened itself to the West. At the end of the 19th century, the government of the Meiji dynasty (1868–1912) ended the empire’s total isolation, which had lasted roughly two centuries. As it did so, it created the conditions for the Japanese to study the cultural and political structures of Europe and Northern America. In order to accelerate the country’s economic and technical development, engineers and scientists – including building experts and architects – were brought in from abroad. Receiving government commissions, they erected public buildings and modernised the education and training of architects. At the same time, Japanese architects travelled abroad, some with the intention of working and studying at leading offices in Paris, Berlin and Vienna. A period of historicist construction ended when, between 1910 and 1920, a young generation of architects set about creating a contemporary Japanese style. During these years, modernist European currents – first German Expressionism, then the de Stijl movement, the Bauhaus, and Le Corbusier – became increasingly influential. Frank Lloyd Wright was a further source of inspiration. Wright travelled to Japan for the first time in 1905. In 1911 he was commissioned to design the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which was completed in 1923. Even more influential on Japanese architecture than Wright (who incorporated ideas from traditional Japanese architecture into his own designs) was Antonin Raymond, Wright’s Czech collaborator on the Imperial Hotel. Raymond stayed in Japan for forty years and conceived a language of forms that combined traditional elements with modern principles of construction and technology and modern ways of living. He modelled his approach on Le Corbusier’s rationalist architecture. In 1933 Bruno Taut emigrated to Japan, where he spent three years closely studying traditional architecture. Taut saw in the formal and spatial concept of the Villa Katsura (see p. 29ff.) a great affinity with the architecture of the Modern Movement. In the many writings and papers he published in Japan, Taut propagated a modern style of architecture that drew on the Japanese tradition and never tired of drawing attention to the positive qualities of traditional modes of construction. Which said, he remained completely opposed to the mere copying of forms handed down from the past.

At the very same time, independently of Taut, and initially unnoticed by him, a number of Japanese architects also began to return to their own tradition. They drew on ideas dealing with both spatial composition and structure. Isoya Yoshida, for example, attempted to reform traditional construction and – like Antonin Raymond – to adapt his principles of spatial division and structure to changing social conditions and changing principles of construction. The interiors of his residential buildings are based on large areas, with apertures and recesses introduced to lend emphasis. He separated structure from function, thus responding to the potential offered by the new materials, namely: steel and concrete. The 1950s – The Origins of Modern Architecture The Second World War put an abrupt end to the development of an independent modern Japanese architecture. After 1945, under the overwhelming influence of the USA, the victorious power, it took Japanese architects some time to link up again with the process that had begun earlier. That this happened was due, above all, to Kunio Maekawa and Junzo Sakura (both of whom had worked with Le Corbusier); they succeeded in taking up the thread and combining traditional spatial concepts with modern architectural approaches. However, the outstanding architect of the time was Kenzo Tange, a former pupil of Maekawa’s. His Memorial Museum, the Hiroshima Peace Center (1956), is rightly seen as one of Japan’s first independent contributions to modern architecture (fig. 3.4). Here, Tange combines the formal language of his idol, Le Corbusier, with concepts borrowed from

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modern architecture. This unpretentious and somewhat bleak building, which rests on slender reinforced-concrete pillars, was supposed to embody the duality between East and West. Tange’s life work culminated in sports halls for the Tokyo Olympics, held in 1964 (fig. 3.5). These halls were designed as expressive buildings in steel and concrete, and displayed a formal affinity with the architecture of Eero Saarinen, Pier Luigi Nervi and Jørn Utzon. This design put Japanese architecture on the international stage. Apart from designing countless individual buildings, mostly of rough fair-faced concrete, Tange increasingly devoted his attention to the problems facing the city. His answer to the uncontrolled expansion of the urban environment is revealed in his master plan for Tokyo (1960), which envisages a linear development extending down to the sea and building over a part of Tokyo bay. This concept brought him close to a group of young architects and designers who had come together at the time of the International Design Conference in Tokyo in 1961. They called themselves the Metabolists, and had a profound influence on the architectural scene during the following decade. The 1960s – Metabolism and Urban Utopias Metabolism (the term is borrowed from biology) arose as a protest movement. It sought to create alternatives to the increasing urbanisation (a result of the economic boom) of the coastal region around Osaka and Tokyo and to the country’s growing westernisation. In an age of great utopias and an unbroken faith in technology (man had just began to conquer space), the Metabolists responded to the aforementioned problems with futuristic models of the city and flexible structures that displayed a formal affinity with the contemporary ideas of Archigram in England and those developed by some of the members of Team 10. Systematic planning methods applied during the design and construction phases thematised aspects of an urban-planning and architectural programme that was based on prefabrication and sought to direct growth processes in a rapidly developing society. Three years before the group was founded, Kiyonori Kikutake had already demonstrated, in his own home in Tokyo (Sky House, 1958), the basic principle behind Metabolism: cyclical growth plus renewal. The one-storey house, which rests on four slender concrete slabs and is composed of a single room subdivided into sleeping, cooking and sanitary cells, seems to float above the ground. The cells can be replaced or moved as desired, and additional rooms added for children. Inspired by the model of the human organism, which produces cells when needed and subsequently allows them to die, the load-bearing structure for this building is filled with replaceable modules (fig. 3.3). Even though the group of Metabolists did not work out a uniform position with respect to form – the works of the tendency’s individual representatives differ in character – they nonetheless shared a vision of organic growth. Another common feature is that almost all of their designs have remained utopias, as revealed, for example, by Helix City (1961) by Kisho Kurokawa, who collaborated on Tange’s project to build over the Bay of Tokyo, and Arata Isozaki’s Cluster in the Sky of the same year (fig. 3.2). Hardly any large-scale projects were realised. One of the few projects the group completed was the Nagakin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (1972), by Kurokawa. In this building,140 standardised,

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prefabricated residential capsules are stacked along two vertical access shafts. With interiors completely pre-furnished and fitted out, each unit may be used as a dwelling or one-room office (fig. 3.6, 3.7). However, the underlying idea – allowing owners to take their own capsules with them when they move home and then insert them into a similar structure at their new residence – remained an illusion. Nowhere was a suitable counterpart constructed, and none of the now patinated cells in Kurokawa‘s tower have ever been moved or replaced. The 1970 World Exhibition in Osaka saw both the climax and the end of Metabolism. Under the motto “Progress and Harmony for the Human Race”, an ensemble of impressive buildings was constructed (after a master plan by Kenzo Tange) that clearly demonstrated the potential contained in the Metabolists’ ideas and visions. Tange’s own spatial structure was included as were capsule designs by Kikutake and Kurokawa and the pneumatic pavilion structure designed by Yutako Murata and Mamoru Kawaguchi. No sooner was the World Exhibition over than the euphoric belief in technology vanished. Not only did the building industry and society at large reject series-produced buildings, but the executed projects also proved less flexible than people had anticipated. The Metabolists split up. Its members went separate ways, many rejecting their utopian illusions. In their own distinct ways, some of the most outstanding representatives have shaped architectural developments in Japan since then. Arata Isozaki and Kisho Kurokawa in particular adopted an increasingly formalistic position before they finally turned to Postmodernism, whilst Fumihiko Maki has until now remained faithful to Modernism‘s language of form. The 1970s and 1980s – Between Formalism and a Space Concept Almost all of the different positions taken up since 1970 have involved both renewed interest in Japanese culture and a specific orientation to current Western attitudes. In response to the functional dogmas of the Modernists and the rigid, technicising designs of the Metabolists, the architects have increasingly produced expressive buildings. A conspicuous feature of all these currents is their critique of the continued proliferate growth of Japanese cities. This critique takes various forms, among them radical rejection, the attempt to find identity in chaos, and buildings that aggressively defy their surroundings. Often, by trying to make buildings stand out at any price, the architects ended up exacerbating the very chaos they had criticised. There are, however, many more moderate tendencies too. Fumihiko Maki, who had already adopted a more moderate position when he co-founded the Metabolists, has continued to avoid extreme positions. His long-term Hillside Terrace project clearly shows his development away from radical Modernist ideas to a more pragmatic, Late-Modernist position. (This project is a complex of buildings, in the Western part of Tokyo, comprising businesses, apartments and offices. It was completed in six building sections for a private investor between 1969 and 1992). Hillside Terrace, which had been started outside Tokyo on a wooded property on the edges of a suburb, was subsequently engulfed by the overflowing metropolis. However, even in its new heterogeneous environment, it has lost none of its positive 35

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qualities with respect to urban construction and form (fig. 3.15). Like other projects by Maki, the houses in Hillside Terrace display clear forms, dynamically proportioned facades and elaborately worked-out details, as well as thoughtfully designed open spaces, squares and paths. The individual buildings in the project were designed in relation to their environment, and were – during the first phase, at least – supposed to serve as the nucleus for the subsequent urbanisation of the district. Maki turned his back on the city, however, when he started working on another project, the Spiral Building (1985). Like other architects at the time, Maki located the directly experienced space on the interior. The moderately expressive glittering metal roofs with which Maki later crowned the concert hall in Kirishima (1994) and the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium (1990), for example, almost became his trademark (fig. 3.11). In contrast to Maki, Arata Isozaki became lost in formalism after passing through what was, initially, a rather moderate phase in the early seventies. He soon began to cite historical European styles before finally devoting himself completely to the Postmodernists, becoming their best-known representative in his home country. Completing large-scale commissions on the international arena, Isozaki remains one of the most influential Japanese architects. Even so, he has ceased to be a major source of inspiration for international architecture and construction. His real importance for Japanese architecture stems from his role as initiator and mentor of large prestigious building projects, such as the Kumamoto Artpolis and the Gifu Kitagata project. Receptive to a variety of currents, he also actively supports awarding contracts to unknown, young, or foreign architects. In the late seventies early eighties, a time characterised by great uncertainty and a search for cultural and urban identity, Postmodernism became very popular. Kazuhiro Ishii, one of its representatives, was initially influenced by his American teacher, Charles Moore, and became interested in fusing historical stylistic elements from Europe, as the Gable Building in Tokyo shows. However, Ishii began questioning the practice of borrowing from European architectural history. Preoccupying himself with the intellectual values of his own culture, he discovered his own tradition and developed what one might call a Japanese Postmodernism. He transferred the principle of alternating colour schemes, rooted in Japanese art, to architecture and created a kaleidoscopic collage, applying the then prevailing vocabulary of forms, on his fifty-four-window building in Tokyo (1975, fig. 3.8). He subsequently also concerned himself with historical wooden structures, an interest that culminated in the sophisticated load-bearing structures for the Bunraku Puppet Theatre in Seiwa (1992), which borrows from the ideas of a 12th-century Buddhist monk and from traditional Japanese wood games. A different, more abstract position was adopted by Kazuo Shinohara, a professor of mathematics before he took up architecture. The use of geometrical forms and metals demonstrates his predilection for mechanical science and processes. Where his residential buildings clearly reflect his interest in the “Japanese character”, as expressed in his spatial compositions (see p. 48ff), he departed from this position when he turned to formal designs. Although Shinohara himself spoke of “zero significance”, he nonetheless

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thematises the arbitrariness and dissection of urban space, as the Centennial Hall in Tokyo (1987) reveals. He designed his residential buildings most of them realised during his professorship at the Tokyo Institute of Technology as reference points in the urban chaos of buildings and traffic. This approach earned him great influence with the younger generation of architects. Itsuko Hasegawa implemented her principle of creating compositions of space and form with freely combined, industrially manufactured metal materials. She tried to inject identity into urban space and break through its anonymous character. Her play with forms and materials is not only related to a set vocabulary, she also works intuitively. She develops her ideas for specific places and projects, with structures and nature serving her as models. The two cultural centres in Tokyo suburbs, the Shonandai Cultural Centre (1990) and the Sumida Culture Factory (1994), are collage-like landscapes, brought to life by the play of light and shadow, which exemplify her quest for an urban identity (fig. 3.10). Hiroshi Hara also tries to counter the disorder and confusion of the city with metaphors, composing in novel fashion the elements of a building made of single modules. Proceeding from his early projects – Hara House in Toyko (1974; see p. 47, fig. 3.29) – he transfers the image of the city to his design for an entire building, which now also relates to the surrounding urban space instead of turning away from it. For his Yamtao International Building (1986, fig. 3.9), a Cycladic village served as his model. He developed his more recent projects as striking city landmarks, e.g. the Umeda Sky Building in Osaka (1993), whilst continuing to work on the theme of the city. His traffic-routing and ordering of space for the large multifunctional hall at Kyoto railway station (1996), relates to a specific image of the city. Since Takamatsu, in contrast, deliberately avoids all familiar formal vocabulary, his architecture defies any attempts at categorisation. His high-tech buildings seem rather unfriendly and cool. He responds to the urban chaos of heterogeneous buildings, displays and billboards with phantastic images such as Origin (1981), Ark (1983, fig. 3.14) and Syntax (1990), the last being a commercial building in the stylised form of a T-shirt. Makato Sei Watanabe went a step further. For the main building of the Aoyama Technical College in Shibuya, Tokyo (1990) he designed a deconstructivist plastic structure whose components are more reminiscent of parts of insects or machines than of traditional tectonic forms (fig. 3.12). The motto here is to cause a sensation, come hell or high water, even in an environment that is already chaotic. The same applies to Kengo Kuma’s M2 Building (1991), although it must be said that this work does follow a traditional canon of forms. However, Kengo Kuma (later known for his sensitive staging of materials, see p. 44ff) created a scenic architecture with his Postmodernist debut, enlarging an oversized Ionic capital to the point of grotesqueness (fig. 3.13). Such excessive formalisms are typical for Japan in the eighties. Even so, a number of architects were primarily interested in a conceptual approach. Among them were Toyo Ito, Tadao Ando, who first drew attention to themselves in the mid-seventies (see p. 40ff), and Riken

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Yamamoto, who set trends, particularly in residential housing projects. In his effort to develop contemporary dwelling forms, Yamamoto presented alternatives which successfully countered schemes for rented accommodation that had degenerated into mass-housing projects. He designed his buildings as microcosms of society, transposing the lively neighbourhood that was fast disappearing from the street under the onslaught of traffic onto their roofs. Multi-family houses such as Gazebo (1986), Rotunda (1987), Hamlet (1988) and the Hotakubo Residential Complex (1991) are made up of independent dwelling units with communal living and terrace areas. The services are largely accommodated in the ground floor zones. Light penthouses shaped like vaulted tents lend emphasis to this communal space above the city (fig. 3.17). He later experimented with the idea of the „social neighbourhood” as part of major developments of a different order. For example, at the Saitama University Complex (2000), with its additive concept, the courtyards serve as communication areas for the students (see p. 160ff). The steel-and-glass architecture here is far more elegant than the reinforced-concrete structures of the older residential developments.

Contemporary Architecture During the eighties, the coincidence of formal fashions such as Postmodernism and Deconstructivism with the booming bubble economy, which liberated enormous financial resources, led to an overemphasis on original forms. This trend was encouraged by a desire on the part of commercial clients for unmistakable trade marks, and by the longing of many architects, as artists endeavouring to promote themselves, to break out of an essentially conformist society. Standing out come what may, was, it seems, the done thing in many places: formal excesses almost became the rule. When the speculative bubble burst in the early nineties, design projects become more modest, and forms – influenced by international trends such as the New Simplicity and Minimalism – become simpler. Many of the early Formalists, such as Arata Isozaki and Kisho Kurokawa, returned to a moderate version of the International Style. Isozaki’s Kyoto Concert Hall (1995, fig. 3.16) well illustrates this trend with its clear geometrical forms, the tension between volumes and surfaces, and between lightness and heaviness. It is one of Isozaki’s most mature works, and generally avoids pure fashion. Shin Takamastsu, the rebel of the eighties, became established, and went on to execute a number of large-scale projects, a growing number of them in Europe and China. In his hometown of Kyoto, where he still dominates the architectural scene, he occasionally realised some sensitive smaller buildings. Even the older generation included some leading architects who remained true to their modernist conceptions throughout their professional lives, only allowing themselves to be influenced

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marginally by fashions. Both Fumihiko Maki and Yoshio Taniguchi, who belong to this generation of established architects, who showed that they could produce some very inspiring works. (It took Maki until 1999 to finish one of his finest works a further ensemble of apartments, offices and shops and slightly translucent, shimmering screen of aluminium rods, situated close to his Hillside Terrace complex.) Taniguchi, who attracted attention internationally with his rather conservative prize-winning competition entry (2000) for the extension of the MoMA in New York, realised a series of museums with peaceful forms and meticulous detail in Japan. The peculiar quality of his museums stems from his conscious endeavour to relate his buildings to their surroundings. He has recently also turned to minimalist structures, as the reduced forms and surfaces of his design for the Tokyo National Museum – The Gallery of Horyuji Treasures (1999) show. At the beginning of the new millennium, Japan’s architecture scene seems to be a dazzling mixture of different approaches. Some of the basic positions adapted by Japanese architects are described below.

