Small Houses: Contemporary Japanese Dwellings 9783034610506

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SMALL hOuseS

SMALL hOuseS CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE DWELLINGS claudia hildner

·· birkhAuser Basel



TABLE OF CONTENTS

6 About This Book: The Poetry of Small Houses claudia hildner 10 The Roots of Contemporary Japanese Residential Architecture Ulf Meyer





CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE DWELLINGS

28 House with Gardens/Yokohama/Tetsuo Kondo Architects 32 Sakura House/Tokyo/Mount Fuji Architects Studio 36 O House/kyoto/Hideyuki Nakayama Architecture 42 Tread Machiya/Tokyo/Atelier Bow-Wow

46 Privacy and publicness 48 House in Komae/Tokyo/Go Hasegawa & associates 52 House in buzen/buzen/Suppose Design Office 56 Final Wooden House/Kumamoto/Sou Fujimoto Architects 60 a culture shaped by wood



62 Small House H/takasaki/Kumiko Inui 66 Dancing Living House/Yokohama/A.L.X. jun' ichi Sampei 70 Ring House/karuizawa/TNA takei nabeshima architects 74 Kondo House/Tokyo/Makiko Tsukada Architects 78 steps and layers

80 Rectangle of Light/sapporo/Jun Igarashi Architects 84 Tree House/Tokyo/Mount Fuji Architects Studio 88 Villa Kanousan/kimitsu/Yuusuke Karasawa Architects 94 space without space

96 Pilotis in a Forest/tsumagoi/Go Hasegawa & associates 100 House C/Chiba/Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP Architects 104 KCH/Tokyo/KoCHI ARCHITECT'S STUDIO 108 dealing with the existing fabric



110 Tsui no Sumika/Uji/Kite Architecture 114 House of Trough/Hokkaido/Jun Igarashi Architects 118 Mosaic House/Tokyo/TNA Takei Nabeshima Architects 122 Tower Machiya/tokyo/Atelier Bow-Wow

126 beauty and ephemerality

128 Moriyama House/nagoya/Suppose Design Office 134 Minimalist House/Itoman/Shinichi Ogawa & Associates 138 Atelier Bisque Doll/Osaka/UID Architects 144 the Garden as part of the Architecture

146 House Tokyo/Tokyo/A.L.X. Jun' ichi Sampei 150 House H/Tokyo/Sou Fujimoto Architects 156 appendix

About This Book: The Poetry of Small Houses

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New approaches in architecture are usually reflected first in small buildings. This is also true in Japan, where the architectural brief of the residential building offers architects an opportunity to realize unusual concepts, to experiment with materials and forms, and to implement new ideas for space. Observers in other countries admire the rigor with which Japanese architects compose these small houses: in his Final Wooden House, for example, Sou Fujimoto takes up the theme “forest,” which he does not simply understand as an image but tries to embody in the material (p. 56). Yuusuke Karasawa, by contrast, works with algorithms and based on these strict rules creates spaces he calls “ordered chaos,” which seem natural in a bizarre way (p. 88). “Experiments” like these often form the basis for other designs and larger architectural tasks and hence for the evolution of architecture in general.

The Key to the Architecture of Japan In this book the phrase “small houses” refers to residential architecture for private clients that is outstanding in terms of space and design. Although there have been many publications concerned with Japanese minimal houses, this book approaches them on a more comprehensive level: it seeks to reveal the possibilities offered to contemporary architects by the architectural brief of a residence and to clarify, both in an introduction on the history of architecture and in various in-depth texts, the cultural and social principles that influence the architecture of individual residences in Japan. The introductory essay by Ulf Meyer thus sheds light on developments in Japanese residential architecture since modernism. The author explains the residential architecture of various eras in terms of outstanding projects built between 1940 and 2000. This subtle survey brings readers closer to contemporary projects and gives them an opportunity to draw parallels between the present and the past and to get to know various facets of one architectural task. The architects whose contemporary houses are presented in the project section are for the most part members of the young avant-garde of the Japanese architecture scene. For several of them small residences for private clients have been the only opportunity thus far to realize their design ideas, since young architects have a difficult time establishing themselves in the Japanese market. The building of small houses gives them a chance to become known and to be perceived internationally as well.

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The City OF Small Houses Compared to their European colleagues, Japanese architects have a somewhat easier time realizing their visions as residential buildings. First, there are hardly any design guidelines; second, Japanese clients who hire an architect know exactly what they are getting into. They want special houses that stand out from the brown and green masses; hence they are prepared to accept that the architecture will not function exclusively as a subordinate shell but will at times even demand a symbiosis, an adaptation of living habits. Japanese clients are more open to unconventional and daring ideas also in part because they are not expecting a home for eternity. In contrast to Europe, where residential buildings can as a rule be used unproblematically by several generations, a Japanese home lasts on average only twenty-five years. The reason for this difference is that in Japan a house is supposed to satisfy primarily the needs of a moment and hence of a certain period of a lifetime. When the living situation changes, it is demolished and replaced with no great qualms. The lot, not the house, is considered the real value; that is where life plays out, where spaces are created. This different understanding of building was also the theme of Japan’s national contribution to the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2010. In the exhibition Tokyo Metabolizing, curated by Koh Kitayama for the Japan Foundation, satellite photographs of that city of millions were shown in rapid sequence, with the individual lots constantly changing, revealing transformation as a fundamental feature of Tokyo. But it is neither the public buildings nor the large apartment blocks that are primarily responsible for this rapid change: it is the small houses, which can simply be adapted to the changing living conditions of their owners and hence can be seen as the liveliest and most spontaneous elements in the urban fabric.

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Design Independence Many of the projects presented in this book were possible only because sustainability is defined differently in Japan than it is in many European countries. It is interpreted not so much as a function of the building as it is a function of the inhabitants. Houses are often heated and cooled only locally and as needed. The body and not the space is what is supposed to be brought to a certain temperature – when possible by adding or removing clothing or by tabletop heating elements. Hence cold and heat are allowed to enter the room and are not “battled” in advance but rather “balanced” subsequently. This different way of thinking about sustainability in Japan can, of course, be regarded critically as well, but anyone who looks at the effective use of energy in Japanese homes cannot demonize it entirely. The greater tolerance of their clients – with regard to sacrifices of comfort, for example – means more design freedom for architects. They can risk more with their designs, presume shorter life cycles, and translate their visions into architecture more or less unaltered. The Japanese approach to architecture thus seems very free, whereas in many European countries one observes almost the opposite phenomenon: rather than making architecture the focus, issues of ecology or building codes become the yardstick for designing a residence. The architect thus seems less like a creative maker of space than like a mediator between the building authority and the energy planner. Although the historical, social, and legal circumstances are very different, the small houses of Japan can offer many sources of inspiration for the Western world. The projects presented in this book whet the appetite for more residential architecture. In the West that cannot be conceived without energy efficiency and building codes, but perhaps it could do with a little more poetry. Claudia Hildner

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The Roots of Contemporary Japanese Residential Architecture

Futurist dwelling capsules: the Karuizawa vacation home was completed by Kisho Kurokawa in 1974.

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Buildings with innovative ideas for space and an unusual aesthetic have repeatedly caused the eyes of Western architects to turn to Japan. Particularly in residential architecture, several fascinating characteristic architectural features have survived there that reflect the country’s traditions and social relations. Moreover, Japanese houses have a short useful life, because adapting to new living circumstances is not usually achieved by converting homes but rather by tearing them down and rebuilding them. Social and economic changes and the transformation of design preferences can therefore be read from the resulting buildings. Anyone observing their development will thus first gain insights into how the Japanese live and second derive an idea of the origins of contemporary Japanese residential architecture. This essay is thus dedicated first to the conditions on which residential architecture in Japan is based, focusing on social and urban planning factors. Then it depicts the evolution of Japanese residential architecture from the mid-twentieth century to the present using chronological case studies. In the process it becomes clear that residential architecture in Japan did not develop in a vacuum but rather is based on a long tradition of small houses that only exist in this form in the Land of the Rising Sun.

The Principles of Japanese Residential Architecture In Japan most private lots are extremely small, limited, and always more expensive than the buildings that stand on them. This has repeatedly led to unique architectural solutions, since the existing space has to be used as efficiently as possible. But the differentness of Japanese residences is also based on building codes intended primarily to regulate the blocking of light in constricted Japanese metropolises, basing permissible building heights on the width of the streets. They are also intended to protect buildings from fire




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1 1.25

1.25

Restrictions on heights in the Japanese building code: A… Area within which limits apply depending on the width of the street. B… Area within which one- or two-story buildings can be built (as measured from the edge of the property) with no sloping in accordance with regulations on the north side. C… Area within which the building can be built (if no other rules apply). 11

and ensure that they resist earthquakes as long as possible. Hence the building codes also determine not only the form of houses but above all urban planning: the effects can be seen, for example, in the “gullies” between houses that result from the setback requirements and in the top floors of buildings, which seem to be cut off diagonally in order to maximize building heights while ensuring that neighboring houses receive as much natural light as possible. The climate is comparatively mild throughout the year in much of Japan, but because the walls and windows of Japanese houses are poorly sealed and insulated, it can become unpleasantly hot inside during the summer and bitingly cold in winter. Because of the way many Japanese heat and cool – they regulate the temperature of the body rather than that of the entire room – the effective energy use of houses is nevertheless relatively low, so that at least from the government perspective there is no need to heighten regulations for the use of energy in homes. Because this means that extensive insulation is unnecessary, the architects have a design freedom that their Western colleagues can only envy. Despite high population density – the factor that influences Japan’s building culture more than any other – there is still an astonishingly high number of single-family homes in the cities. Traditionally, the large middle class in Japanese society has placed great value on owning private land and real estate – however small it may be.

The Influence of Urban Planning Developments Regulations, building traditions, and economic factors influence the look of Japanese houses, but the most important factor is urban planning itself: the largest Japanese cities have grown together into a single meta-megacity in recent decades. Because Japanese metropolises are characterized by modern high-capacity train networks, and individual traffic cannot

View to the south from Tokyo’s northern city limit: a tapestry of single-family homes with isolated apartment blocks. 12

Change in scales: the high-rises of urban centers tower out of the agglomeration.

compete with public transportation despite numerous highways, the destructive tendencies of suburbanization familiar from the United States and other Western countries have done much less damage here. A culturally rich, almost continuous, densely woven tapestry of settlements has formed, and among other things it serves as the foundation for innovative Japanese residential architecture. The lack of context is the only context in which residential buildings are designed. The fragmentary essence of Japanese metropolises has often been described as a “patchwork,” because of its – as Botond Bognar has put it – “radical heterogeneity.” The architect cannot but “add to the restless image of the city.” (Bognar Botond 1990, p. 14) Whereas in most countries the relationship to the surrounding landscape is marked by single-family homes, in Japan it is the omnipresent city, a manmade landscape that can be called an urbanscape. The visual chaos of these constantly changing metropolises usually offers few points of reference for housing, but on the other hand it frees architecture of the obligation to adapt to or even subordinate itself to its urban context. Every building stands alone; the urban juxtaposition sometimes seems confused and arbitrary to Western eyes. Because of the rapid sequence of building and demolition that is typical in Japan, it makes little sense for architects to relate their work to a neighboring building. Many architects thus choose a defensive strategy and cut the building off from the context of the city. Experience with recurring natural catastrophes, wars, and not least the explosive growth of cities has left little room for sentimentality in the design of Japanese cities. They do not build for eternity: on average, residential buildings are demolished and rebuilt after just twenty-five years. A situation that might seem at first glance to run counter to the development of an architectural culture in fact has deep cultural roots in Japan. The lack of tradition has a long tradition where the physical constitution of buildings is concerned. Originally, houses in Japan were created from ephemeral materials and were repeatedly demolished and replaced – only a building’s form, never its material, could be preserved for centuries.

House in a Tokyo suburb ready for demolition. 13

Anyone who studies Japanese urban planning will recognize the changing of individual elements as an essential quality of these metropolises. Whereas European cities are characterized by their permanence, Japanese cities are characterized by transformation, by the dynamic. Changes in social or economic circumstances can be manifested architecturally and urbanistically in Japanese metropolises within a quarter century, whereas in cities like Paris it is barely possible to detect a change in the cityscape over that period. The Japanese city counters the lack of monumentality and permanence with its omnipresence as its strength. In contrast to the Western, European view of urban planning, in which one building relates to the next, and the body of a city emerges only within a context, Japan’s cities celebrate chaos, energy, and constant renewal. That does not mean that urban planning considerations are fundamentally bracketed out in Japan, but rather that such metropolises often require different solutions than a Western city does.

Japanese Architecture until the Second World War Until the twentieth century, the majority of Japanese residential buildings were characterized by a traditional modular wood-frame construction that obtained its genuinely Japanese form from fusuma (sliding doors), tatami (straw mats), and sho ¯ ji (sliding panels made of rice paper). Houses in Japan were designed for large families, and their floor plans were based on a planar, modular system of rooms and corridors with a straw or tile roof above and a wooden platform below. The proportions and dimensions of the room were based on the module of a tatami (which today measures about 80 by 182 centimeters but varies slightly from region to region and even then has been adjusted repeatedly over time) and the construction grid of the wood frame, which is filled in with both permanent and moving, nonbearing walls. The floor plans of Japanese houses have not traditionally been determined by function but are rather flexible in use, and thanks to their sliding walls they can easily be

The interpenetration of housing and the experience of nature: the Villa Katsura in Kyoto. 14

View into one of the teahouses of the Villa Katsura: the proportions of tatami mats and sliding elements characterize the traditional architecture of Japan.

combined into larger units. Futons were rolled up and stored in closets during the day; so there were neither beds nor chairs nor tall tables. “Clean” (bath) and “dirty” (toilet) were separated spatially. Until the devastating Kanto ¯ earthquake of 1923, even large cities like Tokyo consisted largely of low-rise, traditional wooden houses. The fires after the earthquake thus caused worse damage than the vibration of the earth itself: the catastrophe made painfully clear the limitations of wood construction for the modern Japanese metropolis. Even the brick buildings of the Ginza District that had been built in the Western style proved not to be sufficiently earthquake-safe, so that reinforced concrete was increasingly used in the years that followed. At the same time, traditional Japanese architecture was receiving more attention in the West: it began with Franz Adolf Wilhelm Baltzer’s Das japanische Wohnhaus of 1903 and reached a climax with the texts Bruno Taut wrote between 1933 and 1936, in which the Villa Katsura in Kyoto in particular was assessed as an outstanding example of Japanese architecture. Walter Gropius also recognized that traditional Japanese architecture offered solutions to the architectural issues of his day. It is thus not surprising that his Sommerfeld House in Berlin of 1921 has similarities with the Sho ¯ so ¯ in wood house in Nara from the eighth century. While the West was discovering traditional Japanese architecture, the Japanese were fascinated by the Modern Movement and tried to keep up with its Western advocates. Iwao Yamawaki (1898–1987) was one of four Japanese students at the Bauhaus in Dessau, and the only architect among them. After returning to Japan, he built a residence and studio in Tokyo in 1933 that reflects the principles of Bauhaus modernism. The intercontinental exchange of ideas was fruitful for the evolution of a modern Japanese residential architecture, as is also demonstrated by the example of the house that Kunio Maekawa built for himself.