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Tadao Ando – Light and Space Tadao Ando was unquestionably the outstanding figure in the early nineties. He succeeded, like none of his colleagues at the time, in drawing attention to Japan by presenting a new image of contemporary Japanese architecture on the international arena. He developed a quite, meditative perspective, creating buildings whose sensuous appearance was achieved by the use of raw concrete and accentuated light. In a world increasingly dominated by computers, Ando responds to the urban and social situation with buildings that turn away and by trying to heighten consciousness of the body and allow for genuine experience of space in the physical sense. His preferred stylistic means is fair-face concrete, made to ever-greater perfection, and structured by the dimensions of the shuttering boards and visible anchor holes. With this approach, he contributed towards the international renaissance of this material. Born in Osaka in 1941, Ando, an autodidact, first appeared on the scene in the mid-seventies with simple, minimalist high-rises that re-interpreted traditional building types and rigidly turned their backs on the chaos of the city. Alongside his early single-family houses – the Koshino house in Ashiya (1984) probably being the most famous – he soon realised other building projects, applying the same materials and a similar concept to churches, temples and commercial buildings. Tadao Ando combined his rooms by superimposing clear volumes based on simple geometrical forms. He used narrow glazed openings to offset different building elements from one another, thus creating depth. He staged one of his most powerful architectural works in the form of the Protestant chapel in Ibaraki (1989). And it was certainly no accident that this church was given the epithet “Church of Light”: on entering the simple, box-shaped building of fair-face concrete, the visitor’s attention is immediately drawn towards the sun-drenched cross on the altar wall opposite (fig. 3.20). The strong contrast between darkness and the light, created by a slit only 20 centimetres wide, intensifies this effect. With very simple yet carefully considered means, Ando succeeded here in addressing the senses and creating an atmosphere of solemn grandeur. With the Chikatsu Asuka Museum (1994), situated on a

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prehistorical burial ground outside Osaka, Ando tried to reproduce the atmosphere of one of the nearby graves in a main room that is uncharacteristically gloomy for him. The roof plays a crucial role here: designed as a monumental perron, it serves as a viewing platform looking out on the nearby burial mounds (fig 3.1). The outside surface of the roof forms a kind of museum hall. Ando’s most typical museum is probably the Naoshima Art Museum (1992, extended in 1995) with its complex transitions from the exterior to the interior. The building is picturesquely positioned on a tongue of land in the middle of a national park by the sea (fig 3.19). The plan is based on distinct geometrical forms, with oval playing an important role; the courtyards and a greater part of the building’s volume are sunk into the earth in order to disturb the natural surroundings as little as possible. Also sunk into the earth, but situated in an urban environment, is his Garden of Fine Art in Kyoto (1994). The museum is based on an exhibition concept that people in the West find rather strange: the exhibits are paintings, mostly historical European works, reproduced on ceramics. Even so, he succeeds, amidst the hustle and bustle of the city, in creating a refuge with very special qualities. This extraordinary open-air museum, which visitors traverse on ramps and walkways, is remarkable for its tranquil and distinctly designed water basins, waterfalls and the accentuated play of light and shadow. Having made his name with his small, meditative rooms, Ando later transposed the design principles he had applied here to ever-larger projects, creating (like Richard Meier and Frenk Gehry in the USA) a trademark in the process. His architecture has become a brand product. Nevertheless, the constant repetition of the same stylistic elements has always been successful. Owing their uniform design, some of his more recent large buildings lack the class of his earlier works. Now and then, however, Tadao Ando still manages to design small buildings that display all those qualities for which he once became famous. Furthermore, these buildings are considered among the best that Japanese architecture has to offer. Two of them, a small residential building in Osaka (see p. 49ff and p. 126ff) and a simple museum exhibiting an artwork by James Turrell, are documented in detail in this book. For the small museum, Ando used wood, his favourite authentic material after concrete; he, again used wood for the Japanese Pavilion at Expo, Seville (1992) and for the Komyo-ji-Temple in Sajio (2000). And he is a master at this craft: the simple building was thereby built to give an almost archaic impression thanks to its simple modern details executed in the spirit of tradition. Toyo Ito – “Blurring Architecture” Toyo Ito is the second great representative on the contemporary Japanese architecture scene. He and Ando were born in the same year (1941), and both came on the scene in the same year (1976) with a highly individual single-family house. And they were both undoubtedly influenced to some extent by Shinohara’s house concepts. Like Ando, Ito’s basic position reveals a sympathy for Modernism. Apart from that, however, their architecture is as different as their personalities. Here the sensuous yet severe and agile Tadao Ando, and there the intellectual, Toyo Ito. Where Ando’s architecture is heavy, plastic and organically grows out of the earth, Ito strives to “create architecture like an 41

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unstable flowing body”, with transformable, transparent rooms. Where Ando restricts himself to authentic building materials such as concrete and wood, and minimises detail, Ito works with industrially manufactured products and creates complex architecture. Where Ando creates complexity by overlapping spaces, Ito plays with overlapping surfaces: glass and punched metal sheeting, grids and plastic panels. Heavily influenced by Shinohara at first, Ito developed his very own style at both the formal and conceptual levels. The basic theme of his architecture nevertheless remains that of a changing society in an age of information. How does a work of architecture look that corresponds to the electronic age? This question plays a decisive role. Ito’s ideas on this culminated in the mediatheque, completed in 2001, in the northern Japanese city of Sendai (see p. 148ff), which is one of the most highly regarded buildings of the new century throughout the world. With this building, Toyo Ito finally soared to the top of the architectural league and became a model for a younger generation of Japanese architects. His mediatheque features flexibly usable levels which visitors can use as they choose; on the facades he tries out differing degrees of transparency to realise the theme of virtual reality in real architecture. Ito also seeks to symbolise transparency by visual representations of water: the tubular steel load-bearing structure, which is not quite rational in static terms, is an allusion to Sea weed floating back and forth in the sea: a symbol of a flowing architecture. However, the visitor needs to know all of these allusions in order to grasp them fully. Irrespective of such symbolism, one of the principle qualities of his mediatheque lies simply in its noble design and its precise, minimalised details. During the day, it expresses considerable openness, from the inside to the outside. At night, by contrast, the brightly lit rooms behind the dissolved street facades expose the building’s filigree structure, recalling the early Modernists’ ideas on transparency. With his timelessly clear architecture, however, Ito moves away from the relaxing quality of his earlier buildings, such as the Silver Hut, with its improvised air (see p. 49ff). Toyo Ito’s path to the mediatheque in Sendai is marked not only by countless mall residential buildings, but also by temporary installations such as “Egg of the Winds” (1991) and the “Tower of the Winds” (1986), where he translated environmental signals – traffic noises and gusts of wind – into a computer-synchronised, moving play of light on the facades. For his Municipal Museum in Yatsushiro (1991), Ito transposes the lightness of his architecture onto an exhibition building. He achieves this by sinking the ground floor and crowning the transparent top floor with one of his typical multi-vaulted roofs with a silvery shine. Toyo Ito also created an atmosphere of openness at his Old People’s Home in Yatsushiro (1994). There, he colours his building in a seemingly arbitrary fashion, and softens the transitions between the individual sections with casually arranged rooms (fig. 3.22). Kazuyo Sejima – Formulating the Transition Toyo Ito’s concepts were developed further by his former collaborator Kazuyo Sejima. Her radical approaches have made her one of the most influential models in the present especially among the young generation. Like Toyo Ito,

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Sejima likes to experiment with transparency to explore the border between physical and virtual existence. Indeed, her central theme is the relationship of a building to its surrounding environment, in which transition is a vital theme. Sometimes it appears as a puffer zone, as in her S-House in Okayama (1997). Her prime means of architectural expression involves playing with transparency, translucency and reflections. To achieve her goal, Sejima also uses contemporary industrially manufactured materials, translucent plastics and glass. The dissolution of the skins of buildings and the reduction of the load-bearing structure result in a certain minimalism, which sometimes negates structural facts. At times, the durability of her works suffers from her consistent application of spatial and aesthetic concepts. Sejima’s convincing room concepts, which are always based on strict plans, are as different as the situations for which they are designed. Here, houses shut themselves off from their surroundings just as radically as they open themselves completely: her strictly rectangular M-House (1997), an introverted house – with a courtyard – clad in corrugated steel and built (in Tokyo) to face the city represents the former attitude, whilst her irregularly shaped Small House (see p. 78ff), clad almost entirely in glass, reflects the latter. Sejima’s first important work, the Saishunkan Seiyaku Women’s Dormitory (1991) for female office workers at a company in Kumamoto is completely closed off to the outside world. In consequence, it is all the more open on the inside: a large flowing room, bordered on each side by a row of smaller (individual) rooms, accommodates all the communal functions. A minimal degree of individual space is confronted by a maximum degree of communal 3.23

space. Sejima developed innovative ground plans for social housing projects for the Housing Development in Gifu (1998, second building section 2002, fig. 3.23). Inside a rigid system, a cross-wall construction with short spans, she arranged simple room structures that were flexibly combinable to form maisonettes, thus allowing a variety of possible uses and lifestyles. For the hhstyle.com furniture store (2001) in Tokyo, priority was given to transparency, reflection, and the relationship of the building to the surroundings. Design chairs were consciously placed along the rear side like shelves, becoming part of the facade. Functioning as an optical puffer zone, they form a layered transition from the inside to the outside (see p. 74ff). Shigeru Ban – Experimenting with Structures and Space Radical space concepts, thematising the transition from the inside to the outside, and a largely minimalist approach are also characteristic of Shigeru Ban’s work. What really distinguishes the lateral thinker Shigeru Ban from others, however, is his boundless interest in new structures and materials. Whereas most Japanese architects of his generation tend to see solving technical problems as a means to an end, Ban shows considerable delight in experimenting with structures. His every design reflects his perpetual quest to develop personally, and extend his own architectural range. It is no accident that he refers to his residential buildings as case-study houses. Being a typical loner, he is not affiliated with any of the “family trees” so common in Japan. This is certainly due to the fact that he studied in the USA and never worked for an architect in his native country (apart from a brief interlude with Arata Isozaki). Shortly after his return from the United States, Shigeru Ban established his own office in Tokyo. Initially, he managed by designing exhibitions. It was while doing this work that he discovered cardboard rolls, the type used for rolling lengths of material. The first time he used them for decorative purposes was when he designed an Avar Aalto exhibition in his hometown of Tokyo. He soon discovered the material’s structural advantages and began using it to support loads (fig 3.21). The great highlight in his use of cardboard-tube structures was undoubtedly his design for the Japanese Pavilion for Expo 2000 in Hanover (the restrictions imposed by the German authorities notwithstanding), which made him an international star overnight. He had already worked with similar cardboard tube structures in designing, on his own initiative, emergency shelters for victims of catastrophes around the world, as after the devastating earthquakes in Kobe (1995) and in Turkey (1999). It would be unfair, however, to reduce Shigeru Ban‘s innovations to his cardboard-tube architecture, for his experimentation extends to other materials, too. For Furniture House (see p. 108ff), he used an inexpensive shelfsystem from the department store as a load-bearing structure and partition wall. For another building he developed a translucent heat-insulated building skin of cheap packaging material, and for a residential building he took the term curtain wall literally, using a synthetic curtain as an outside skin (see p. 51ff). For all his enormous enthusiasm for solving structural problems, Shigeru Ban is not a technician: he always combines his technical experiments with innovative room concepts. His idols are still Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with his concept of flowing space. A rather reserved character, Shigeru Ban is probably the most 43

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dazzling figure on the architectural scene in Japan today. He shows an equal interest in structural, aesthetic and spatial concepts, in publishing and in social projects. Kengo Kuma – The Material Is the Concept For Kengo Kuma, another architect of this generation, relationship to material is very different to that of Shigeru Ban and Kazuyo Sejima. By taking industrially manufactured materials and putting them to new, unconventional uses, Ban makes the material a part of the concept. Sejima, in contrast, sees the material merely as a means to an end, for creating spatial and aesthetic effects. Hence, in most cases she uses the same materials: thin steel profiles and glass, sometimes acrylic glass and concrete too. For Kengo Kuma, one could say that the material itself is the concept. 3.25

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Especially in his more recent buildings, which are mostly in the countryside, Kuma – whose work has developed in the most amazing way since he designed his Postmodernist M2 Building – has almost always focused on a single material: natural stone for the Stone Museum in Nasu (see p. 130ff); glass for his Water/Glass House in Atami (1995); bamboo for his Bamboo House in Kamakura (2002); and plastic for his Plastic House in Tokyo (2002). Kuma takes the relationship to the specific location very seriously, an approach that leads him to come up with a very different design for each building. A characteristic feature of his buildings is his use of lamellas, sometimes wooden, but occasionally of natural stone or plastic. Kuma regards the authentic material, with its texture, natural colouring and haptic qualities, as more important than the form of a building. Ultimately, the full

effect of a material is very difficult to grasp through images alone. Hence, in our media age, where almost everything is simulated by computers, this particular aspect assumes a special significance. Kuma created one of his most impressive buildings with his museum for Hiroshige Ando, the famous 19th-century painter, in Batoh (2000). The oblong building, with its simple gable roof, is clad all over – outside and in – with wooden lamellas. The archetypal form of a house, situated in the middle of a densely wooded area, is created by arranging the lamellas equidistantly. It is impossible to discern the design of the volumes enclosed in this translucent skin because the spatial (room) boundaries appear differently at different times, depending on the light and the atmosphere. The cedar skin becomes a translucent filter (fig. 3.25). Kuma also felt a certain loyalty to traditional Japanese architecture, and his lamellas represented a conscious attempt on his part to revive the character of the semi-transparent outside walls of the traditional house. Hiroshi Naito’s Expressionist Quiet The austere, simple Hiroshige Ando Museum, with its unassuming gable roof, vaguely recalls Hiroshi Naito’s early museums. Naito, who is of the same generation as Kuma and Ban, is an outsider among contemporary architects. Unlike Kengo Kuma, whose designs always reveal a certain feel for fashionable trends, Naito, untouched by passing fashions, has steadfastly gone his own way over the years. This quiet but very confident architect says that he does not want to be a star, and refers to his works as silent architecture. He consciously opposes the loud, screaming structures so customary in Japan today. He justifies his gable roofs, so characteristic of his designs, in terms of structural considerations. (For Naito, too, formal aspects are secondary.) He sets great store by durability. Going against the prevailing trend in present-day Japan, Naito wants to create durable buildings of lasting value, as well as rooms adapted to changed conditions and usable over a long period of time. In his eyes, the main task of architecture is to provide shelter against the weather and other external influences. Naito develops each detail with great care, composing his buildings with the aid of expressive supporting structures. His favourite building material is wood, but he also feels comfortable with other materials: he used steel for the protective roof for Kutani Ceramics (2002) in Kyushu, and fair-face concrete for a residential building in Kanazawa (1996).