Walter Gropius’s Sommerfeld House in Berlin (right) reveals echoes of the Sho ¯ so ¯ in wooden house in Nara. 15

case study 1. Kunio Maekawa, the Architect’s house, 1942 The shortages of materials during the Second World War compelled Kunio Maekawa to use construction materials that could be easily obtained when building his house. His design for his own residence thus seems at first glance like a traditional peasant house of the sort found in central Japan. The house Maekawa built in 1942 does indeed bear the seed of the Japanese understanding of modernism. The enormous saddleback roof, for example, is symmetrical but it crowns a modern, asymmetrical floor plan with exclusively Western floor coverings, furniture, and bathrooms. Maekawa used modern sliding glass elements for the facade, behind which a layer of opaque panels can be inserted, so that they block views and glare like a traditional sho ¯ ji wall. A round wooden support accentuates the facade. The house was relocated to the Edo-Tokyo OpenAir Architectural Museum, where it is preserved today. It is considered the nucleus of modern solutions for residential architecture in Japan in the 1940s.

Plan of ground floor 16

The 1950s: Reflecting on Its Own Tradition With the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan’s subsequent capitulation, the war in the Pacific came to an end. Then the rapid rebuilding of Japanese cities based on modern principles began, though they retained the traditional small lots. The building of Kenzo ¯ Tange’s Peace Center in Hiroshima represented the first translation of the Japanese wood construction and aesthetic into modern reinforced-concrete construction and hence the formulation of a distinct Japanese modernist formal idiom. It was also echoed in Tange’s design for his own house. ¯ Tange, case study 2. Kenzo the Architect’s house, 1953 In 1953 Tange was invited to be the architect to direct the fifty-ninth rebuilding of the Ise Shrine. In accordance with an ancient tradition, the famous shrine is replaced every twenty years by a new building that stands parallel to the existing one. This traditional rebuilding coincided with the end of Japan’s occupation by the United States, and the project marked the beginning of a new era in Japanese architecture. Tange was deeply impressed by traditional architecture, and in 1961 he published the book Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture, in which he compared the “modern” construction of the shrine with the principles of Western modernism. Tange took what he had rediscovered in the tradition of his country and translated it into an uncompromisingly modern formal idiom, which made him a role model for several generations of Japanese architects.

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The marriage of tradition and modernity is also reflected in his own house: Tange used the tatami module as the basis for a modern reinforced-concrete construction and filled it out with construction based on wood and paper walls. The supports in front of the facade bear only vertical loads and hence could remain thin and elegant. The large central room could be subdivided into three smaller rooms by means of sliding doors. The facade followed an a-b-a-a-b-a pattern. The roof employed the traditional Japanese forms but translated them into 1950s modernism. Tange would not long remain the only one capable of achieving Japanese modernism in reinforced concrete. Kiyonori Kikutake created an icon of modern Japanese residential architecture with his Sky House in Tokyo, which continues to be admired and cited today. case study 3. Kiyonori Kikutake, Sky House, 1958 Kikutake’s Sky House does not occupy its lot but sits on a throne above it. It is supported by four slender concrete panels like a hunter’s blind, but the ground floor remains open. The house spans the concrete panels on the upper story. Despite its radically modern form, Sky House is an allusion to the traditional houses of Japan, which were also built on stilts. On the upper story the concrete panels have sliding wooden shutters that can be used to close off the single room of the house from its surroundings as necessary. Most of the time, however, only the glass panels located on a second track behind them are closed, which produces the continuity between interior and exterior space that is essential in traditional Japanese buildings and also expands the space visually. A continuous balcony mediates between the inner glass and the outer wood panel facade, recalling the engawa of the traditional Japanese house: a slender stripe running around the plateau used for living space, thus extended the interior into the garden. In Kikutake’s house, the kitchen units and bathroom are also located here, so that none of the spaciousness of the square main living space has to be sacrificed. A built-in closet is all that marks the spatial separation between the living and sleep areas (see also Shigeru Ban’s Wall-less House and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House). The floor plan of Sky House is based on a consistent square grid. For decades Sky House was considered the only singlefamily home in Japan worthy of inclusion in architectural guidebooks.1

1… See: A Guide to Japanese Architecture. Compiled by The Japan Architect. Editorial Section, Nobuo Ito. Tokio, 1975. 18

Plan of living floor

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The 1960s and 1970s: Japan’s Rise to Economic Superpower Status In the economically flourishing and politically stable, peaceful, democratic Japan of the postwar period, a Western way of thinking became established in which each room was assigned a specific function. Most houses were now planned for small families; they came from rural prefectures and fueled the demand for housing in large cities. The functionalist architecture of the International Style and soon thereafter Brutalism met with considerable interest in Japan, in residential architecture as well. In the form of Metabolism, Japan also developed its own modernist architectural movement; it symbolized in architecture the growth fantasies of Japan as a rising superpower and had a lasting influence on housing as well. A group of young architects around Kenzo ¯ Tange, Kisho ¯ Kurokawa, and Kiyonori Kikutake developed visions of a transitory city of the future based on large, flexible infrastructure that could be expanded at will and hung in prefabricated spatial cells. The most famous project, which exemplified the zeitgeist of “impermanence and change” in the booming Japanese cities was the Nakagin Capsule Tower of 1972. This residential tower designed by Kisho ¯ Kurokawa is composed of two concrete cores of eleven and thirteen floors into which 140 prefabricated, structurally independent modules were mounted. The capsules measure just over nine square meters and have characteristic porthole windows; according to Kurokawa’s plan, it was supposed to be possible to replace them, but this was never done. Currently this icon of Metabolism is threatened with demolition. Icon of Metabolism, threatened with demolition: the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Kisho ¯ Kurokawa.

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In the 1960s Japanese architecture was powerfully influenced by technological progress and mass production of building parts. Since that time some residential buildings have been prefabricated industrially and sold in large numbers. These “off-the-rack houses” are, however, difficult to adapt to the small lots in Japanese cities, which usually have irregular forms, and hence there is still room for tailor-made architectural solutions.

The 1970s and 1980s: Golden Ages The 1970s and especially the 1980s were times of great economic prosperity and galloping urbanization in Japan. Real estate prices rose so rapidly that for the first time single-family homes became unaffordable for large sections of the population. Postmodernism flowered a little later in Japan, resulting in building projects in Japan for many American and European architects. In the “golden” 1980s, slender luxury residential towers with condominiums began to rise into the sky about the Japanese metropolises for the first time. These new small urban apartments, known as toshi ju ¯ taku, were interpreted as a reaction to the decreasing importance of traditional, organically evolved neighborhoods and as an alternative to life in the suburbs. In terms of design, they are marked by a view of the city as a hostile environment and the formation of a defensive architecture in exposed concrete.