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Niroshi Naito’s most outstanding work is the Seafolk Museum (1992), in the charming countryside at the end of the Ise Peninsula, next to the sea. The clearly defined structures, with their unassuming gable roofs, stand on a rectangular ground plan and radiate solemn grandeur, awakening associations with the famous shrines nearby. There is a genuine correspondence here between use and material form, thanks to the employment of wood for the main exhibition building and, above all, thanks to the curved laminated timber beams on the interior, which recalls the hull of a ship (fig. 3.24, 3.26). He also applied the principle of the supporting structure as a compositional element in his Mini House in Tokyo (1997) He abandoned the principle of the simple building form for the Makino Museum in Kochi (1999) to create an organic structure that blends harmonically with the protected countryside surrounding it (see p. 58ff).

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Small Houses – Great Concepts Small houses have traditionally played a very important role in Japan. Right up to the middle of the 20th century, a major city like Tokyo consisted almost entirely of narrow wooden constructions with an open plan, sliding paper walls, and straw (tatami) mats as flooring. Even today, just under half of the Japanese people live in densely populated conglomerations in closely packed single-family houses. The construction of apartment buildings has never really caught on in Japan, despite some promising starts such as the complexes designed by Riken Yamamoto. So, designing mini-houses remains an important task for architects, especially with the collapse of the bubble economy. A spontaneous delight in experimenting with plans and dwelling concepts, plus cultural and climatic conditions very different from those in Europe, has often produced startling results, which could well serve us as inspiration here too. Furthermore, the single-family house, with its compact size and almost standard spatial programm, provides an ideal gauge of the varying approaches of Japanese architects. It also conveniently reflects thematic differences between Japanese and Western approaches. This chapter examines the Japanese house from these two points of view. The projects presented here, as the treatment of the structure, the materials used, and the relationship to the surrounding environment clearly show, are influenced as much by local traditions as they are, in a variety of ways, by debate within Japan over both international and contemporary Japanese architecture. And it is precisely this exciting dialogue between Western and Far Eastern ideas that makes architecture such a fascinating subject. Since the mid-20th century, the development of the modern Japanese house has been shaped by two tendencies: the first is the cultivation of the home life, the retreat into the private sphere, and the second is a gradual and, in some cases, radical opening-up to the city. And although focus has shifted from preoccupation with aspects of the Modern Movement and a novel interpretation of the Japanese tradition to a debate on the city and society in the age of information, these two intertwined tendencies have remained a constant theme in the architecture of Japan for the past century, culminating in the residential housing projects discussed below. The examples shown here reveal that the architects have not always attached priority to the quality of life. Sometimes a delight in experimentation – in exploring boundaries – has gone so far that the practical utility of the houses has suffered, or that certain lifestyles have been imposed on the habitants. This is true of some of the buildings designed by Sejima, Shigeru Ban and FOBA. Yet it is precisely their preoccupation with houses that has made people challenge handed-down positions and consider unconventional solutions. (Some of the examples given involve weekend houses, where the approach was different from the very start.)

3.28

3.29

The Residential Building as an Artwork Kunio Maekawa worked with Le Corbusier in Paris from 1928 to 1930. When he designed his own home in 1942, he tried to combine his former teacher‘s principles of the freely designed facade and ground plan with traditional elements. 47

3.30

3.31

The spacious, brightly lit living room (fig. 3.30) with its white plastered wall surfaces and European furniture symbolises a modern lifestyle, whilst the interplay of light and shadow created by the translucent sliding elements is typically Japanese. These tensions are immanent to the entire project, which combines Western stylistic elements the Japanese architecture. Whereas Maekawa gives primacy to achieving a symbiosis of the two aforementioned tendencies, Kazuo Shinohara, in his House in White (1966), abstracts from the character of Japanese architecture and then interprets it in a modern language of forms. In the large two-storey living-cum-dining room, he cites traditional elements – the wooden sliding windows and the support (made from a cedar trunk) standing in the middle of the room – thereby transforming them into isolated symbols (fig. 3.31). Shinohara subsequently concentrated on building houses that were shut off from their surroundings and became increasingly interested in the residential building from a theoretical perspective. The empty white room, which gave the House in White its name, also became a characteristic feature of his later houses. Shinohara now gradually departed from the traditional repertoire of forms and began designing abstract compositions. In 1984, with an eye on his own house in Yokohama, Shinohara declared the dwelling house a work of art, a place where the construction becomes a fantasy world, a collage of diverse forms and materials uniting all references to contemporary and conventional architecture (fig. 3.28). The clearly structured interior offsets the unrest generated by the play of forms, whilst the cut-out openings provide a framed view, a detail as it were, of the surrounding hilly countryside. These openings reveal Shinohara’s unbroken affinity with traditional Japanese architecture. And in this design, at the very latest, it becomes apparent that preoccupation with space leads to the development of purely interior worlds. This notion is taken almost literally in Hiroshi Hara’s house designs. In his interiors, Hara formulated those qualities that he finds missing in the real city. The chaotic surroundings are shut out. For his own home in Machida, Tokyo (1974) he designed an image of a “city”. The street, the square and the structuring facade became metaphors (fig. 3.29). An “inner street” following the central axis is flanked by symmetrically arranged rooms that appear to be abstracted silhouettes of buildings. Ultimately, Shinohara and Hara responded to the question of contemporary living forms with art objects that more or less negated the house’s function as a home: the two architects thus withdrew from the general discussion to create for themselves the space where they could formulate their own responses.

3.32

48

Toyo Ito’s first important project, the house designed for his sister in Nakano, Tokyo (1975) is influenced by this perspective. White U stands within sight of the high-rises in Shinjuku, one of Tokyo’s commercial centres. To meet his widowed sister’s wish for a secluded, meditative retreat, Ito built a screened-off house that turned its back on the city (fig. 3.34, 3.35) The tunnel-like room of the U-shaped building, with its white plastered walls and partially cut-out openings, resembles a covered walk in a cloister. In contrast to the compositions by Hiroshi Hara and Tadao Ando, Ito’s room is directionless; the contours dissolve and

become intangible. The radical exclusion from the city and the concentration on the relationship between a human being and a work of architecture has no parallel in Ito’s oeuvre. His particular themes, namely the flowing, metamorphosing room and the differentiated transition from outside to inside, would assume greater significance in subsequent projects. In his own home, Silver Hut (1984), erected next to the plot where White U had stood before being demolished, Ito overcame the separation between inside and outside (fig. 3.36). The house is composed of single rooms separated from one another to a minimal degree. Each room is spanned by an arch-like structure. Perforated sheeting and grid structures have been used instead of solid walls. The ephemeral and the intangible, which Ito evoked in essays such as Blurring Architecture, have gradually disappeared from his projects.

3.33

Sensuous Concrete Ito’s more recent buildings are characterised by their clarity of design and greater perfection in the details. His house in Setagaya, Tokyo (1999), for example, is undoubtedly one of the finest single-family houses to be completed in Japan in recent years, and betrays little of the dogmatism of the examples mentioned above. It offers residents the greatest degree of freedom to use the house as they choose. In contrast to many a nobly executed residential building, it is even designed to accommodate the personal furnishings and household goods of the residents. The open courtyard, a traditional idea that Ito used for both White U and Silver Hut, is transformed here into a central entrance hall in this narrow building of fair-face concrete and matt glass. Individual rooms and working rooms, distributed over two floors, are arranged to the left and right of the hall. On the top floor, sliding doors of acrylic glass board not only allow users to change the disposition of the rooms but also offer a view across the entire floor (fig. 3.38). Anyone who so chooses can interpret this as a translation of traditional lifestyles with the aid of modern materials. Tadao Ando’s at Nomi House (1996) in Osaka, with its meticulous attention to detail, is of the same quality, whilst proceeding from a completely different concept. In contrast to Ito’s house in Setagaya, where carefully positioned openings and a large area of translucent glass along the street side of the building offer planned referential glimpses of the world outside, Ando rigorously seals off his house with high concrete walls. A single plain door establishes a relationship with the surroundings. Within these walls is a succession of courtyards and rooms. Access to the internal spaces is via the courtyards. This very individual concept, so simple on its face, goes way beyond the purely functional requirements of movement via the courtyards and stairs (fig. 3.41, 3.42). Ito‘s concept does not aim merely at a diversified use of space and hence of rooms, and at blurring the boundary between outside and in; it also addresses the reduced experience of nature within the city. The residents‘ distinct lifestyles are shaped by their direct experience of the wind, sun and rain, and sometimes even snow, as well as by seasonal changes. In a sense, Ando stage-manages the contrast between the plain fair-face concrete walls and the sparsely greened courtyards in order to intensify the sensuous impact of both elements. A similar approach can be found in almost all of 49

3.34

3.35

3.36

3.37

50

his dwelling houses, his exploitation of the effects of light on the concrete being another decisive element. Ando himself sees his design for Azuma House (1976, fig. 3.40), a twostorey terraced house, as the real point of departure in his oeuvre. At the dwelling house in Osaka, the narrow plan is interrupted by a courtyard, whence the stairs ascend. When the sun shines, the light entering becomes part of the overall setting. Ando magnified this effect at his Koshino House (1984). In both the studio and the two-storey residential area of the single-family house, he produced an atmospheric interplay between light entering via thin strip skylights and shadow on the smooth concrete walls. This effect is most impressive on the corrugated studio wall, where the falling light dissolves the solidity of the concrete surface. Opening up to the City In contrast to the sense of distance embodied in Ando’s houses, residential buildings in general are increasingly opening themselves to the city, as projects by Shigeru Ban, Kazuyo Sejima and the FOBA demonstrate. Houses are being erected on ever smaller plots and supplied with minimised furnishings and fittings. As a consequence, the urban environment increasingly has to fulfil the functions normally performed by the house. With her Small House (2000) in Tokyo, Kazuyo Sejima designed a residential building within the constraints imposed by this type of residual plot. The transparent facade establishes a direct relationship between the house and the city (see p. 78ff), a striking contrast to earlier projects such as the M-House in Tokyo (1997), whose closed facade shuts the building off from the outside world. Focusing entirely on spatial impact and transparency issues, Sejima reduces the bearing structure to a minimum. The building’s specific individual form was thus determined by the prescribed space. Sejima rendered the existing negative space visible in the densely built-up city. In view of the small floor area, Sejima challenged the residents to apply their improvisational skills, an approach that she had already formulated for projects such as Platform (1988) and Platform II (1990), which clearly refer to Ito’s house. A common feature of Sejima’s projects is the provisional character of space, which remains in its entirety a built concept (fig. 3.37). All this notwithstanding, the unusual form of the mini-house, as embodied in the Small House, is nothing new. Back in the 1960s, Takamitsu Azuma realised a building (at around the same time as Shinohara’s House in White was completed), which can certainly be viewed as a forerunner of this development. He erected his own dwelling house (1966) in a gap measuring only 20 square metres in Shibuya – one of Tokyo’s shopping and commercial centres. It is a six-storey tower, whose unusual silhouettes are produced (as is the case with Sejima’s projects) by the spacing between his structure and the other buildings. The raw-reinforced-concrete building, whose individual rooms are packed on top of one another, creates a vivid counterpoint to an indifferent environment (fig. 3.39). The openings cut into the building respond to the city’s chaos, reflecting a great interest in the surroundings and bringing, through the concrete, framed images of the outside into the rooms. In comparison with Azuma’s powerfully sculptured architecture, Sejima’s minimalism seems almost fragile. Even so, the formal languages of both approaches reflects

3.38

the period in which they were formulated. Shigeru Ban went a step further than Kazuyo Semima with his Curtain Wall House in Tokyo (1995). Whereas the space occupied by Sejima’s Small House is sealed by its transparent facade, Ban merely uses a white curtain as a skin to cover the two residential levels. The residential areas are open to the street; only the bedroom on the setback set-back second floor is protected by walls. Physical contact with the surroundings shifts the act of living into the surrounding urban space (fig. 3.44). The effect is all the more dramatic because the building stands on an exposed corner plot, allowing passers-by to look in from two sides. In the onestorey Wall-less House, a weekend house in Nagano (1997), Ban refrained from structuring the rooms and the facade. Situated on a slope, the floor is vaulted to create a rear supporting wall which also became the main support for the flat roof spanning the ground plan. The residential level is furnished only with a bench integrated into a kitchen installed along one wall, a free-standing WC and a bath-tub set alongside a very low sideboard (fig. 3.43). The City as Dwelling Although the houses described above embody very distinct concepts, not one architect has so far examined the functions of the house. With their Aura House in Tokyo (1996), the FOBA architects not only made the private sphere public, they also transferred it into the urban space (fig. 1.2). The buildings were erected without the customary functions on one of those typical deep and narrow plots found in central Tokyo residential districts. Whereas Ban transcends the physical separation of the private and public spheres, in this case, the functional boundaries between the house and the city are dissolved. The fair-face concrete cross-member is covered by a translucent membrane, the only visible finish on the outside. At the same time, this skin expresses the interior: there are no furnishings and fittings, no partition walls, only concrete surfaces – this is an enveloped void that establishes contact indirectly, via the skin, with the outside world. It is now the city space itself in which the residents dwell: eating in restaurants, washing at the people’s swimming pool, shopping in the multifunctional 24-hour convenience store, spending their free time at the cinema or at the karaoke bar. Home-living in the traditional sense ceases to exist: private life becomes public. Universal Room The FOBA pursued a different approach with its Pleats house. Where dwelling and city space merge in the Aura project, here the boundary is drawn within the house; the focus of the discussion on “how to live” is shifted to the ground plan (see p. 86ff). The “layering” of Japanese residential houses according to the “oku” principle, i.e. from the outside to the inside, with increasingly private zones, is reversed here. With this reversal, the FOBA dissolves the difference between the public and private spheres, and home-living is conceived as an experiment. Jun Tamaki also deals with the boundaries between private and public space. However, his architecture is inspired by a completely different idea to that embodied in FOBA’s Pleats project. Appearing externally as abstract cubes, his houses are literally hollowed out from their respective rooms. The positive volume creates negative volumes: the spaces. Disappearing in the remaining “mass”, the structure is thus 51

3.39

3.41

52

3.40

deprived of any conceptual meaning. In these two projects, the theme of a central space stands in the foreground. Whereas FOBA pushes all remaining utilities (kitchen, bathroom, etc.) through the facade to the outside, Tamaki has them disappear between the living space and the facade. At the Tofu House in Kyoto (1997), the one-storey central room is designed for multi-functional use: as reception, living and dining area and as a bedroom. It is not only the centre in terms of the building’s geometry, but also in terms of its contents (see p. 110ff). The Hakama House in Kyoto (1998), in contrast, makes a clearer distinction between living space and private rooms. All of the individual rooms open out onto a two-storey centre that can be completely sealed off by curtains; the centre is not unequivocally defined initially and only assigned its function when it is individually occupied by the residents (fig. 3.45). The adjacent private rooms are only separated by the curtain, making complete withdrawal impossible. Tamaki’s houses offer surprising proposals and solutions that could serve us as inspiration too. After all, the question of creating dwelling forms in keeping with our time is not of topical interest only in Japan. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, who have named their architect’s office the Bow-Wow Studio, produced another variation on the open common room linking all the functions with one another. Their Asama weekend house (2000) has neither walls nor doors. Where Tamaki works with curtains and sliding doors hidden in niches, Bow-Wow use shear walls located in the roof structure to zone the large room. Depending on the position of the sun, the light falling through the skylight accentuates the skilful sub-divisioning of the large room (see p. 94ff). With their rational architecture, distinct details and warm surface tones, Bow-Wow have created an unusual yet subdued interior. In both Tamaki’ and Bow-Wow’s buildings, the openings, situated to catch specific views (provided in traditional buildings by opening sliding elements), emphasise the fact that the reference to the outside is an important theme. The Structure as an Element of Spatial Design Go Yoshimoto succeeded in intelligently translating Japanese dwelling forms into a modern wooden structure in a residential building with an integrated studio for an artist and her two grown-up children in Kobe (1993). Here, interior of the oblong slab structure is largely determined by the form of the load-bearing structure (see p. 98ff). The interior finishing has been kept as simple as possible to allow the rhythm and the expressive force of the load-bearing structure to come into their own. The architect refers to his house as a barn, an allusion to the rough charm of American barns. And to strengthen the spatial impression the plan bends slightly, directing the beholder’s glance inexorably to the wooden frame. Despite the individuality of Yohimoto’s approach, his choice of simple forms and natural materials fuses traditional and modern elements in the most natural way imaginable. Although Hiroshi Naito’s house in Setagaya, Tokyo (1997) is very different, it is not without its similarities. Like Yoshimoto, Naito has a predilection for wood. And with his structures, he has played a major role in renewing wooden architecture in Japan. His narrow building, which is illuminated via the end faces, stands on a tiny plot. The form of the unclad

interior is completely dominated by the regularity of the open structure. If Yohimoto’s architecture is fascinating for its casual, relaxed feel, in Naito’s building it is the strict rhythms of the pine load-bearing structure (see p. 104), accentuated by the light entering from outside, which captivates us. Not unlike Ito, with his house in Setagaya, Yoshimoto and Naito have designed introverted residential houses which, despite some subtle links with their surroundings, are primarily self-referential. Expressionism in Wood Hitoshi Abe’s guesthouse in Miyagi (1997) stands in a completely different environment, on a peaceful plot in a wood. The building can also be used as a single-family house. Abe designed an exciting expressive interior whose atmosphere is intensified by the light falling from the aperture high above. The dominant effect of the wood inside the room is further emphasised by the white plastered balustrade of the ascending stairs. Even here, the structure remains hidden from sight, being clad by a horizontal shell (fig. 3.32, 3.33).