Sekisui Home M1 of 1970 is the only finished house to be included on the “DOCOMOMO 100 Japan,” a list of modern buildings deemed worthy of preservation.

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case study 4. Toyo ito, white U, 1976 In 1976 Ito built this house for his older sister, whose husband had recently died of cancer. She wanted a house in which their two daughters would have “more direct contact to earth and sky”. Over the course of designing it, functional considerations took a backseat to symbolic ones. The exposed-concrete building was shaped like a U whose ends are joined by a straight line. Thus it resulted in both a protected courtyard and an infinite space. The long corridor led to the children’s rooms and the mother’s bedroom. White walls and a white floor formed a universal space for playing, eating, and meditating. Light and shadow from a skylight covered these surfaces like a canvas. The demolition of the house, which took place before Ito’s eyes in 1997, was regarded by the family as a liberation from the task of mourning. Whereas in the 1970s houses were often still designed like a heterogeneous “internalized city,” the beginning of the “new wave” in the 1980s introduced a radical reversal in thinking: architects abandoned the attempt to view the city as something to be designed and instead pursued an introverted architecture that related to the city in a defensive way and sought hermetic separation. This period was the heyday of the exposed-concrete architecture of strict primary geometry of the sort that Tadao Ando ¯ made world famous.

Plan of ground floor

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¯, case study 5. Tadao ando Sumiyoshi Nagaya, 1976 Tadao Ando ¯ took a traditional building type as his point of reference for his design of the Sumiyoshi Nagaya: the nagaya. It is a kind of row house that was particularly common in the Edo period (1603–1867) and housed the majority of the city’s population. Ando ¯ ’s slender exposed-concrete building stands on a lot 14 meters deep but just 3.5 meters wide. A small incision in the otherwise completely closed-off, six-meter-tall street facade of exposed concrete serves as the entrance. Only after passing through it is it clear that the house is organized around an open courtyard that extends the full width of the lot. Residents have to pass through this courtyard to reach the back spaces from the front ones. The design has entered the history books as a symbol of the radically introverted residential architecture in Japan of this period. Ando ¯ ’s architecture was both antiurban and antihedonistic. The turn away from the hostile, overpowering, constantly transforming city resulted in many inward-turned spaces.

Plans of ground floor and second floor, section

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1989 to the Present: The End of the Bubble Economy

The beginning of the Heisei era in Japan in 1989 was overshadowed by the bursting of the “bubble economy”. Bad bank loans and overvalued real estate caused Japan to slide into a phase of deflation and high national debt, which led to a high level of economic stagnation and still influences the society and its architecture today. At the same time, the demographics and economic situation of Japanese families changed radically in the 1990s and around the turn of the millennium. Now only sixty percent of households in Japan are single-family households. The unmarried, single parents, and seniors constitute a larger percentage than ever before. The low birth rates and high life expectancy are leading to ever smaller households. Many rural towns have shrinking populations. Real estate prices in metropolitan areas sank in the wake of the crash – building a residence has thus again become affordable for many. There is increasing demand for tiny lots. In Tokyo they can be as little as two meters wide. That is the minimum permissible width for residences. Contemporary residential architecture responds to this with Bonsai Bunka – miniaturization of building projects. Moreover, many Japanese architects allude with their buildings to features of traditional Japanese construction. This includes the rediscovery of the ephemeral, reflected, for example, in Shigeru Ban’s paper architecture or in Kengo Kuma’s almost immaterial Water/Glass House near Atami.

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Floor plan 3F

case study 6. Kengo Kuma, Water/Glass House, 1995 With his Water/Glass House, Kengo Kuma has taken the architectural striving for transparency to its limits. Kuma’s design alludes to the neighboring Kyu Hyuga Bettei Villa of 1936, the only project Bruno Taut built during his three-year stay in Japan. Taut was excited by the ability of Japanese architecture to frame nature and at the same time harmonize with it. Inspired by that, Kuma designed a building that frames the view of Sagami Bay not by means of a traditional engawa, a sliding element, or a roof overhang but only by two horizontal surfaces. Water or earth and ceiling slats describe a fluid space without bounding it. Between the two layers sits an almost immaterial all-glass facade, which replaces the usual wooden supports of traditional Japanese architecture and dissolves, as it were, the load-bearing structure. The surface of the water symbolically extends the oval meeting room on the upper floor into the Pacific and provides fascinating reflections.

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Plan of third floor

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Residential Architecture Today In Japan as in the West, very few houses are built by licensed architects, but there too residential architecture is a springboard for small architectural firms beginning their careers. Low interest rates and high inheritance taxes have caused the demand for small houses in agglomerations to increase again in recent years. Those who can afford to do so hire an architect to build their houses. The search is aided by numerous periodicals specifically dedicated to the subject of the residential building. In urban contexts architects are able to produce ambitious designs of spatial qualities even on small lots and under difficult circumstances. To save space, many blur the boundaries between rooms or permit overlapping functions. Fluid sequences of rooms are often subdivided only by movable screens, curtains, or sliding elements. Because clients are usually interested in protecting their private sphere only from the outside world – and not within the family – there are frequent experiments with open spaces. In the center of most of the buildings is the eat-in kitchen, which represents the center of the family’s life. The children often sleep in the same room as their parents until they reach primary school age, and thereafter they usually get only a very small separate room, barely separated visually and acoustically from the other living areas. Guests are only rarely invited into one’s home these days in Japan, so the house is primarily intended to meet the needs of the family and rarely serves as a status symbol. The desired separation from public space and neighbors in densely populated Japanese cities often results in rows of bunkerlike buildings – at least when seen from outside. Usually a completely different world is revealed inside: with skylights through which one can glance at the sky, split levels that simulate multiple floors, or opaque materials that allow a lot of light into the rooms. Many houses are organized around one or more courtyards, thus creating their own microcosm.

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Within the urban space, however, these closed-off worlds can also result in leftover spaces such as gullies or dead corners, and many young architects have recognized the unused potential of them. The effort to weave these areas into the architecture and better connect public and private space will occupy architects of urban residences in the future as well. Whereas in large cities there is an effort to establish a culture of townhouses, residences in more rural areas correspond more closely to the typical singlefamily home with a garden. Second and vacation homes thus often resemble villas. Because not all the house is occupied, functional concerns can recede in favor of design issues. As a rule, clients want their vacation home to feature an architecture that emphasizes the contrast to the high-density life in cities and integrates the landscape into the house. Young architects in particular are using this opportunity to try out new materials and ideas for space in this context. In Japan, houses are seismographs of current trends in architecture. Japanese designers often find – despite all the Westernization – their approaches to solutions rooted in their own tradition, with no equivalents in the Western world. Both on the small lots of large Japanese cities and in rural areas, the young generation of Japanese architects is paying a lot of attention to creating livable and architecturally ambitious houses and living spaces. Their evolution will continue to be followed with great curiosity throughout the world.

ulf meyer

sources ARCH+ 151, “Minihäuser in der Megacity Tokio”. Aachen, 2000. Bognar, Botond: The New Japanese Architecture. New York, 1990. Fackler, Martin: “Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened” in New York Times, October 17, 2010. Kitayama, Koh, Tsukamoto, Yoshiharu, Nishizawa, Ryue: Tokyo Metabolizing. Tokyo, 2010. Pollock, Naomi: Modern Japanese House. Wien/London/New York, 2005. Rössler, Hannes: Minihäuser in Japan. Salzburg, 2000. TAUT, Bruno: Houses and People of Japan. Tokyo, 1937. 27

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yokohama

house with gardens tetsuo kondo architects

2007

living anarchically

One use per floor – the architect Tetsuo Kondo did not permit any more in this house with gardens in Yokohama. The lot slopes, hence the split-level arrangement of the rooms. Kondo deliberately placed the bedrooms on the lower stories and moved the living rooms upward, from which there are views over Yokohama. In doing so he followed no strict scheme, dispensing with any continuous vertical connection and almost hiding some of the rooms. For example, a tiny study on the lower floor is accessed through the parents’ bedroom and the adjoining garden space.