3.42

A Pragmatic Modernist Waro Kishi, whose position is marked more by his pragmatism than by dogmatic concepts, is best known for his countless single-family houses in the Kansai region. His houses are characterised by their timeless modern design, their functionality, the way they have been consciously integrated into their surroundings, and the charm they develop through use. This also applies to his dwelling house in Suzaku near Nara (1998), a complex consisting of two residential slabs arranged around a courtyard (see p. 118ff) in such a way that the complex can be experienced from a variety of angles. All this, combined with the smooth surfaces of fair-face concrete and wood, creates a pleasant homely environment. The luxuriously furnished, Western “living room” is located in a carefree way next to the traditional tatami room. This house embodies an attitude far removed from the conceptual orientation of Kazuyo Sejima’s fragile structures. One of Kishi’s most well-known houses is that in Nipponbashi, Osaka (1992) – a forerunner of today’s minihouses. The narrow multi-storey building in the middle of Osaka’s Naniwa-ku district is a precisely detailed steelframe construction: a shelf of glass and steel (fig. 3.27). The furnishings and fittings on the lower floors are based on a simple design; above these floors, a 6-metre-high dining and living level occupies two-thirds of the building’s depth. Behind this area is the roof terrace, which Kishi uses to take up Le Corbusier’s idea of a roof garden. Even though Kishi himself denies any relationship to tradition in his architecture, they are still apparent in both his conception of space and tectonics. East and West – Exciting Juxtapositions As in Waro Kishi’s house in Suzaku, many modern dwelling houses have their classical tatami rooms, which are often used for the tea ceremony. In the Far East, where materials and symbols carry greater weight than do the dogmas of the Western modernists, leading architects see no contradiction in integrating them into their designs. In his house in Hokusetsu (2001), Toshihito Yokouchi has stacked Western and Eastern rooms on top of one another, delib53

3.43

3.44

54

erately contrasting the two lifestyles (see p. 122ff). Yokouchi also makes this contradiction a theme of the structure: a conventional post-and-beam construction has been placed on the insulated reinforced-concrete structure of the ground floor. The building thus becomes a symbol for the dialogue between East and West – the two spheres influence one another, and this is precisely what gives his architecture its special charm. Ultimately, perhaps this is the thing that so fascinates us in the Japanese house: the juxtapositioning of traditional and modern lifestyles, the way they are both accepted as a matter of course. And, needless to say, this is a tension, or the resolution of a tension, that reflects the state of Japanese society itself, ever striving for peaceful coexistence between the Zeitgeist and tradition.

Bibliography: 1 Binder, Hans, »Japans junge Wölfe«, Junge Avantgarde, db – deutsche bauzeitung 12, Stuttgart 1991, pp. 54-61 2 Bognar, Botond, Die neue japanische Architektur, Stuttgart/Berlin/Cologne 1991 3 Buntrock, Dana, Japanese Architecture as a Collaborative Process, London/New York 2002 4 Dal Co, Francesco Tadao Ando – Complete Works, London 1995 5 Dimensions of the Urban House, JA, The Japan Architect 34, Tokyo 1999 6 Ernst & Sohn (ed.), Kazuo Shinohara, Berlin 1994 7 Feldmeyer, Gerhard G., Die Kraft des Widersprüchlichen, Bauwelt 21, Berlin 1988, pp. 856–872 8 Feustel, Marc; Schneider, Ulrich, Toyo Ito – Blurring Architecture, Aachen 1999 9 Fletcher, Banister, A history of architecture, London 1996 10 Frampton, Kenneth, Die Architektur der Moderne. Eine kritische Baugeschichte, Stuttgart, 1997 11 Gabriel, Andreas, “I always try to do something new” – Shigeru Ban on Experimentation, Detail 8, Munich, 2001, pp. 1448-1450 12 Gleiter, Jörg H., Moderne und Tradition, Bauwelt 1995, pp. 2461-2467 13 Institut francais d´architecture, Itsuko Hasegawa, Basel/Boston/Berlin, 1997 14 »Japon«, L´architecture d´aujourd´hui 338, Paris 2002 15 Kira, Moriko; Terada, Mariko (ed.), Japan. Towards Total scape, NAI exhibition catalogue, Rotterdam 2000 16 Kishi, Waro, 2G, no. 19, Barcelona 2001 17 Klauser, Wilhelm; Yamamoto, Riken, Riken Yamamoto, Basel/Boston/Berlin 1999 18 Klotz, Heinrich, Vision der Moderne – Das Prinzip Konstruktion, Munich 1986 19 Knabe, Christopher; Noennig, Joerg Rainer (ed.), Shaking the Foundations, Japanese Architects in Dialogue, Munich/London/New York 1999 20 Kurokawa, Kisho, From Metabolism to Symbiosis, London 1992 21 Laurence King Publishing, Shigeru Ban, New York 2001 22 Meyhöfer, Dirk (Ed.), Contemporary Japanese Architects, Cologne 1993 23 Montagnana, Francesco, Architectural Guide Japan Basel/Boston/Berlin 1997 24 Naito, Hiroshi, Thoughts on Pitched Roofs, Detail 5, Munich 1999, pp. 784-785 25 Rössler, Hannes (Ed.), Minihäuser in Japan, Salzburg 2000 26 Schaarschmid-Richter, Irmtraud, Toyo Ito, Weinheim 1995 27 Schittich, Christian (ed.), Single Family Houses, Munich/Basel/Boston/Berlin 2000 28 Schittich, Christian (ed.), Building Skins, Munich/Basel/Boston/Berlin 2001 29 Schittich, Christian, Hiroshi Naito: Silent Architecture, Shinkenchiku 12, Tokyo 1997

30 Schittich, Christian, Timber construction in Japan – Past and Present, Detail 1, Munich 1997, pp. 4–7 31 Schittich, Christian, Tadao Andos Museums – an Interview, Detail 2, Munich 1997, pp. 137–140 32 Schittich, Christian, The Significance of Materials: an Interview with Kengo Kuma, Detail 7/8, Munich 2002, pp. 892–897 33 Shigeru Ban, JA, The Japan Architect 30, Tokyo 1998 34 Speidel, Manfred, Japanische Architektur, Geschichte und Gegenwart, Düsseldorf 1983 35 Stewart, David B., The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture, Tokyo/New York 1987 36 Tadao Ando/Inside Outside, a + u, Architecture and Urbanism 378, Tokyo 2002 37 Taut, Bruno; Speidel, Manfred, Das japanische Haus und sein Leben, Berlin 1997 38 »The House«, a + u, Architecture and Urbanism 361, Tokyo 2000 39 Toyo Ito, 2G, no.2, GG, Barcelona 1997 40 Watanabe, Hiroshi, Waro Kishi – Building and Projects, Stuttgart/London 2000 41 Watanabe, Hiroshi, The Architecture of Tokyo, Stuttgart Fellbach 2001 42 Wiegelmann, Andrea, The Media Centre in Sendai – an Interview with Toyo Ito, Detail 7, Munich 2001, pp. 1202-1212

Illustrations: 3.1 Chikatsu Asuka Museum near Osaka, Tadao Ando 1994 3.2 Cluster in the Sky, sketch, Arata Isozaki 1962 3.3 Sky House, Tokyo, Kiyonori Kikutake 1958 3.4 Hiroshima Peace Centre Memorial Museum, Kenzo Tange 1956 3.5 Olympic Sports Halls, Tokyo, Kenzo Tange 1964 3.6 Nagakin Capsule Tower, Tokyo, sketch of residential capsule, Kisho Kurokawa 1963 3.7 Nagakin Capsule Tower, Tokyo, Kisho Kurokawa 1962 3.8 »54 windows«, Tokyo, Kazuhiro Ishii 1975 3.9 Yamato International Building, Tokyo, Hiroshi Hara 1986 3.10 Sumida Culture Factory, Tokyo, Itsuko Hasegawa 1994 3.11 Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, Fumihiko Maki 1990 3.12 Aoyama Technical College, Tokyo, Makato Sei Watanabe 1990 3.13 M2 Building, Tokyo, Kengo Kuma Maki 1991 3.14 Ark, Dental Clinic in Kyoto, Shin Takamatsu 1983 3.15 Hillside Terrace, Tokyo, overall perspective, Fumihiko Maki 1969–1992 3.16 Kyoto Concert Hall, sketch, Arata Isozaki 1995 3.17 Hotakubo Residental Complex, Kumamoto, Riken Yamamoto 1991 3.18 School extension, Tokyo, Yoshio Taniguchi 2002 3.19 Naoshima Art Museum, general plan, Tadao Ando, 1992, extension 1995 3.20 Chapel in Ibaraki, interior, Tadao Ando 1989 3.21 Miyake Design Studio Gallery,Tokyo, Shigeru Ban 1994 3.22 Old People‘s Home in Yatsushiro, Toyo Ito 1994 3.23 Housing Development in Gifu, facade detail, Kazuyo Sejima 1998 3.24 Seafolk Museum on the Ise Peninsula, view, Hiroshi Naito 1992 3.25 Hiroshige Ando Museum, Batoh, Kengo Kuma 2000 3.26 Seafolk Museum on the Ise Peninsula, Hiroshi Naito 1992 3.27 House in Nipponbashi, Osaka, Waro Kishi 1992 3.28 Shinohara House, Yokohama, interior, Kazuo Shinohara 1984 3.29 Hara House, Tokyo, »internal road«, Hiroshi Hara 1974 3.30 Maekawa House, Kunio Maekawa, 1942 3.31 House in White, Tokyo, living room, Kazuo Shinohara 1966 3.32 Guesthouse in Miyagi, ground plan, Hitoshi Abe 1997 3.33 Guesthouse in Miyagi, interior, Hitoshi Abe 1997 3.34 White U, Tokyo, ground plan, Toyo Ito 1975 3.35 White U, Tokyo, interior, Toyo Ito 1975 3.36 Silver Hut, Tokyo, Toyo Ito 1984 3.37 Platform II by Mount Yatsugatake, Kazuyo Sejima 1990 3.38 House in Setagaya, Tokyo, Toyo Ito 1999 3.39 Azuma House, Tokyo, Takamitsu Azuma 1966 3.40 Azuma House, Osaka, Tadao Ando 1976 3.41, Nomi House, Osaka, ground plans, Tadao Ando 1996 3.42 Nomi House, Osaka, Tadao Ando 1996 3.43 Weekend house »Wall-less House«, Nagano, section, Shigeru Ban 1997 3.44 Curtain Wall House, Tokyo, Shigeru Ban 1995 3.45 Hakama House, Kyoto, interior, Jun Tamaki 1998

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Geographical Location of Projects

Syntax, S. Takamatsu (P. 38 ) Kyoto Concert Hall, A. Isozaki (P. 39) Garden of Fine Arts, T. Ando (P. 41) House Hakama (P. 52) and Tofu House in Ukyo-kui, J. Tamaki (P. 52, P. 110) Guest House in Temple Grounds, T. Yamagushi (P. 142)

Housing Development, K. Sejima (P. 43)

»Pleats« House, Foba (P. 51, P. 86)

Hotakubo Residental Complex, R. Yamamoto (P. 39) Saishunkan Seiyaku Women’s Dormitory, K. Sejima (P. 43)

Art House (P.126) and Art Museum (P. 41), T. Ando

Hiroshima Peace Centre, K. Tange (P. 33)

Mineyama

Hiroshima Gifu

Kyoto Naoshima

Ibaraki

Nagoya

Kobe Osaka

Bunraku Puppet Theatre, K. Ishii (P. 36) Municipal Museum, T. Ito (P. 42) Old People’s Home, T. Ito (P. 42)

Kumamoto

Kochi

Nara

Yama

Toba

Seiwa Yatsushiro

House, K. Takeyama (P. 82) Seafolk Museum, H. Naito (P. 45) Botanical Museum, H. Naito (P. 45, P. 58)

House and Studio, G. Yoshimoto (P. 52, P. 98) House, T. Kawai (P. 66)

House in Suzaku, W. Kishi (P.118) Church and Sunday School, T. Ando (P. 40, P.134) Chikatsu-Asuka Museum (P. 40), Nomi House (P. 49) and Azuma House (P. 50), T. Ando House in Nipponbashi, W. Kishi (P. 53) House in Hokusetsu, T. Yokouchi (P. 53, P. 122)

56

Sapporo

Platform and Platform II, K. Sejima (P. 50)

Odate

Mediatheque, T. Ito (P. 148) Stadium (P. 166), H. Abe

Sendai

Nasu Batoh Karuizawa

Stone Museum, K. Kuma (P. 44, P. 130) Hiroshige Ando Museum, K. Kuma (P. 45) Weekend House, Bow-Wow (P. 52, P. 94)

Yatsu-ga-take Koshigaya Tokyo

naka-ko

Machida Yokohama

Day-Care Centre for Children, S. Ban (P.62)

University, R. Yamamoto (P. 160)

Olympic Sports Halls, K. Tange (P. 34) Hillside Terrace, F. Maki (P. 35, P. 40) Curtain Wall House, S. Ban (P. 43, P. 51) House in Shibuya, T. Azuma (P. 50) House in Setagaya (P. 49) and House in Sakurajosui (P. 70), T. Ito Furniture Store (P. 43, P. 74) and Small House (P. 50, P. 78), K. Sejima Housing Development, A. Watanabe (P. 114) House and Studio, H. Naito (P. 53, P. 104)

House, H. Hara (P. 48) House, K. Shinohara (P. 48)

Hadano

House, Tezuka Architects (P. 90) House, S. Ban (P. 44, P. 108)

The map shows the locations of the projects of the projects contained in the following section and a some of the modern buildings mentioned in the introductory chapters.

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Botanical Museum near Kochi Architects: Naito Architect & Associates, Tokyo

With some 84 per cent of its area covered with forest, the island of Shikoku – situated south of Honshu, the main island of Japan – possesses the country’s largest reserves of timber. High above the town of Kochi, on the flank of Mount Godai, lies the Dr Makino botanical museum. The development comprises two structures, an exhibition hall and the rectangular main building, which are linked by a walkway. As a result of their organically shaped roofs, the two tracts seem to nestle against the hillside. The roof construction of this ensemble by Hiroshi Naito is as impressive as it is fascinating. In his formal design, the architect was inspired by plant and animal structures, especially those of leaves and skeletons. The broad, cantilevered roofs, for example, have spine-like ridge purlins that lend the structures their dynamic quality and draw them in broad curves round the internal courtyards. The organic forms of the buildings are derived from the free layout of the laminated timber trusses and beams that extend from the spines. Set out to varying pitches, the beams on the courtyard side are fixed via individually adjustable triangular steel elements to a tubular foot purlin. The exhibition spaces open on to the courtyards with large areas of glazing. On this side, the roofs are also cantilevered out to create flowing transitions between indoor and outdoor space in the tradition of Japanese architecture. The external areas are conceived in such a way that, in a few years’ time, the buildings will be surrounded by tall trees and the architecture will merge to an even greater extent into the surrounding landscape. Sections scale 1:1000

Site plan scale 1:4000

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Day-Care Centre for Children in Odate Architects: Shigeru Ban Architects, Tokyo

The warm tones of wood and the play of light on the curved walls and the floor of this day-care centre for children are the first impressions one has of the interior. The nursery was designed for a hospital in Odate in the north of Honshu, the main island of Japan. The most striking feature of the calm, tranquil internal space, however, is the construction of the enclosing surfaces. More than most other architects, Shigeru Ban has devoted a great deal of his energy to experimentation. With each new building, he seeks to explore fresh paths. His fields of interest range from innovative spatial concepts to new materials and forms of construction. Some years ago, Ban became known for his structures built of cardboard tubes. Studies for the use of bamboo, membranes and plastics followed. His latest buildings are distinguished by their simple spaces and clear articulation, a development that extends as far as monospace solutions. The composite structure of the present nursery is based on Ban’s work with Frei Otto, in which he explored forms of construction using plywood elements. Externally, the single-storey building has the appearance of a cubic volume tilted on its side, with one edge seemingly buried in the ground. The outer skin, which consists of fibrereinforced plastic and trapezoidal-section ribbed metal sheeting, lends the structure a light, transparent appearance. Access is possible from both ends. The interior comprises a large space for the children and the nursery staff, with a self-contained white box – housing the kitchen and sanitary facilities – inserted within it. The character of the internal space is largely determined by the narrow, curved plywood strips drawn round the circumference and fixed to the foundations with steel anchor pieces. The form is stabilized by longitudinal laminated planks boltfixed to the curved strips at the points of intersection. This two-layer construction creates a relief-like grid with square openings distributed evenly over the curved surface. Daylight is able to penetrate the skin through these openings, creating a lively play of light in the interior. Using simple means, it proved possible to create an atmosphere that owes its quality to the spare finishings and which reveals a dialectic with space and materials. In northern Japan, there is a lot of snow in winter. The timberbeam pitched roof, with a 90° angle at the ridge, is calculated to bear a snow load of at least 4.4 kN/m2. The steel loadbearing structure fixed to the curved elements supports the outer weather-resisting skin of fibre-reinforced plastic and ribbed metal sheeting. 62

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Sections scale 1:50 1 1.2 mm trapezoidal-section ribbed galvanized steel sheeting 2 2 mm fibre-reinforced plastic sheeting 3 120/120 mm structural timbers 4 90/90 mm timber struts 5 Ø 25 mm steel rod 6 275/275/6 mm steel plate 7 galvanized sheet-steel cover strip 8 600/30 mm plywood strips 9 floor construction: 12 mm cherry boarding 12 mm screed around underfloor heating 200 mm bed of concrete separating layer 50 mm thermal insulation 60 mm bed of concrete 90 mm layer of gravel

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House in Kobe Architects: Toshiaki Kawai/Kawai Architects, Kyoto

Sections Ground floor plan First floor plan Second floor plan scale 1:200 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Entrance court Tatami room Bathroom/WC Cupboard space Bedroom Terrace Living area Kitchen WC Studio

Surrounded by monotonous suburban developments, this house is distinguished by a sculptural, cubic form that seems as if it were composed of a series of additive blocks. From the street, all one sees is a largely closed front with a passageway leading to the entrance courtyard. The other elements of the building remain concealed. The complex structure reveals itself fully only from the courtyard and in particular from the staircase tower with its large areas of glazing. The skilful exploitation of the tight site resulted in an interweaving of internal and external space at many points, with constantly changing perspectives and visual links inside the building. The various layers and volumes are defined solely by the fine grid of the wired glass. On the garden face, the house opens on to its surroundings, and in the distance, one sees the high-rise blocks of Kobe. Within the house, however, there are also areas for withdrawal: the bedrooms, which can be divided off with sliding doors, the tatami room, and the studio on the upper floor. In addition to the spatial aspects, other factors that influenced the design included orientation and the position of the sun, wind directions, and the provision of cross-ventilation. The outer skin consists of reddish-brown-coloured galvanized steel sheeting. Internally, the pale wood surfaces of the built-in furniture, the doors and floors dominate, a feature that also extends to the terrace areas. The clear, functional detailing of the finishings can be found in the tatami room and the courtyard as well. Both these spaces reveal a strict, modern variation of traditional Japanese design. Uniform floor finishings in the entrance and to the open areas on the upper floors create flowing transitions between indoors and outdoors. A contrasting note is provided by the coloured painted doors.

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1 0.5 mm galvanized steel trapezoidal-section ribbed sheeting 100 mm thermal insulation 0.5 mm galvanized steel trapezoidal-section ribbed sheeting to falls light-gauge steel channel bearers 2 12.5 mm plasterboard fixed to steel bearers, painted 3 19 mm waxed cedar boarding on timber supporting structure

4 20 mm magashiri wood tread 5 6 mm coated fibreboard fixed to light-gauge steel channel bearers 6 0.4 mm galvanized steel sheeting bitumen sealing layer 25 mm composite wood boarding light-gauge steel channel bearers 70 mm thermal insulation 12.5 mm plasterboard, painted 7 20 mm wood boarding, impregnated 8 gravel paving bonded in mortar 9 50/50/5/7 mm steel T-section 10 100/100/5 mm steel SHS

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House in Sakurajosui Architects: Toyo Ito & Associates, Tokyo

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The present structure in Sakurajosui stands in close proximity to another house Toyo Ito built for the same client in 1975. Located in a densely developed residential district of Tokyo, the new building covers almost the entire site area. In spite of the high-density development, the facade of this house is not completely closed. Room-height glass sliding elements allow views out to the immediate surroundings. Instead of the traditional courtyard garden, the house has a two-storey “sun space” at its centre, which allows additional daylight to penetrate to the living areas. A staircase leads up to the guest room and a broad terrace that takes up almost two thirds of the area of the upper floor. The slender aluminium structural members and the glazed sliding elements lend the interior a quality of spaciousness. The glazing on the upper floor also allows the occupants to experience changes in the weather – sunshine and clouds, wind and rain – a theme that Ito also explored in a number of his early housing schemes. The house was originally planned with a reinforced concrete structure. As a result of his participation in a research project for model houses in aluminium, however, Ito modified the construction and erected the building with an aluminium skeleton frame. One condition for this change was that the costs for the new form of construction should not exceed those previously agreed with the clients. The research group working on the model houses realized the first project of this kind in 1999 in the form of an “ecomaterial house”. The system for the present structure is based on a 3.60 ≈ 3.60 m column grid (1.80 m in peripheral areas). The square columns have an exceptionally small cross-section – only 70 ≈ 70 mm – which results in a very slender load-bearing structure. The minimal dimensions were achieved by inserting a cruciform core into the columns to ensure greater stability. A grid of primary extruded Å-beams and transverse secondary Å-sections at 300 mm centres was laid over the columns, providing horizontal structural bracing. Externally, the house is clad with uniform storey-height sheetaluminium elements. Internally, in contrast, the warmer wood tones of the furnishings, doors and floor finishings dominate. The clarity of the architecture, the relationships established with the surroundings, and the links between the internal spaces reflect Ito‘s own formal language. What is unusual for him, though, is the attempt to implement these principles with standardized system-building units.

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Furniture Store in Tokyo Architects: Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, Tokyo

Passers-by sit on the railings that separate the pavement from the road and watch the activities going on within the store. The “shop windows” through which they gaze consist of storeyheight glazing elements – transparent on the ground floor and translucent on the upper levels, where the forms of furnishings and customers can be distinguished only vaguely. This three-storey furniture store is located in the lively Harajuku district of Tokyo, in one of the busy, small-scale, fashionable streets directly off the main shopping route. In view of the completely glazed front, the whole building is in the nature of a showcase. The interplay between external space and internal sales areas makes the building itself an advertising medium for the furniture sold there, which in turn forms an integral part of the design concept. The objects on sale strike a colourful note against the restrained architecture. The continuous floor areas, which extend without divisions right up to the facade, are subtly articulated by sloping zones. Every level serves as a sales and presentation area. Even the customers form part of the “exhibition”. In order not to impinge upon the spatial concept, the finishings and fittings are intentionally restrained. Via a series of flowing transitions, customers move from one exhibition area to another, with ramps linking the individual floor levels. The walls, columns and exposed ribbed-metal soffits of the floor slabs are painted white, with the dark parquet flooring striking a contrasting note. The strict axial grid of the load-bearing structure allowed the dimensions of the round columns to be kept to a minimum. The building has a steel structure, the floors of which are suspended from brackets fixed to the facade columns. As a result of this, the floors are not immediately visible from the street. Their lines are merely indicated by the narrow fixing strips to the storey-height facade glazing. With their simple, clear interpretation of the department-store type, the architects avoided the usual attributes of consumer architecture and have created an elegant urban structure.

Section Ground floor plan Second floor plan scale 1:400

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House in Tokyo Architects: Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, Tokyo

Harajuku, where this house for a young family stands, is a densely developed suburb and one of the newly fashionable districts of the capital. The small site area dictated the form of the building, which consists of a number of levels stacked on top of each other. Their different dimensions reflect both spatial needs and the constraints imposed by building regulations. The singular form of the house is also a product of the reduced facade details. In accordance with Kazuyo Sejima‘s philosophy, the spatial concept is the dominant element of the design. Constructional aspects play a subordinate role, as can be seen in the reduction of the load-bearing steel structure and the facade details. To provide the necessary flexibility to accommodate changing family needs, the individual storeys are fitted out in minimal form. The relationship between internal and external space is treated differently on each floor. Whereas the bedroom level is sunk halfway into the ground and lighted via a clerestory window strip, the guest room, the living-dining room and the terrace on the floors above all open on to the undeveloped area to the rear of the house. The raking cut-out section of the building facing on to the narrow access road provides space to park a car. On the street face, sheet-steel panels and translucent panes of glass screen the interior from prying eyes. Curtains on all floors allow the occupants to withdraw entirely from the urban life outside. The restrained all-white finishings – even the steel columns are painted white – and the spiral staircase that links all the levels of the house lend this structure a sense of spaciousness, despite the restricted site area. Within its tight dimensions, the building allows the occupants to live together in an open form and to enjoy a great sense of freedom in their relations with each other.

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1 roof construction: 1.2 mm sealing layer with protective coating 12 mm plywood steel SHS bearers 40 mm thermal insulation screed 100 mm reinforced concrete roof slab 2 steel-flat frame with expanded-metal mesh filling 3 8 mm laminated safety glass 4 floor construction: 15 mm cherry boarding 12 mm screed around underfloor heating 10 mm screed 125 mm reinforced concrete floor slab 5 125/125/6.5/9 mm steel Å-section, painted white 6 treads and risers: 2 mm PVC 2.5 mm sheet steel 7 wall construction: 0.4 mm aluminium-coated sheet-steel cladding bitumen sealing layer 12 mm plywood thermal insulation between steel studding 12.5 mm plasterboard, painted white 8 silicone joint 9 Ø 60.5/8 mm steel tube, painted white 10 9/38 mm steel flat, painted white 11 25/38 mm steel flat, painted white

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House in Nagoya Architects: Amorphe Takeyama & Associates, Kyoto

Built as a single-person dwelling for a restaurant owner, this house is situated in a residential district on the outskirts of Nagoya, surrounded by a motley array of prefabricated detached houses, low-rise blocks of flats and isolated paddy fields that have so far escaped development. The present building, with its striking elongated form, kinked on plan and in cross-section, has a load-bearing structure consisting of raking steel frames set at an angle to each other. The long faces of the house are clad in galvanized steel sheeting, the end faces in 9 mm oxidized steel. The exposed concrete tower at one end forms a compositional counterweight to this structure. The two volumes are linked by a balcony. Instead of the usual small garden, there is a forecourt, which is defined by the L-shaped form of the building and laid out with gravel, sand and bamboo. In spite of the expressive appearance of the house, the main focus lies in the interior, from where there are only a few, carefully controlled views out. Single-person houses are becoming an increasingly common building brief in Japan. Their limited spatial programme allows solutions like the present one, where all main activities are concentrated in a single, elongated space. The entirely white walls are contrasted with a variety of floor finishes: terracotta tiles, wood boarding, tatami mats, polished concrete, bamboo, etc. The cubic tower contains a small Japanese guest room on the ground floor, with sanitary spaces on the levels above this. From the outside, one would scarcely imagine that there was a pure white interior concealed behind the rusted steel cladding to the street face. Finely worked details such as the minimal balustrades, the wafer-thin canopies over the doors or the scarcely perceptible abutments of sliding doors are contrasted with materials left in a raw state, which recall the architecture of traditional Japanese tea houses. Site plan scale 1:2000 Floor plans scale 1:250

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Roof terrace Bathroom Toilet Balcony Bedroom gallery Gallery Tatami room Kitchen Shallow pool of water Living room

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1 0.5 mm galvanized steel sheeting 2 waterproof membrane 3 50 mm lightweight concrete slabs, high-pressure steam cured 4 75/45/15/2.3 mm cold-formed steel section 5 75/75/7 mm steel angle 6 150/100/6/9 mm steel Å-beam 7 150/150/7/10 mm steel Å-section 8 0.5 mm galvanized sheet-steel strip bent to shape 9 0.5 mm galvanized sheet-steel covering 10 2≈ 19.5 mm cement-bonded wood fibreboard 11 80 mm glass-wool thermal insulation 12 12.5 mm plasterboard 13 steel Å-beam 100 mm deep 14 sheet-steel window frame 15 insect screen 16 6 mm float glass 17 elastic seal 18 exposed concrete 19 shallow pool of water

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House in Mineyama Architects: FOBA, Kyoto

This unusual house stands on a man-made plateau not far from the coast in the northern part of the prefecture of Kyoto. Raised above and clearly separated from the structure of the building, the roof seems to hover over the individual rooms. These are oriented to a garden and to the rural surroundings, with views across a valley to the east and to a chain of mountains to the south. The striking appearance of the house is based on a carefully elaborated diagram of functions, which the architects then sought to translate as directly as possible into built form. The design process marked a departure from traditional spatial concepts. Classically, Japanese houses are organized according to the oku principle in a series of layers, whereby the zones increase in privacy from the outside to the inside. This principle is reversed in the present building, where access to the central common space is via a tunnel. Incised in the floor of this living area is a square irori or hearth that forms the focus of the house, with rooms of increasing size laid out around it. In this case, the individual, personal spaces form the outer enclosure oriented to the outside world. Two of the most striking aspects of the interior are the restrained detailing and the use of fine-quality materials. The floor and walls of the living room, finished with dark-stained wood, convey a sense of security and well-being. Tatami mats can be laid around the irori if required. By day, the direct light that enters this central space through an opening in the roof penetrates in diffuse form via narrow passages to the outer layers of the building. At night, the living room is indirectly lighted from a recessed joint between the dark wall surfaces and the pale ceiling, which slopes up to the roof light. The central living room is enclosed by a ring of spaces that accommodate the open kitchen, the sanitary tract and fitted cupboards. Also situated in this zone are the service installations and the load-bearing columns that support the roof. The surfaces of the inbuilt furnishings facing the outer spaces are veneered with pale-coloured limewood. The private bedrooms in the outer layer of the building were deliberately designed in a simpler form. The main goal here was to open these spaces to the surroundings. The outer rooms thrust out irregularly into the external space like a series of boxes radiating from the centre. Their side walls, some extending out in wedge-shaped form, flank fully glazed end faces that afford access to the garden. At the periphery of the house, the ceilings recede upwards and the floors are stepped down. As in traditional Japanese buildings, the outdoor environment is presented like a framed picture. 86

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Section scale 1:20 1 1 mm trapezoidal-section ribbedmetal sheeting 60 mm deep, polyurethane-coated 2 1800/1800 mm purpose-made domed perspex roof light 3 1.6 mm stainless-steel condensation channel 4 1.6 mm stainless-steel sheeting, polyurethane-coated 5 500/200 mm steel Å-section, polyurethane-coated 6 18 mm mineral-fibre board with sealing coat 7 coated sheet aluminium mastic asphalt sealing layer 18 mm cement-bonded slab 75/40 mm steel channel sections 8 wood curtain rail, painted