From the entry a spiral staircase leads half a story downward to the sleeping areas for the children or a half story upward to the parents’ bedroom. The spiral staircase ends on the subsequent bathroom level; from there a second staircase leads upward into the living area. The gaps that result from these shifts in the floor were turned into garden rooms by the architect. Every room adjoins one of these “empty” areas, which can be designed by the users – a family of four – according to their needs. The freely designed floor plan may at first look as if it lacks a concept, yet dispensing with a strict architectural order has its own charms. The house 29

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offers surprises and is not easily understood, much less diagrammed on paper. It seems to resist being transparent on first glance. This house with gardens adopts much of what characterizes the dense residential districts of Japanese cities: there is scarcely any rigorous order and the system of paths sometimes seems rather arbitrary. Both this kind of urban planning and this house with gardens can be described as anarchic in the best sense. The “empty” spaces that the house surrounds underscore the concept of breaking down structures and determinations. From outside, one would never suspect the building has such a complex inner life: the house is wrapped in a bright metal facade that makes it seem compact. The garden spaces are integrated into the house like loggias, causing the interior and exterior spaces to fuse visually into a unity.

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sakura house

tokio

2007

Mount Fuji

architects studio

cherry blossoms in the snow A white protective wall the full height of the house surrounds Sakura House in southern Tokyo. Mount Fuji Architects Studio strove to create an ambience similar to that of Farnsworth House by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The site is not located in the middle of nature, however, but rather in a densely populated section of the Japanese capital. Creating a transparent building here in which the occupants can live just as casually necessitated that the architects first produce a suitable environment.

Two bracketlike walls placed on the lot form the frame of the living space. Where they serve as the building’s exterior walls they are made of reinforced concrete and are hence not transparent, but where they surround a small forecourt, they consist of a steel construction clad with white, flower-shaped perforated metal elements. Decorative paper from Ise provided the model for the computer-generated patterns. The two areas transition into each other, since the flower perforations become gradually weaker where the panels

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adjoin the concrete. The perforated areas of the walls are translucent, so that the building glows from inside at night. From the forecourt, the cellar, which contains an office and two dens, and the entry area are accessed by the stairwell. On the ground floor is another office and a two-car garage. The second story accommodates the living room, which is supplemented by a small outdoor area. The top story, with the bedroom and bathroom, is divided into a split-level area that can be reached

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both via the continuous stairwell and via an external staircase that connects the outdoor area on the second story to the roof terrace. The effect of Sakura House on its surroundings is less that of a building than that of a self-contained world. Nevertheless, it does not confront its surroundings aggressively, since it does not repulse passersby, despite its windowless walls. Rather, the delicate floral patterns invite viewers to dream about the world behind the veils.

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O house Kyoto

Hideyuki Nakayama architecture

2009

live-in cathedral

Is it a church, a cut-open house, or a live-in sculpture with a display window? O House in Kyoto surprises viewers with its eccentric form: a tall volume twists defiantly into the sky, while the two side aisles duck away modestly. On the front side, a full-height glass facade is all that separates the interior from the exterior. When necessary, a curtain can keep curious passersby from looking in. The architect Hideyuki Nakayama arranged living spaces and outdoor areas around the central volume on the ground floor. They are in turn surrounded by a hip-height concrete wall that can be read as an

exterior wall or as a garden wall. From the outside, the central nave is perceived as the most important part of the house, but the floor plan reveals that it houses two completely different uses. On the ground floor it serves primarily to provide access, whereas on the upper floor it accommodates the bedrooms for the family of four. The occupants enter the house via the central volume, which leads them into the side wings with the live-in kitchen and bathroom or into the outdoor area. They reach the upper floor via the kitchen, from which an S-shaped spiral staircase leads back into the central nave. According to 37

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Nakayama, this path makes the occupants’ climb into the bedrooms not simply a walk into another space. It is, he says, rather like coming home after a long day. Life inside the house and its external appearance do not correspond and can scarcely be interpreted as a unity. Thanks to the glass facade, however, there is a direct connection between outside and inside: it transforms the quirky building into a kind of stage, complete with curtain. As long as the latter is open, passersby can follow parts of the family’s life, experiencing a presentation of “living in the city”. For the residents, by contrast, the changing exterior space becomes part of their home. When the curtain is closed, the perception of the house changes, both for its viewers and for its users. The structure of O House contains allusions to the history of architecture: first, the curving main house recalls somewhat White U by Toyo Ito (see p. 22), which has already been demolished; second, the composition of tall middle house and low side buildings admits of purely superficial associations with a typical two-story residence of the Edo period (1603–1867).

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atelier bow-wow

tokyo

tread machiya

stepwise

Atelier Bow-Wow has long since followed the approach that Tokyo’s urban development is controlled by the most mutable elements of the city: single-family homes. One of the houses they have built in recent years is located in southern Tokyo, in a neighborhood dominated by gabled houses. Although this house also follows that basic pattern, it is distinguished from its surroundings by its white corrugated metal facade, projecting roof, and large windows facing the street.

2008

The architects named this house Tread Machiya: the machiya is a type of building that characterized the city especially during the Edo period (1603–1867): a residential and commercial building whose narrow facade faced the street but whose floor plan extended far back in keeping with the shape of the lot. In large Japanese cities, this form of building was not sustained in the modern era, as the completely freestanding single-family home with a garden had become the new ideal. Yet new settlements have been constantly growing more

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densely populated over time. In many places today single-family homes are being built on a lot designed for a machiya, but in contrast to the latter they are largely blocked off from the street and, with their reduced size and sparse appearance, they seem almost ashamed of themselves. With their Tread Machiya, the architects tried to grasp the urban circumstances not as an obligation but as an opportunity. The house develops toward the back, and hence it is no longer a long residential “tube” with an integrated store but rather a compact house for a family of four. The stairwell is a crucial element: it does not simply provide access to the living spaces but also, at least between the living room and the kitchen, functions as space for playing, sitting, reading, or working. This area is even visible to passersby and neighbors, since, unlike the surrounding houses, Tread Machiya is open to the street and permits views into its living space. A terrace on the upper story, which can be reached from the kitchen via an exterior stairwell, provides another linking element between the surroundings and the living space.