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9 9 mm plasterboard, painted 100 mm thermal insulation 10 trowelled screed 11 2 mm PVC flooring 18 mm veneered plywood 12 45/60 mm wood battens 13 90/90 mm timber bearers 14 cupboard door: limewood-veneered plywood, clear varnished 15 12.5 mm plasterboard, painted 100 mm thermal insulation 16 sliding cupboard door: limewoodveneered plywood, stained 17 indirect lighting 18 zelkova wood frame, removeable 19 60/110 mm zelkova wood frame 20 18 mm mineral-fibre board 21 15 mm stained oak boarding 18 mm plywood

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House in Hadano Architects: Tezuka Architects, Tokyo

The gently sloping roof of this simple, single-family house is reminiscent of the deck of a ship, and not simply because of its unusual covering. Conceived as a broad, multifunctional extension of the living area, the roof deck provides scope for various activities. There are cooking facilities and a sitting area shielded from the wind, as well as ample space for sunbathing; and from the roof, one has a broad view over the valley to nearby Mount Kobo. In response to the hot summers and cold winters in this part of the country, a shower and a stove are provided as well. Situated in a suburb in the south-west of Tokyo, this singlestorey house has a strictly organized layout. The kitchen, bathroom and individual rooms are grouped around the living area, from which they are divided by lightweight sliding elements. By opening these elements, a broad space can be created, extending over the full width of the building. A skylight in every room allows ladder access to the roof deck. The south face of the house is fully glazed, affording a view out to a small garden. The street facade, in contrast, is largely closed and of sober appearance. The roof construction consists of a load-bearing grid of 105/105 mm timber beams with two layers of laminated timber sheeting on each face that provide structural bracing. This construction functions as a rigid plate, allowing a minimal structural depth to be maintained. In order not to spoil the elegance of the slender roof line at the eaves, the architects did without a balustrade, which has not caused any problems so far. Floor plan • Plan of roof deck scale 1:400

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3 aluminium sliding roof light with double glazing 4 105/105 mm timber members 5 fibre-cement sheeting 6 pine sliding door with single glazing 7 3 mm lauan plywood, clear varnished 12 mm laminated timber sheeting 30 mm rigid-foam thermal insulation 45/60 mm softwood battens 105/52.5 mm softwood bearers on rubber strips 250 mm reinforced concrete slab 8 plywood sliding element, clear varnished

1 19 mm uline boarding on 45/60 mm battens 2 roof construction: 0.4 mm galvanized steel sheeting bituminous roof sealing layer 2≈ 12 mm laminated timber sheeting grid of 105/105 mm timber beams with 105 mm mineral-wool thermal insulation 2≈ 12 mm laminated timber sheeting 5.5 mm lauan plywood, clear varnished

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Weekend House in Karuizawa Architects: Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo

Situated north-west of Tokyo on the edge of one of Japan’s national parks, this weekend house is roughly two hours by car from the capital. The site commands a view of Mount Asama (2,565 m). With its dark-brown timber cladding, the house is unobtrusively located in a grove of Japanese oak trees. The clear organization of the layout reflects the clients’ wish to lead a simple life in the midst of nature. Internally, all common domestic activities are accommodated in a large main space without partitions or doors. The living area is nevertheless subtly articulated by vertical wall-like slabs at the level of the roof structure. The windows in all the enclosing wall and roof planes afford views out to the sky and the surroundings. In this way, the natural environment is visually drawn into the living realm. These carefully placed openings also allow the occupants to experience the passage of the sun during the course of the day – from the opening in the wall of the east-facing sleeping recess, via the zenith light over the dining area and the large south-facing window in the living room, to the veranda on the western side of the building. Depending on the position of the sun, the skylights also serve to highlight the different compartments of the roof space. In keeping with the simple character of the house, the closely spaced load-bearing wall posts were left visible. In contrast, the roof structure, which spans the living space without intermediate supporting columns, is lined with white-painted plasterboard. Externally, the walls are clad with horizontal lapped cedar boarding with a dark-brown coating. This is echoed by the dark-brown sheet-metal roofing with flat-welted seams.

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1 0.4 mm aluminium-coated, galvanized sheet-steel welted-seam roof covering bituminous sealing layer 9 mm laminated lauan sheeting 100 mm mineral-wool insulation between 90/120 mm rafters vapour barrier battens 9.5 mm plasterboard, painted white 2 15 mm lapped cedar boarding bituminous sealing layer 50 mm mineral-wool insulation 9 mm lauan plywood 3 condensation channel 4 ventilation flap 5 sliding element with insect screen 6 5.5 mm laminated lauan sheeting 12 mm plywood 30 mm polystyrene insulation between 45/60 mm battens 100/150 mm timber joists

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House and Studio in Kobe Architects: Go Yoshimoto Architecture & Associates, Hyogo

Situated on the edge of a residential area in Kobe, this singlestorey house with a gallery level was designed for an artist and her grown-up children. The site adjoins a small park and slopes down steeply towards the road to the north. Cut into the hillside, the narrow, elongated structure stands on a retaining wall and opens on to the park-like grounds to the south. To achieve a maximum of flexibility in the layout, only the kitchen, bathroom and WC were executed as fixed, discrete spaces or elements. The flowing transitions between the studio and the living, dining and sleeping areas accentuate the spacious character of the interior and allow a flexible response to changing conditions. With its ample gates and horizontal boarding, the largely closed street face is reminiscent of a simple barn structure. The facade overlooking the park, in contrast, is glazed over much of its area, so that the boundary between indoors and outdoors is dissolved and the tree-lined landscape seems to merge with the internal space. The wood strip walls are also perforated with slits and openings that enhance the sense of being in the open air. The restrained execution of the interior stresses the special aesthetics of the house. Everything is kept as simple as possible. The load-bearing timber-frame structure is left unclad and remains legible, allowing its full beauty to emerge and its rhythm and expressive power to be brought out to the full. The same approach can be seen in the choice of materials – wood, glass and corrugated fibre-cement sheeting – and in the interplay between open, transparent and opaque facade elements. The relationship between internal and external space is thus articulated as a series of variations on the theme of flowing transitions, in which the principle of traditional Japanese sliding elements is given a new interpretation. The form of the house is the outcome of an architectural dialectic – a reduction of the concept to its essentials in terms of function, spatial design and construction. With its open layout, its simple forms and the use of natural materials, the building is reminiscent of classical Japanese houses. Traditional and modern elements are united to create a harmonious whole.

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4 gallery floor construction: 200/40 mm wood boarding 40/60 mm bearers 105/350 mm primary beams 5 Ø 80 mm plastic rainwater gutter 6 aluminium fascia strip 7 silicone seal 8 5 mm glass 9 4/40 mm aluminium flat strip 10 45/60 mm aluminium angle

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House and Studio in Tokyo Architects: Naito Architect & Associates, Tokyo

In addition to a restrictive set of building regulations and a long list of requirements by the clients, the main factors determining the design of this small house were the tiny, elongated site and the limited budget available. These constraints more or less defined the volumetric form of the structure, which is just three metres wide and squeezed between neighbouring buildings in an urban situation typical of Tokyo. In terms of its height, length and width, the enclosing skin exploits the land-use planning parameters to the full. The house is open at the front and back, so that daylight can penetrate deep into the internal space and there are visual links to the existing vegetation outside. This gesture of opening up the house is also an expression of the openmindedness of the occupants, a young artist couple. The dominant feature internally is the pine load-bearing structure, which is braced by timber wall and floor boarding. The various floor levels are spatially linked, so that, despite its limited dimensions, the house evokes a sense of ampleness. The flowing internal space also ensures a continuous natural ventilation of the building, which is especially important during the humid summer months. In winter, the vertical staircase space on the street side can be closed off to screen the private realm and to keep the house warm.

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House near Yamanakako Architects: Shigeru Ban Architects, Tokyo

From the open living area of this single-storey weekend house one can see the mountains in the prefecture of Nagano. There are no posts or columns to interrupt the view through the room-height glazing, and there are no visible signs of the load-bearing structure internally. Structural support is provided by the furnishings and fittings; hence the name of this project: the “Furniture House”. This is the first of three buildings in which Shigeru Ban is using storey-height fittings for the load-bearing structure and as a means of spatial articulation. As in the day-care centre for children in Odate (see pp. 62 ff.), Ban experiments here with new forms of construction and a new spatial concept. The fitting out internally consists of three “component walls” that articulate the space into a number of different zones. This process of reduction also allows the surrounding landscape to be visually drawn in as a major element of the house. The prefabricated storey-height units can take the form of wardrobes, shelving, kitchen cupboards and the like. Factory production ensures higher quality and a precise execution of the modules. The self-supporting, independent units, 240 cm high, 90 cm wide and 70 or 45 cm deep, can be individually assembled by one man. They are first joined together and then fixed to the floor. The roof consists of prefabricated timber web beams braced with horizontal plywood sheeting. The unusual form of construction allows not only considerable savings in materials; it also helps to reduce the construction period and costs in comparison with conventional houses of this kind. Finally, by combining the load-bearing structure and the inbuilt fittings, it was possible to exploit the floor area to the full.

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1 coloured steel sheeting bituminous sealing layer 12 mm waterproof-bonded plywood on battens finished to falls 12 mm plywood bracing timber web beams 356 mm deep 100 mm thermal insulation plasterboard on supporting construction 2 25 mm plywood 3 cupboard door with 5.5 mm chipboard linings

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House in Kyoto Architects: Jun Tamaki/Tamaki Architectural Atelier, Kyoto

Situated immediately next to the road, the cubic form of this building stands out against the simple housing developments that surround it. Through a deeply recessed window in the street face, one catches a glimpse of the central living space within this monolithic, block-like structure. The white volume is set off from the ground at the base and from the black roof at the top. For Jun Tamaki, spatial experiment is of central importance. The construction is simply a means to an end, concealed somewhere between the facade and the internal finishings. The rooms vary in height according to their function and are cut out of the overall volume of the building – hollowed out a block, so to speak – which accounts for the fitting name Tamaki has given this project: “the Tofu House”. The single-storey dwelling was designed for an elderly couple. This is reflected in the layout, where all areas are directly linked with each other as far as possible. The central space serves as a reception area, living and dining room. The bedroom is situated to the rear and is laid out with tatami mats, whereas the floor of the living areas is finished with parquet. In spite of its limited dimensions, the central room, which extends over the maximum height of the building, conveys an impression of spaciousness. It can be divided into three sections by means of hand-crafted sliding doors (fusuma), which can be slid aside out of sight into recesses in the walls. In view of their size, the doors run in wooden tracks. The principle of traditional housing is reversed here: instead of providing a sanctuary for withdrawal, the centre of the house is a place of open encounter. Like the recesses in the large living area (which are reminiscent of the traditional toko-no-ma), all ancillary rooms are cut out of the volume between the main space and the facade, thereby indicating the depth of the enclosing layer.

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1 roof sealing layer cement-bonded chipboard 100/50/20/2.3 mm steel-section bearers 2 9 mm fibreboard, painted black 3 1.6 mm sheet steel treated with phosphoric acid, painted black 4 two-coat white rendering plaster baseboard steel sections 5 300/150/6.5/9 mm steel Å-beam 6 100/100 mm steel Å-section

7 composite panel: PVC/thermal insulation light-gauge metal supporting structure 8 12.5 mm plasterboard 2≈ 50 mm thermal insulation between light-gauge metal studding 9 cantilevered steel Å-beam (for planned lift to bathroom) 10 10 mm polycarbonate sheet flush with plasterboard wall lining 11 concrete block wall

12 55 mm tatami mats 12 mm plywood thermal insulation 13 abachi wood track 14 abachi sliding door 15 roll-up insect screen 16 sliding window with 8 mm toughened safety glass 17 20 mm maple boarding on wood bearers with thermal insulation between bearers 18 concrete, white rendered 19 bench with white cement rendering

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Housing Development in Tokyo Architects: Akira Watanabe Architect & Associates, Tokyo

This development, situated in a quiet residential district in the west of Tokyo, comprises a number of furnished flats for tenancies of limited periods. The building is articulated into two sections. With its restrained use of materials and formal elements, it is reminiscent of traditional forms of construction in Japan, even though it avails itself of a modern vocabulary. The line of access is incorporated into the design of the external works: a stone footpath leads through a gravel-lined garden to the entrance. The minimal garden design is echoed by the calm, almost austere walls of the building. Embedded in its verdant surroundings, this elongated structure, containing six dwellings, is laid out along a small embankment and commands a panoramic view over the city. Both the residents and the neighbours benefit from the attractive environment that has been created; and by setting back the building from the road, the street space also profits from the site planting. The individual flats are reached via two separate lines of access. The open staircase in the rear section is situated in the centre of the building between the dwellings and is reached via a patio area. The spatial links that have been established between planted zones, gardens, terraces and living spaces not only allow residents to experience the changing daylight and weather conditions outside. The interpenetration of internal and external space creates a series of fascinating spatial sequences and perspectives reminiscent of the layering principle of traditional Japanese architecture. Here, however, the contrasting qualities of openness and confinement are not achieved with sliding elements, but through the layout of the spaces themselves. The flair of Japanese architecture has been translated into a modern formal language. The spatial experience is largely determined by the material quality of the building, the specification of finishings such as exposed concrete, wood and bamboo, and the use of a clear formal vocabulary. Fittings and details are deliberately restrained. Horizontally textured concrete walls complement the wood tones of the flooring and other finishings. The loggias are lined with dark-stained wood that harmonizes well with the different types of stone in the external areas. Using traditional techniques, the outer walls were covered with a 50 mm layer of tamped earth (kieselguhr), applied in horizontal bands behind sliding formwork. This diatomaceous substance, formed from the fossil remains of algae, is light in weight and also has an insulating effect. Seen against the homogeneous texture of these surfaces, the simple details of the slenderly dimensioned steel stairs seem almost sophisticated. The patterns they cast on the texture of the stone facade create a fascinating play of light and shadow. 114

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1 aluminium eaves section 2 roof construction: bed of gravel separating layer thermal insulation waterproof membrane reinforced concrete slab polyurethane insulation 3 light-gauge metal structure for suspended soffit 4 9.5 mm plasterboard 5 laminated sheet timber sliding element 6 aluminium casement 7 5 mm stove-enamelled aluminium window sill 8 50 mm tamped earth applied in horizontal bands behind sliding formwork 9 Aji stone plinth capping 10 15 mm quince wood boards 12 mm plywood 30 mm thermal insulation 11 folding insect screen 12 Russian red pine fascia 13 welded galvanized steel grating, welded to carriage 14 125/125 mm steel SHS stair carriage with zinc paint finish 15 solid rubber section 16 Ø 165.2/5 mm steel tube with zinc paint finish 17 50/20 mm stainless-steel handrail

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House in Suzaku Architects: Waro Kishi + K. Associates, Kyoto

Set in the midst of an unremarkable new housing district on the outskirts of Nara, this building provides a modern interpretation of the classical Japanese courtyard house type. The judicious use of various surface qualities, ranging from opaque to transparent, helped to achieve a finely graduated transition between internal and external space, private and public realms. The principal elements of the complex are two block-like structures of similar size, the floor levels of which are offset to each other and linked by a system of ramps. The eastern section contains the more public areas, such as the kitchen-dining and living rooms, to which an external ramp from the courtyard gate provides direct access. There is also a roof terrace at the top of this tract. The more intimate spaces are located in the western section. As in many modern Japanese houses, there is also a traditionally designed tatami room for the tea ceremony. The two sections of the house are linked by a traditional enclosed courtyard that forms a spatial extension of the adjoining rooms on the ground floor. There are stronger links with the external surroundings on the upper levels. Here, the rooms have a more open quality. The living space, which is more than three metres high, is extended in height even further along the courtyard face by the steppedup construction at the edge of the roof. The enclosing wall along the south face of the complex is dissolved at the top into a wood-louvre structure. Through this filter, people in the street can gain some impression of life within the house – without disturbing the privacy of the occupants. The layout of the house, the network of routes, the interplay between the various levels, and the controlled relationship with the outside world allow this compact structure to be experienced from many different perspectives.

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House in Hokusetsu Architects: Toshihito Yokouchi Architect and Associates, Kyoto

The house stands on a sloping site close to a bamboo wood in the north of Osaka. In his design, the architect, Toshihito Yokouchi, had to accommodate the sometimes contrary wishes of his clients. The husband required a comfortable, modern living environment with all the attributes of a Western lifestyle. The wife, a master of traditional dance, wanted a classical Japanese sequence of spaces. Western and Oriental living cultures are thus juxtaposed and contrasted with each other. The modern spaces are situated on the ground floor, the traditional spaces on the upper floor. In view of the fact that dwellings in Japan are increasingly being built with only one tatami room for meditation and the tea ceremony, Yokouchi took the special role of the classical layout today as a central theme of his design for the upper floor. The garage and the entrance to the house are cut into the slope of the site beneath the ground floor. As a result, the garden on the garage roof is elevated by one storey and screened from inquisitive eyes, and the living room can be opened over a broad front to the outdoor space. Since the rooms in traditional Japanese houses are normally oriented to a garden or courtyard, a narrow terrace was incorporated at upper floor level over the entire length of the house to evoke an outdoor space of this kind. The contrast between the two lifestyles is also expressed in the construction and detailing. The upper storey, with a conventional timber-stud framework, is set on top of an insulated reinforced concrete ground floor structure. Within this solid lower storey, one can enjoy Western comfort, while the simple construction of the upper floor, with loam-rendered walls and reed matting to the soffits, allows the passing seasons to be experienced within the house. The windows on the lower floor, with double insulating glazing, are contrasted with the layered sliding elements on the upper floor. The whole house is a dialogue between East and West in built form, in which the two sections exert a reciprocal influence on each other, thereby lending the architecture its distinctive character.

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Section through upper floor scale 1:20 1 aluminium-coated sheet-steel standing-seam roofing bituminous roof sealing layer cedar battens 90 mm rafters 2 105/180 mm Douglas fir purlin 3 15 mm bamboo lining on cedar battens

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8 60 mm tatami mats 15 mm plywood 50 mm insulation 100 mm timber plates on raising pieces reinforced concrete floor slab 9 two-coat loam rendering on plasterboard 10 marsh-reed matting

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Living/Dining room Kitchen Yard Bathroom Bedroom Dance studio Tatami room Tea ceremony Miniature garden

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Art House on Naoshima Architects: Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Osaka

Many of the buildings on the once lively island of Naoshima, which lies between Shikoku and Honshu, the main island of Japan, are no longer occupied. The “Art House Project in Naoshima” was initiated to alleviate this situation by rehabilitating traditional buildings that have fallen into disuse and converting them to house modern art. The project also embraces the present structure, a new building that stands on the site of a temple destroyed more than 100 years ago. Tadao Ando‘s simple, restrained timber construction reveals a modern interpretation of traditional Japanese architecture. The subdued appearance of this building recalls the meditative character of some of his best-known projects. The few carefully applied elements and materials used here make reference to the history and character of the location. For example, the walls are clad externally with flame-treated cedar boarding, like those of traditional buildings on Naoshima. The projecting eaves construction is based on that found in Japanese temple architecture; and the design of the external realm is reminiscent of classical Japanese gardens. Craftsmen versed in traditional techniques were employed on site, and use was even made of old Japanese units of measurement. Internally, attention is focused entirely on the light installation “The Backside of the Moon” by James Turrell. Access via a lock-like space ensures that no daylight enters the interior. The uniformly smooth surfaces recede into the background behind Turrell‘s concept, which seeks to give light a physical presence. Ando has created a peaceful, meditative place – as once existed here more than 100 years ago – named after the previous building “Minami-Dera”.

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1 galvanized sheet stainless-steel standing-seam roofing bituminous roof sealing layer 2 65/65 mm galvanized steel angle, treated with phosphoric acid 3 90/120 mm laminated Douglas fir beams, stained 4 10/165 mm cedar boarding, stained and flame-treated 5 concrete paving slabs 6 access route 7 foyer 8 light lock 9 light installation

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Stone Museum in Nasu Architects: Kengo Kuma & Associates, Tokyo

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Foyer, café, shop Administration Exhibition area Tea ceremony Special exhibitions and other events 6 Library

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One of the main features of Kengo Kuma’s museum in Nasu is the treatment of stone: the attempt to make this otherwise heavy material appear transparent, light and multivalent. The museum is situated in the Ashino region between Tokyo and Yamagata, one of the few areas in Japan where traditional stone architecture is to be found. This form of construction is rarely encountered in other parts of the country because of the danger of earthquakes. The museum comprises three rice stores dating from the 1930s and three new structures. The buildings are grouped about a central pool of water, which visually extends the spatial dimensions of the small site and which is dissected by a series of walkways. In addition to the exhibition spaces, there is also a small tea house. On the south side of the water, the ensemble is closed off by an elongated structure containing a library and a rock collection which provide an insight into the geology of the Japanese islands. Although they differ in character, both the new and the existing buildings are constructed of local, volcanic Ashino stone. The traditional, solid, coursed-rubble masonry of the older structures is contrasted with the precisely worked stone walling of the new tracts, where, in an attempt to eliminate the explicitness and heaviness normally associated with this material, the walls have been “dissolved”. Various textures have been created, using the same raw material. In addition to the different temperatures at which the stone was fired – to achieve a range of coloration – the character of the masonry is also determined by its surface treatment. The texture has been modified by polishing, grinding and sandblasting, as well as by traditional stoneworking techniques. The load-bearing walls of the buildings to the north are honeycombed with a regular grid of openings, which, on the inside face, are filled with marble slabs cut so thin that they are translucent. In response to statutory regulations, some of these openings were also closed with recessed blocks. The wall of the building flanking the pool of water to the south extrapolates this idea. Here, a skin of stone strips is drawn over the load-bearing structure – yet another innovative use of the material, and one that is reminiscent of timber construction. Virtually all the pavings, both internally and externally, as well as the roofing to one of the existing structures, are in Shirakawa stone, which resembles Ashino stone in its colour and texture. The layout of the buildings around the central pool of water, the circulation routes and in particular the use of materials all serve to unite old and new, internal and external space to create a complex with a bold identity in what are otherwise rather nondescript surroundings.

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1 external wall: 300/50 mm Ashino stone slabs 2 6 mm Bianco Carrara marble strip 3 floor construction: 30 mm Shirakawa stone paving slabs 20 mm bed of mortar sealing coat reinforced concrete floor slab 4 roof sealing layer 25 mm polystyrene thermal insulation 25 mm oriented-strand board 5 60/90 mm cedar rafters 6 120/40 mm Ashino stone strips 7 175/122/11 mm steel T-section facade post 8 175/175/11 mm steel Å-section column 9 sheet-aluminium roof covering roof sealing layer 25 mm polystyrene thermal insulation 25 mm oriented-strand board 10 60/165 mm cedar rafters between 175/175/11 mm steel Å-beams

Sunday School in Ibaraki Architects: Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Osaka

Today, Tadao Ando‘s famous Church of the Light enjoys the status of an architectural classic. Roughly ten years after its completion, the architect was given the opportunity to extend the church with a Sunday school, comprising an assembly hall, library, office and kitchen. The new structure adopts the same theme as its predecessor. The strictly rectilinear layout is intersected at an angle of 15° by a raking wall, which extends beyond the building and turns at an acute angle to run parallel to the existing raking wall of the church. These angled walls form a kind of “clip” that ties the two buildings together as a pair. Only internally does one recognize that – unlike in the contemplative church space – a living environment has been created in the Sunday school for believers and children, who meet here outside church services to pursue various activities. For that reason, and in contrast to the hard concrete shell of the church, the school rooms are distinguished by the soft tones of wood. The interior is also flooded with light, which enters through a number of carefully located openings. The floors are finished with simple Japanese cedar boarding. All furnishings are craft worked from laminated wood sheeting. Simply but carefully executed, they are meant to appeal to the children through their haptic qualities. One of Ando’s ideas was to create a space in which subtle sounds, like those of voices, piano music and the rustling of leaves, would be audible and impress themselves on the memory of the children – together with the location itself. Light also plays a major role here. Used less sparingly than in the church, it enters the two-storey assembly room via numerous openings and horizontal slits beneath the roof, transforming the concrete structure into a sensuous experience.

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Gallery and Guest House in Temple Grounds in Kyoto Architects: Takashi Yamaguchi & Associates, Osaka

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Situated to the north of Kyoto, the Reigenko-ji was built in 1638 as a temple for the family of the emperor, and it still serves this purpose today. Through the layout of the historical buildings, the site is articulated into four realms, each with a different character: a garden with a cherry tree, a stone garden, a garden with a pond, and one with a centuries-old maple tree that is venerated like the main temple hall itself. The new structure, used as a guest house, is located in the maple-tree garden between the entrance hall, the main temple and the drawing hall. In order to disrupt the existing ensemble as little possible, the new building was sunk into the ground. The only volume to rise above the gravel surface of the garden is a large lantern roof light, which allows daylight to enter the gleaming white interior. The transparency, simplicity and architectural clarity of this glass structure ensure that any intrusion in the historical context is kept to a minimum. Old and new are convincingly juxtaposed. The guest house extends from the open side of the courtyard to the area beneath the maple tree. The glass roof is successfully integrated into the clear architecture of the garden. Access to the new tract is via a staircase that descends parallel to the building between two concrete walls clad in black granite. At the centre of the gallery tract is a patio courtyard that is open at the top. Laid out around this space are the various rooms for guests. The obscured-glass walls enclosing the courtyard lend it the appearance of a diffusely luminous volume. In contrast, the meditative character of the room for the tea ceremony is largely attributable to the indirect lighting via slits at the sides of the roof and a narrow horizontal opening in the wall at floor level. Light of a quite different quality falls through the transparent glass roof, dissolving the contours of the internal spaces. To avoid condensation, double glazing was used for the lower layer, with an additional pane above this that reflects the sky. As a result, the glass roof resembles a deep, blue lake. The architecture of the historical ensemble is reflected in the clear forms of the new building, in the reduction of the design to a few, carefully worked details, and in the subtle interplay of open and closed spaces.

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12 mm clear laminated safety glass exposed concrete, coated 25 mm black mottled granite on mortar bed Japanese cypress sliding door perforated sheet-metal sliding door, painted silver 6 cheesecloth on plaster, painted white 7 25 mm white marble on mortar bed

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Mediatheque in Sendai Architects: Toyo Ito & Associates, Tokyo

The media centre in Sendai reflects Toyo Ito’s concept of architecture for the 21st century – for a world of movement, continuous change and flowing transitions. For Ito, the buildings of a city form part of a communications network; and the permanent flow of information that occurs within it requires scope for constant change to accommodate new and unpredictable conditions. Architecture, therefore, should never be final and permanent. It has to remain flexible and capable of responding to the urban environment. The present media centre is conceived as a piece of townscape. Its transparent main facade, its free layout and the clear stratification of the various floor levels lend the building a quality of permeability and openness. The media centre houses a number of civic amenities, including a library, two galleries, an information centre for the disabled, and a multimedia library with an ancillary cinema, as well as seminar rooms and a café. Facades The glazed double-skin south facade overlooking the main road extends up over the edges of the structural floor slabs. The division between indoor and outdoor urban space appears to be dissolved. During the hours of darkness, when the individual floors are illuminated with various lighting tones that range from warm to cool, the south facade is like a huge light installation, with the furnishings on the different levels resembling objects in an exhibition. The east, west and north faces are not only closed to a greater extent than the main facade; they are also articulated by the horizontal lines of the floors. Depending on the internal functions, the outer skin consists of clear or translucent glazing and opaque aluminium panels. The escape staircase on the west face is laid out in a series of straight flights and is screened by a layer of vertical metal strips. The open, grid-like coverings over the service structures on the roof are conceived as a fifth facade. Organization On entering the media centre, visitors are greeted by an organically shaped, bright red information point and have a view of the spacious foyer, which is articulated solely by the freely arranged furnishings and the sheaves of steel tubes that sweep up through all the storeys of the building. In its layout, this so-called “plaza” – like all the other levels in the complex – resembles a public open space. The storeys differ not only in height, but in their design: the various wall elements and furnishings accentuate the change of atmosphere from level to level. The irregular distribution of the sheaves of tubes on each floor helps to create zones of different quality. 148

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Floor plans scale 1:1000 Cross-section scale 1:500 1 Ground floor “plaza” (design: Karim Rashid) 2 First floor: information (design: Kazuyo Sejima) 3 Second floor: library (design: K. T. Architecture) 4 Fourth floor: gallery (design: Karim Rashid; also gallery on third floor) 5 Fifth floor: multimedia, studios (design: Ross Lovegrove)

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South facade: vertical section scale 1:20

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University in Saitama Architects: Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop, Yokohama

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The university complex is situated on the outskirts of Tokyo, surrounded by housing developments and paddy fields. To comply with the extensive spatial requirements of the brief, while taking account of the small scale of the nearby residential areas, Yamamoto located the seminar spaces beneath a landscaped deck. This platform, in which a series of courtyards are incised, is flanked by two building tracts laid out parallel to each other. Nursing, rehabilitation and social work are interlinked spatially and functionally to form a network of disciplines. In a society in which the proportion of elderly people is increasing, an attempt was thus made to heighten the awareness of students for social issues. The sunken courtyards are planted with trees and evoke images of Chinese earth dwellings. The glazed cubic structures elevated above the deck accommodate services and circulation routes and adopt the scale of the surrounding housing. Like the dykes rising above the nearby paddy fields, the wood walkways dissecting the grassed deck are laid out in an orthogonal network of routes that link the 200-metre-long building tracts for advanced and general studies. Access to these tracts, which contain laboratories and seminar rooms, is via four-storey galleries that open on to the landscaped platform through finely articulated glazed facades. The rear-trussed construction of the transparent skin consists of horizontal flat-steel members with vertical tensioning rods. In combination with the horizontal aluminium sunshading louvres, this slenderly dimensioned structure lends the buildings a calm, unfussy appearance. Glazed partitions between the seminar rooms also allow daylight to penetrate to all areas of the complex. Fresh air enters the roof space via openings at the top of the long faces. When the air-extract flaps on the opposite side of the building are open, a system of cross-ventilation is set in motion that removes vitiated air from the entire hall space by a natural process of suction. In winter, there is a passive exploitation of solar energy gains: the warm air in the roof space is fed down into the building via glazed ducts.

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aluminium sunshading glass louvres ventilation openings to roof space roof glazing: laminated safety glass domed roof light over lecture hall steel-section balustrade to maintenance walkway Vierendeel girder grid: 200/200/8/12 mm steel beams 15 mm toughened safety glass steel rods as rear tensioning to facade horizontal flat-steel facade beam with point fixings Ø 250 mm tubular steel column suspended soffit beneath roof space for air circulation: coated wood-cement fibreboard sheet steel bent to shape glass wool porous calcium-silicate sheeting light fitting

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Stadium near Sendai Architects: Atelier Hitoshi Abe, Sendai, in collaboration with Syouichi Haryu Architect and Associates, Sendai

Roughly 10 km north of Sendai in the prefecture of Miyagi stands a new athletics and football stadium. It provides seating for 50,000 spectators, two thirds of which is covered. The rounded forms of the surrounding hilly landscape are taken up by the curving ramps and roof structures. The roof over the eastern grandstand rises from the ground like a seashell. On the opposite side, a broad lattice-girder structure clad with aluminium-coated steel sheeting sweeps majestically over the main stand. This roof is borne by the reinforced concrete skeleton frame of the west facade with its open articulation. Curving round this facade is an extensive ramp, which forms an access route to the upper tier of seating as well as serving as a covering to an internal running track. At this point, one becomes aware of Hitoshi Abe’s concept of an “open stadium”. In contrast to the current trend of designing arenas that are focused on the playing field and that bear little or no relation to the surroundings, the open ramps and staircases, the terraces and pools of water in the present complex provide attractive amenities outside the sporting events. Visitors can stroll up to the level beneath the stands; and children and young people can use all kinds of sports equipment in a public park. The complex is complemented by further training fields, a hall for various sporting events and a swimming hall.