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Through the small, personal matter of dwelling units, the city, with its dual extremes of massive authority and capital, seems to be undergoing a grand reorganization. 1 Koh Kitayama

1… Kitayama, Koh, Tsukamoto, Yoshiharu, Nishizawa, Ryue: Tokyo Metabolizing. Tokyo, 2010, p. 27. 2… Ibid. 3… Hirai, Kiyoshi: The Japanese House Then and Now. Tokyo, 1998, p. 69–71. 46

privacy and publicness

In the view of Japanese clients, an urban residence should fulfill one task especially well: screening its occupants off from the neighborhood. This view is based on a desire for a private sphere that is in fact scarcely possible in Japanese metropolises. With a house closed off on all sides, the density within which they dwell can be partially obscured. At the same time, such a home conveys the impression it can protect the family from outside influences. This protection of the familial group from dangers that could come from outside is an essential criterion for Japanese residential architecture. In contrast to this pronounced desire to preserve the private sphere of the family, most Japanese place little value on individual private spheres within the home. Most of them want open spaces in the interior, which make it not just possible for the family to be together but almost inevitable (see, for example, Moriyama House by Suppose Design Office, p. 128). Children often sleep in their parents’ room until they are nine or ten, and thereafter they are given only a small room of their own, barely separated visually and acoustically from the other areas. For many Japanese, the ability to feel the presence of family members is one of the features that define the quality of a house. This division into an inner group (uchi), with which one identifies unreservedly, and an outer group (soto), with which contact is only sought when it is necessary for the needs of the inner group, shapes many social spaces in Japan. In urban planning, however, the separation from public space can also have negative consequences: today’s large cities often lack any intertwining of spaces that would result in chance encounters between neighbors. People scarcely know one another and do not pay attention to one another. Moreover, Japanese building codes requiring setbacks result in unused empty spaces – so-called voids – for which no one feels responsible. In the book Tokyo Metabolizing 2, published as the Japanese contribution to the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2010, the author Koh Kitayama

explains that many residences in Tokyo built since the great Kanto ¯ earthquake of 1923 have passed through four stages or generations. The single-family home with garden that was generally built around the urban perimeter at the time was replaced – as a result of rapid urbanization, high inheritance taxes, and the resulting constant subdivision of lots – by the vertical town house surrounded by residual spaces. But rather than truly defining the building as a town house and integrating it into its context, residential buildings were increasingly separated from their surroundings, in an attempt to maintain the illusion of a single-family home. In recent years, more and more architects have taken up this theme and tried to integrate the voids of urban space into their designs so that housing is once again tied to the urban space (see, for example the house in Komae by Go Hasegawa [p. 48] or Tread Machiya by Atelier Bow-Wow [p. 42]). In neighborhoods still marked by older urban structures, it is evident that there certainly is a tradition of coexisting in neighborhoods. There is also a precursor to town houses: the so-called machiya, which already existed in Japan around AD 1000 and were common into the nineteenth century. 3 These combined commercial and residential buildings are open to and accessible from the street. The more one penetrates their deep floor plans, the more private the spaces become. Because other building codes existed at the time, voids were not yet a problem in this period. Many Japanese miss the qualities of older cities, which can help Japanese architects persuade their clients of the advantages of less closed-off architectural styles. Because the rapid cyclical transformation of large Japanese cities is primarily a consequence of the short lifespan of residential buildings, the paradigm shift in their construction could gradually lead to an altered, more open cityscape. The voids would then no longer be unused residual areas but could enrich the space of the small buildings and turn living in the city into an experiential theme.

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house in komae go hasegawa & associates

tokyo

2008

with a view of the stars

A terrace in the middle of Tokyo: the possibilities that result when a singlefamily house does not completely block itself off from public space but at least partially opens onto it are demonstrated by this house in Komae by Go Hasegawa. This house for a family of three more or less fills the hundred-square-meter lot. Rather than creating a one-story bungalow, the architect distributed uses on two levels. The living area and entry are on the ground floor; the sleeping areas and bathroom are in the semibasement. Hence the roof of the lower story could be designed as a terrace, expanding the living space.

The reinforced-concrete walls of the building are clad with metal panels, which cause the building to shine with a matte silver, also causing it to stand out against the gray-brown single-family homes typical of the neighborhood. The residents enter the building through a tunnel-like entrance, which also serves as the classic genken for the removal of shoes and adjoins the clearly higher living space. The relatively large step overcomes the difference in height that results from the arrangement of levels. The terrace, of all places, can be interpreted as the central part of the house. It is located about half a meter about the street level, which demarcates it 49

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from the public space and protects the living areas from direct views inward. It can be accessed from the ground via a French window or via a staircase from the semibasement. The lower floor receives natural light from skylights placed above the beds of the parents and the child, the bathroom, and the workspace.

Over time, the increasing density of Tokyo neighborhoods has resulted in the shrinking of the outdoor space belonging to single-family homes in favor of expanding the interior – which is usually emphatically blocked off. This house in Komae shows one possibility for creating exterior space in the densely populated city (see also p. 47).

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suppose design office

house in buzen buzen

branching winter garden

2009

Individual spatial modules are distributed across the lot of this house in Buzen. They make the building look like a small village. The architects of Suppose Design Office covered the interstices of this residence in southern Japan with a glass-and-steel construction. As a result, a branching winter garden emerges amid the spatial boxes of various heights. The individual spatial modules are clad with lacquered wood on the outside and drywall inside, so that they truly seem like small, independent houses. They can be opened onto or closed off from the interim space by means of sliding doors. So the family of four can

decide itself, depending on the season, how much they wish to use the additional space. This kind of transitional area between inside and outside is also found in traditional Japanese houses: in earlier periods, the continuous veranda known as an engawa made it possible to spend time outdoors without really leaving the house. This villagelike organization of the floor plan is particularly exciting for the two children of the clients. The area between the boxes offers variety and secluded corners where they can safely play. The approach of taking the house apart and distributing the functional units across the lot is found 53

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in the work of several young Japanese architects today. The trailblazer here was Ryue Nishizawa’s Moriyama House of 2005, which marks a kind of turn in residential architecture in the view of several Japanese architects and architectural critics.1 Whereas for many years prior to that, the ideals were compactness and uniformity, Nishizawa distributed the individual spatial modules of the building across the property in a way that created a villagelike structure. In contrast to this house in Buzen, however, that project was for units for several unrelated parties. Hence there was no roof that integrated the individual elements. Rather, the exterior spaces are closely connected to a given unit. Despite these clear differences, both projects reveal a concept that plays with the isolation of functional units and attributes new qualities to the spaces in between. – 1… ISOZAKI, Arata, ANDO, Tadao, FUJIMORI, Terunobu, ITO, Toyo: 住宅の射程 (juutaku no shatei). Tokyo, 2006, p. 134, p. 181.