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Hiroshi Naito Born 1950 in Yokohama; 1976 Master’s at Waseda University, Tokyo; from 1976 to 1978 under Fernand Higueras, Madrid; 1979 to 1981 under Kiyonori Kikutake, Tokyo; from 1981 Naito Architect & Associates, Tokyo. Botanical Museum near Kochi Client: Kochi Prefecture With: N. Kawamura, T. Kambayashi, D. Takakusa, T. Yoshikawa Structural planning: Structural Design Group Co., Ltd.; Kunio Watanabe Date: 1999 House and Studio in Tokyo Client: private With: Hiromi Furuno, Paddy Tomesen Structural planning: Structure Technical Design Architect Office, Syuichi Matsumoto, Tochigi Date: 1997

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Shigeru Ban Born 1957 in Tokyo; from 1978 to 1980 studied at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, from 1980 to 1982 at the Cooper Union School of Architecture; from 1982 to 1983 under Arata Isozaki Associates; diploma 1985 at the Cooper Union School of Architecture; from 1985 Shigeru Ban Architects, Tokyo. Day-care centre for children in Odate Client: private With: Nobutaka Hiraga, Soichiro Hiyoshi Structural planning: Hoshino Architect & Structural Engineer, Tokyo Date: 2002 House near Yamanakako Client: private With: Yoko Nakagawa Structural planning: Gengo Matsul, Minoru Tezuka, Shuichi Hoshino, Tokyo Main contractor: Marukaku Kenchiku, Yamanashi-ken Date: 1995

Toshiaki Kawai Born 1967 in Kobe; from 1986 to 1991 studied architecture at Kyoto University; from 1994 to 1995 further studies at the Architectural Association, London; 1995 founded the Kenchiku-Shownen Partners & Associates, Kyoto architectural practice; 1999 founded his own architectural practice Kawai Architects, Kyoto. House in Kobe Client: Hinori Sakai With: Teruko Shinmei Structural planning: Tac-D structural consultant Masamazu Taguchi, Hirosada Kotani, Osaka Date: 2001

Toyo Ito Born 1941 in Nagano Prefecture; diploma 1965 at Tokyo University; founded Urban Robot in 1971; from 1979 Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects, Tokyo; honorary professorship at the University of North London; numerous prizes and awards House in Sakurajosui Client: private With: Tatsuo Kuwabara, Akihisa Hirata Structural planning: Oak Structural Design Office Inc., Tokyo Date: 2000 Mediatheque in Sendai Client: City of Sendai With: Takeo Higashi, Tatsuo Kuwabara, Makoto Yokomizo, Toyohiko Kobayashi; Hironori Matsubara, Leo Yokota Structural planning: Sasaki Structural Consultants, Tokyo Date: 2001

Kazuyo Sejima Born 1956 in Ibaraki Prefecture, diploma 1981 at the Japan’s Women University; 1987 founded the Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, Tokyo architectural practice; 1995 founded SANAA with Ryue Nishizawa. Furniture store in Tokyo Client: private With: Kouichiro Tokimori, Yoshinori Nishimura Structural planning: Sasaki Structure Consultant, Tokyo Date: 2000 House in Tokyo Client: private With: Yoshitaka Tanase, Shoko Fukuya Structural planning: Sasaki Structure Consultant, Tokyo Date: 2000

Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama Born 1954 in Osaka; diploma 1977 at Kyoto University, from 1977 to 1979 at the University of Tokyo 1979; founded the Amorphe Takeyama & Associates architectural practice, Kyoto 1979. House in Nagoya Client: Masayuki Hiraiwa With: Hisakazu Sutou Structural planning: K3 Structure Design Firm, Tokyo, Hirofumi Kaneko, Tokyo Services, electrical planning: Soh Mechanical Engineers, Tokyo Main contractor: Kawabe Construction Co., Ltd., Nagoya Date: 2000

FOBA Katsu Umebayashi Born 1963 in Kyoto; diploma 1987 at the Osaka University of Arts; from 1987 to 1993 under Shin Takamatsu Architect & Associates; from 1995 own architectural practice FOBA; from 1998 FOB Homes in co-operation with Shingo Fujiwaki and Mitsue Masunaga. www.fob-web.co.jp House in Mineyama Client: Shuji & Yoko Koishihara With: Ryosuke Inoue Structural planning: Daiki Maehara, S.D. Room, Osaka Main contractor: Shimizu Corporation, Kyoto Date: 2000

Tezuka Architects Takaharu Tezuka Born 1964, diploma 1987 at the Musashi Institute of Technology; 1990 Master’s at the University of Pennsylvania; from 1990 to 1994 worked at Richard Rogers Partnership, London; 1994 founded Tezuka Architects with Yui Tezuka, Tokyo. Yui Tezuka Born 1969, diploma 1992 at the Musashi Institute of Technology; 1992–93 at Bartlett School, London; 1992–93 at the Ron Herron Unit; 1994 founded Tezuka Architects with Takaharu Tezuka, Tokyo. http://www.tezuka-arch.com House in Hadano Client: Hiroyuki Takahashi Project director: Takeo Isoda, Kamakura Structural planning: Masahiro Ikeda, Tokyo Light planning: Masahide Kakudate, Waseda Main contractor: Takeo Isoda, Kamakura Date: 2001

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Atelier Bow-Wow Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Born 1965 in Kanagawa, Japan; diploma 1987 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, from 1987 to 1988 visiting student at the Ecole d’Architecture, Paris; from 1992 Atelier Bow-Wow with Momoyo Kaijima, Tokyo. Momoyo Kaijima Born 1969 in Tokyo, 1991 diploma at the Japan Women’s University; from 1992 Atelier Bow-Wow with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Tokyo; 1994 master at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Weekend House in Karuizawa Client: Atsushi Kobayashi With: Shun Takagi Structural planning: Kanebako Structural Engineers, Tokyo Main contractor: Ide Construction Co Ltd., Nagano Date: 2000

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Go Yoshimoto Born 1961 in Tokushima; 1984 diploma at the Nippon Institute of Technology; 1985 studied at the Institute for Architecture and Environment; from 1989 own architectural practice Go Yoshimoto Architecture & Associates, Hyogo. House and Studio in Kobe Client: Takeo Ondo With: Kuniaki Uehara Structural planning: Go Yoshimoto, Hoyogo (timber construction); Hidekazu Hayakawa, Kyoto (concrete construction) Date: 1993

Jun Tamaki Born 1965 in Kyoto; diploma 1987 at Kinki University, further studies there leading to Master’s 1989; from 1989 to 1995 worked with Royji Suzuki and Kazuyuki Negishi; 1996 founded the Tamaki Architectural Atelier, Kyoto architectural practice. www.wao.or.jp/user/tamaa House in Ukyo-ku, Kyoto Client: private Structural planning: Junzo Harada and Steradian Architectural Engineering Associates, Hyogo Main contractor: Kawana Kogyo, Kyoto Date: 1997

Akira Watanabe Born 1938 in Nagano; 1960 diploma at Nihon University, Tokyo; from 1960 to 1980 under Takenaka Corporation, Tokyo; 1980 guest student at Harvard University, Boston; from 1980 own architectural practice Akira Watanabe Architect & Associates, Tokyo. www2.tky.3web.ne.jp/ πawaas/ Housing Development in Tokyo Client: private With: Kazumi Niibori, Naoto Kadono, Rie Mori Structural planning: Sekita Structural Design Consultant, Nagano Date: 2000

Waro Kishi Born 1950 in Yokohama; 1973 diploma in electrical engineering at Kyoto University; 1975 diploma in architecture; from 1975 to 1978 further studies; from 1978 to 1981 under Masayuki Kurokawa Architect & Associates, Tokyo; 1981 founded his own architectural practice Waro Kishi Architect & Associates, Kyoto; 1993 Waro Kishi + K. Associates/Architects, Kyoto. http://k-associates.com House in Suzaku Client: private With: Asako Takeuchi, Yushi Kajima Structural planning: Urban Design Institute, Osaka Main contractor: Kunisada Construction, Nakamura Sotoji Construction Co., Kyoto Date: 1998

Toshihito Yokouchi Born 1954 in Yamanashi; 1978 Bachelor’s at the Tokyo University of Art; 1980 Master’s at the School of Architecture and City Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; from 1982 to 1990 under Kunio Maekawa Architect and Associates, Tokyo; 1991 founded his own architectural practice Toshihito Yokouchi Architect and Associates inc., Kyoto. www.yokouchi-t.com House in Hokusetsu Client: Tokuya Fujihara With: Shigeko Iwasa, Yoko Takeyama Structural planning: Yoshiharu Kanebako, Tokyo Date: 2001

Tadao Ando Born 1941 in Osaka; from 1962 to 1969 self-taught as an architect; 1969 founded the Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Osaka architectural practice; numerous honorary professorships, prizes and awards, including the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1995. Art House on Naoshima Client: Benesse Corporation Ltd. With: Kazuya Okano, Saiko Kosugi Main contractor: Kajima Corporation, Hiroshima Date: 1999 Sunday school in Ibaraki Client: Ibaraki-Kasugaoka church parish With: Takaaki Mizutani, Kanya Sogo Structural planning: Ascoral Engineering Associates, Osaka Main contractor: Zenitakaguma, Osaka Date: 1997

Kengo Kuma Born 1954 in Kanagawa Prefecture; 1979 diploma at the School of Engineering, University of Tokyo; from 1985 to 1986 at Columbia University; 1987 founded the Spatial Design Studio; 1990 founded his own architectural practice Kengo Kuma & Associates, Tokyo; numerous prizes, awards and publications. www02.so-net.ne.jp/πkuma/ Stone Museum in Nasu Client: Shirai Building Stone With: Keita Goto Structural planning: K Nakata & Associates, Tokyo Services: M.I. Consultant, Tochigi Prefecture Main contractor: Ishihara Construction & ECRIS, Tochigi Prefecture Date: 2000

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Takashi Yamaguchi Born 1953 in Kyoto; 1983 diploma at Kyoto University; 1983-1996 worked with Tadao Ando Architect & Associates; 1988 founder member of the ARX international architectural association; from 1996 own architectural practice Takashi Yamaguchi & Associates, Osaka. http://www.yamaguchi-a.jp Gallery and Guest-House in Temple Grounds in Kyoto Client: Reigenkou-ji temple, Kyoto With: Masahiro Kato Structural planning: S.D. Room, Taiki Maehara, Osaka Main contractor: Konoike Construction, Osaka Date: 1998

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Riken Yamamoto Born 1945 in Beijing, China; 1968 Bachelor at Nihon University; 1971 Master‘s at the Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music; from 1973 own architectural practice Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop, Yokohama; numerous prizes and awards. http://www.ya-fa.ch

Hitoshi Abe Born 1962 in Sendai; 1989 Masters at the Southern California Institute of Architecture; from 1988 to 1992 under Coop Himmelb(l)au, Los Angeles; 1992 doctorate in architecture at Tohoku University; from 1992 own architectural practice Atelier Hitoshi Abe, Sendai.

University in Saitama Client: Saitama Prefecture With: K. Nishikura, T. Tanabe, C. Hori, S. Nishida, K. Hachiya, N. Kawamura, A. Utsumi, K. Matsubara, K. Toki, Y. Fukushi, K. Oda, M. Nagaoka, T. Yokoyama, M. Yasuhara Structural planning: Takumi Orimoto Structural Engineer & Associates, Tokyo; Plus One Structural Des. & Eng. Firm Inc., Tokyo Services: Sogo Consultants, Tokyo Date: 1999

Sports stadium in Miyagi Client: Miyagi Prefecture Architect: Hitoshi Abe Studio, Sendai; Syouichi Haryu Architect and Associates, Sendai Structural planning: SDG, Kozo Keikaku Engineering, Tokyo Date: 2000

Authors Christian Schittich (editor) born 1956 studied architecture at the University of Technology, Munich followed by seven years’ office experience and work as author; from 1991 editorial board of DETAIL, Review of Architecture from 1992 responsible editor, from 1998 editor-in-chief; author and editor of numerous textbooks, several visits to Japan since 1987 have enabled him to meet almost all the country’s leading architects. Günter Nitschke Born 1934 studied architecture in Germany, urban development in London, and modern and classical Japanese in Tokyo; from 1969 lecturer in East Asian architecture and urban development, first in Princeton, then at the MIT, from 1987 at Kyoto Seika University, director of the Institute for East Asian Architecture and Urbanism, Visiting lectureships in the USA; Author of numerous critical essays in international publications, recent books include »Japanische Gärten« and »From Shinto to Ando«. Andrea Wiegelmann born 1969 trained and worked as an architectural draughtstwoman, studied architecture at the TU Darmstadt, from 1996 work as a journalist, including work for db – deutsche Bauzeitung, from 2000 editorial board of DETAIL, from 2002 editor; intensive contact with Japanese architecture, in the field and in the course of her editorial activities.

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Illustration credits The authors and editor wish to extend their sincere thanks to all those who helped to realize this book by making illustrations available. All drawings contained in this volume have been specially prepared in-house. Photos without credits are from the architects’ own archives or the archives of “DETAIL, Review of Architecture”. Despite intense efforts, it was not possible to identify the copyright owners of certain photos and illustrations. Their rights remain unaffected, however, and we request them to contact us.

From photographers, photo archives and picture agencies: • Asakawa, Satoshi/ZOOM, Tokyo: 3.13 • Atsumi, Shunichi, Sendai: pp. 166, 168 • Bognar, Botond, Illinois: 2.10, 3.9 • Carrascosa, Francisco, Zürich: 3.12 • Helico Co. Ltd., Tokio: pp. 130, 132 links • Hirai, Hiroyuki, Tokio: 1.6, 3.21, 3.27, 3.44, pp. 63, 66–67, 69, 108–109, 119, 121 • Ishimoto, Yasuhiro, Tokyo: 2.17, 3.4

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• Kida, Katsuhisa, Tokio: pp. 93 • Kinumaki, Yutaka, Tokio: pp. 98–99, 101, 103 • Nacása&Partners, Tokio: p. 157 • National Museum, Tokio: 2.14 • Nitschke, Günter: 2.21, 2.22, 2.24 • Nordström, Minna, Paris: 2.26 • Ohashi, Tomio, Tokio: pp. 71-73, 162-163 • Uehara, Keiko, Kioto: 2.1 • Sakaguchi, Hiro/A to Z: pp. 149, 156, 159 • Uesugi Museum, Yonezawa: 2.19 • Schittich, Christian, München: 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 2.9, 3.1, 3.5, 3.11, 3.20, 3.22, 3.26, pp. 68, 76, 78, 102, 112, 139, 142, 145–146, 158 • Shinkenshiku-sha, Tokio: 1.1, 3.3, 3.7, 3.10, 3.17, 3.18, 3.23, 3.25, 3.30–3.31, 3.33, 3.35, 3.37–3.40, 3.42, 3.45, pp. 59, 62, 64-65, 75, 77, 79, 81, 86–89, 91, 94–97, 110–111, 113–118, 120, 122-124, 127-129, 131, 132 rechts, 133-135, 137–138, 140-141, 143-144, 147–148, 150-153, 155, 160–161, 165, 167 • Shiratori, Yoshio/ZOOM, Tokyo: pp. 83–85 • Waki, Tohru/Shokokusha: 1.2, 3.8 • Gilbert, Dennis/View, London: p. 169

From books and journals: • Aerial View from 1973 by a Japanese publishing house: 2.3 • André, Jean Louis, Architekten und ihre Häuser, Knesebeck Verlag, München, 2000, p. 63: 3.29 • Berndt, Jaqueline, et al., (Ed.), Bauen mit Eigensinn, Petruschat Verlag, Berlin, 1996, No. 23: 3.14 • Kazuo Shinohara – Philosopher of Architecture, Ernst & Sohn (Ed.) Berlin, 1994, p. 107: 3.28