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final wooden house sou fujimoto architects

kumamoto 2008

innovatively primitive In this experimental house in Kumamoto in southern Japan, the constructions, facade, and interior are all made of wood. Its architect, Sou Fujimoto, thus calls the building, located in the garden of a private client on a lot measuring 4.20 by 4.20 meters, Final Wooden House. Building an all-wood house appealed to the Tokyo architect for several reasons. First, the material dominated Japanese architecture for centuries and had a great influence on the evolution of the country’s architecture. Second, there was its naturalness, which predestined it to shape the “primitive” architecture Fujimoto sought. Finally, the architect

was fascinated by the diversity of the material, which in one building can fulfill every conceivable function from dressing by way of construction and insulation to interior finishing. With his Final Wooden House, he pushed the multifunctionality of wood to its limits by assigning nearly all the tasks to a single element: thirty-five-centimeterthick square cedar beams. The viewer notices in passing that this is a living, growing material simply from its growth rings. Staggering the arrangement of the solid wood beams results in steps whose heights are multiples of the basic unit of thirty-five centimeters 57

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and are thus harmonized with human dimensions. One element is suitable for seating furniture; two correspond to the height of a desk; three make it possible to work standing up. In essence, this is a house without furniture, which only became common in the living areas of Japanese homes from the time of the Meiji Restoration (from 1868 onward) and the associated adoption of Western styles of housing and living. The walls and levels of Final Wooden House cannot be easily read; in fact, the space and the material that delimits space closely dovetail as positive and negative forms. In his book Primitive Future, Sou Fujimoto writes of this project: “Before matter and space separated, there was an unfathomable potential concealed in the unequivocally undiffer-

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entiated state […] when the stacked timbers and interstitial spaces become equivalent, ambiguities blur the distinction between the space produced by mass and the mass produced by space” 1. This quotation reflects what the architect means by “primitive”: not an imitation of earlier building techniques but rather an attempt to understand space and architecture in a very primal sense, to question the means available to architecture, employing them in such a way that the result makes a general statement about building. With his Final Wooden House, the architect created a house that is also an experiment with space: a small universe that offers people spaces and areas to use but not instructions for their use. 1… Fujimoto, Sou: Primitive Future. Tokyo, 2008, p. 119.

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When Japan rebuilt the cities, it used modern materials such as iron and concrete in its buildings, but this restricted Japan’s historical continuation of its own architectural style. […] For us Japanese, modernization was westernization, and that cut off our history. 1 Shigeru Ban

1… Hagenberg, Roland: Twenty Japanese Architects. Interviews and Photos by Roland Hagenberg. Taiwan, 2009, p. 71. 2… Nitschke, Günther: “Architecture and Aesthetic of an Island People,” trans. Ingrid Taylor, in: Schittich, Christian, ed., Japan: Architecture, Constructions, Ambiances. Basel, 2002, p. 26. 3… Hara, Kenya: White. Baden, 2009, p. 39–41. 4… Henrichsen, Christoph P.: Holzkultur Japan. Bauten, Gegenstände, Techniken. Basel, 2004. 5… See, for example, http://www.timberize.com. 60

a culture shaped by wood

The earliest residential buildings from Japan’s prehistoric age featured the simplest construction imaginable: the living area was defined by a hole in the earth in which four wooden supports stood that supported the roof construction. All that was visible from outside was the straw-covered, tentshaped roof. The individual elements of this “roof architecture” evolved over the millennia, but much remained fundamentally the same. For example, the area defined by the four supports arranged in a square and the distance between the supports were long referred to as ma (see also p. 94) and ken, respectively. This was not a rigid scale but a flexible unit, which later had to be harmonized with other modules such as the tatami mat and prefabricated built-in elements. 2 In sacred architecture – that is, in the indigenous Shinto ¯ religion of ancient Japan – four wooden posts arranged in square were used to mark a sacred place. The tips of the wooden poles were connected by a consecrated room, thus forming an area in which it was thought a divinity was staying – or at least could stay. 3 Later the first shrines developed from this basic structure, for example, the Ise Shrine in the Mie Prefecture, built around AD 700, or the Izumo Taisha in the Shimane Prefecture. The form of these sacred buildings derived not from residential buildings but rather from the warehouses on stilts built to protect the rice harvest from moisture and pests. The connection to wood as a building material is immanent to Shinto ¯, which is based on the worship of the “eight million” gods that run through nature and linger in it – in crags, mountains, and trees. Wood is thus a material that the divine can inhabit. The example of the Ise Shrine demonstrates just how strong the relationship between the sacred and the material truly is in Shinto ¯ism. For more than twelve hundred years it has been rebuilt every twenty years. The Japanese always use shiraki – that is, “white” or untreated wood, which symbolizes the pure and unspent. Japanese wooden buildings were not originally painted or clad. Only with the importation of Buddhism and the associated architecture from China did the

painting of wooden buildings become fashionable for a time. 4 In contrast to Western countries, wood dominated both residential architecture and sacred and public buildings for millennia, resulting in a culture distinguished by the artful use of this material. The complicated joints and constructions in wood used, for example, for the temples in Nara demonstrate the high level that the Japanese art of woodworking had already achieved in antiquity. One of the few historical building types that employ wood neither for the structure nor for the facade is the kura of tufa stone built in certain regions of Japan. They were used to store materially or culturally valuable possessions such as kimonos or art objects imported from China. Rich warriors and merchants built these vaults to protect their property against theft and fire damage. Until the twentieth century, however, they had little influence on residential architecture, which continued to be marked by wood. Only in the postwar period did steel and concrete become more common in residential architecture as well, owing to their robustness and the possibility of creating multistory apartment houses. Single-family homes often continued to be built in wood, though no longer in the traditional Japanese style but increasingly according to the American model. Those who could afford it, however, used robust steel or concrete construction even for small houses. Now wood is being rediscovered as a construction material. Strict regulations for fire prevention do not so easily admit of the use of this material for larger construction jobs in urban contexts. Hence several architects are working with hybrid constructions, such as wood paneling in front of steel-and-concrete structures or wood supports filled with concrete. 5 The rules for small houses are less strict. Recently, constructions in wood – once dismissed as a cheap expedient – are no longer necessarily covered with artificial cladding. Rather, the character of the house is deliberately made visible on the outside by means of wood facades (see, for example, Final Wooden House by Sou Fujimoto [p. 56] or Tsui no Sumika by Kite Architecture [p. 110]).

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kumiko inui

takasaki 2008

small house h ordered wilderness

A square plot with a cruciform layout spanned by a tent roof, Kumiko Inui’s Small House H might at first glance recall a threedimensional variation on the children’s drawing game Das Haus vom Nikolaus (Nicholas’s house). The building is located in Takasaki in the Gunma Prefecture and is an addition to an old farmhouse now used as a vacation home. The small addition measures just forty-two square meters and sits next to the existing building as a kind of garden house. The point of departure for the Tokyo-based architect’s design was the garden, which had partly

gone to seed, and the adjacent forest. Although it had numerous charming details, such as a mosscovered fence, a stone lantern, and a small river, this landscape lacked the key that would have made it accessible in whole or part to viewers. With her house, Inui sought to “edit,” in a sense, the garden and its elements: the strictly geometric structure provides order by offering framed views into the surroundings through windows on four sides. Thus the building with its four areas – bathroom, live-in kitchen, and two living rooms – is not just an accommodation but also a kind of filter of perceptions: through the triangular spaces that result from 63

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the diagonal interior walls, the view through the ribbon windows is focused on the landscape. This unusual spatial form inspires one to imagine the individual triangular modules as rectangles, thus integrating the garden into the perception of the interior spaces. Because the wood-and-concrete house is kept very simple inside, it is primarily the details of the garden framed by the windows that lend the rooms their character.

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yokohama

A.L.X.

2008

Jun’ichi Sampei

dancing living house

dancing living

Room to dance: the clients of this house are enthusiastic dancers and wanted, despite the limited space, to have an appropriate practice room in their new home. The studio occupies an entire floor of the building, but it also serves as kitchen, dining room, and living room. The entry floor of this house designed by Jun’ichi Sampei does not occupy the entire plot but rather sits like a wedge on the right edge of the property. This results in an open area that can be used as a carport. The bathroom is located to the left of the entrance; to the right a staircase leads upward. From outside, the latter can be read as a diagonal

line, manifesting in the very form of the building the significance of rising into the center of the house: the living room or dance studio. There is little furniture in the studio, and when necessary it can be quickly moved aside. Two mirrored walls and a robust parquet floor make it possible to use the space for professional dancing. The mirrors can be covered with two curtains when it is used as a living room. Dancing calls for music, and in order to keep the noise from disturbing the neighbors, the architect decided to light the building from above in the area of the studio, and in general tended to close the 67

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house off to the outside. The two strip skylights placed on the short ends of the studio are thus incorporated into the uses above the studio as well: the sleeping areas. One of these glazed ceiling openings is part of the roof terrace; the other serves as a corridor in front of the bedrooms and faces another skylight above the staircase on the third floor. The architects interpret the house as a kind of apparatus: the studio in the center is the real core of the building; all of the other uses are subordinated to it as accompaniments. Moreover, the design of the ground floor conveys a dynamics of form that in the studio is expressed by the dancing of its users.

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ring house karuizawa 2008

TNA

takei nabeshima architects

forest magic

Weekend houses amid greenery are very popular among wealthy residents of Tokyo. The size and density of the city fuels a desire to spend one’s leisure time, at least, in more rural areas. Ring House by TNA is located in Karuizawa in Nagano Prefecture, about an hour from Tokyo. The size of the lot, about 1,400 square meters, would have made it possible to build a spacious one-story building, but the architects decided instead to create a three-story tower with more modest dimensions.

This was a reaction to the unique character of the site: as a rule, areas intended for vacation homes do not offer the luxury of being able to spend one’s free time there cut off from neighbors. Ring House, however, is surrounded by a dense protective shield of trees, which makes it possible to design a transparent building and thus convey a sense of living in the middle of nature. Moreover, the site is located on a northern slope, which means that the height of the building allows more light into the upper stories.

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The wooden frame construction consists of pine bitte nur supports painted white, onto which Vierendeel trusses of plywood boards have been mounted verwenden at intervals. On the outside they are sided with cedar painted in dark colors. Between the stripes with the closed elements sit fixed panes of insulating glass. Into these transparent stripes the architects have integrated windows framed in yellow in several places, which provide cross ventilation. The house is accessed from the north via a footbridge. From there one does not enter any of the floors directly but rather via a staircase on an intermediate platform, from which one can climb up to the living areas or down to the guestrooms. The bedroom and bath are located on the top floor. The interior walls and ceiling elements are painted white and reflect the light. Because the closed facade rings are placed in such a way that the furniture can largely be hidden behind them, the three stories are barely identifiable from outside. The strips thus seem to be placed around a single tall space whose use is not evident to viewers. The building thus seems – especially in twilight or fog – less like a residence than like a work of art that dramatizes the forest.

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Makiko Tsukada Architects

tokyo

2008

Kondo House hanging Gardens

How can light be brought into a house that is constricted on three sides by neighboring buildings and faces a loud street on its fourth side? The Tokyo-based architect Makiko Tsukada solved that problem by largely closing off Kondo House from its surroundings, letting light flow into the house from above via patios and staggered levels. The architect used a combination of two pairs of steel frames, from which the residential floors, the outer walls, and two patios were fastened or

suspended. This made it possible to dispense with supports in the interior, so that the floors almost seem to float. This impression is reinforced by a ribbon window just above the floor, which makes the wall surfaces above it seem light as a feather. On the ground floor of the house Tsukada designed for a husband-and-wife team of graphic designers, their one-year-old child, and the husband’s father, she placed a live-in kitchen, a living room closed off on three sides, and the grandfather’s living quarters. One of the patios extends the full

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height of the building and serves as a small interior garden between the grandfather’s rooms and the clients’ living area. Two staircases lead from the kitchen to the upper floor. Arranged on three staggered levels are the family’s bedrooms, a workspace, and a play space for the child. Between the work and play areas is a second, slightly narrower patio, so that the upper story is articulated by two glass boxes as well as the shifts in level. Makiko Tsukada tries to design her houses in such a way that the occupants can use them in several ways: for example, the two

staircases permit a playful “circular tour” through the house. The open living space should not be understood as an obligation either: the rooms can be separated by shoji – the traditional sliding doors covered with rice paper – which provides a little private sphere. It is in keeping with Tsukada’s concept that the facade has dark plaster and gives few hints of its spectacular interior. Shielding against unwanted influence seems to be more important to the family than exposing to the outside the exciting world in which they dwell.

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In the Western architectural tradition, a building is primarily framed by means of walls and windows. […] On the other hand, in the traditional Japanese architecture, horizontal planes (that is, the floor and the ceiling) are the dominant framing devices. 1 Kengo Kuma

1… Hyatt, Peter and Hyatt, Jennifer: Designing with Glass: Great Glass Buildings. 50 modern classics. Mulgrave, Victoria, 2004, p. 18. 2… Hirai, Kiyoshi: The Japanese House Then and Now. Tokyo, 1998, p. 41. 3… Casa Brutus, special issue “Traditional Japanese Architecture and Design” (part 1), 4/2008, p. 71. 78

steps and layers

Flooring is first found in Japan in antiquity. It came in the form of slightly raised plank floors in the living room that cause the living area to stand out as a result, distinct from the height of the surrounding floors. Previously, the Japanese lived almost exclusively on rammed earth; floors of this kind continued to be used for “dirty” areas of the house, but the living spaces of wealthier families were increasingly dominated by plank floors. In essence, this floor served as universal furniture, supplemented by mobile tatami mats on which to sit and lie down more comfortably. Beginning around AD 1200, there were more and more residential buildings in which tatami mats were installed permanently. 2 The nature and height of the floor not only revealed the function of the room within the house but also suggested how formal the given area was and indicated the rank of those sitting on it. This was particularly clear in medieval Japan: in the reception rooms of residences of warriors, the heights of the floors indicated where those of different military ranks were supposed to sit in relation to one another. In prestigious residences, other parts of the building indicated the formality of the room and the corresponding level of etiquette. In essence, there were three different levels of formality: shin (very formal), gyo ¯ (formal), and so ¯ (informal). This was conveyed, for example, by means of the borders of tatami mats, the design of walls and ceilings, and wood of different types and manner of installation. 3 These means of formal expression were available to the nobility and the warrior class – the lower classes were not permitted to use them. Whereas craftspeople and farmers could only design their homes in simple ways in any case, in order to maintain the traditional hierarchy of the estates the merchants who grew wealthy in the eighteenth century were forbidden to use the insignias of the upper classes. In addition to functioning as an indicator of social status and as all-purpose furniture, the floor is

very important spatially, as Kengo Kuma explains. In the traditional Japanese house it was one of the few immovable elements, along with the ceilings and wooden supports. Because there were only light sliding doors and few solid interior walls, the floor and ceiling shaped the space through which daily life flowed (see also p. 94). Western influences on Japanese housing only began to increase with the Meiji Restoration from 1868 onward, but even then only one or at most two rooms of a house would be furnished according to Western ideas – or, more accurately, by the notions the Japanese had of how people lived in the West. One crucial change, however, was the introduction of furniture for sitting and reclining, which deprived the floor of its universal tasks in the living areas. In many Japanese homes, the traditional functions of the floor still play an important role. For example, the genkan, or ground-level entrance where street shoes are removed, has been retained in many cases. It is, however, no longer distinguished by an earthen floor but usually has an easily cleaned plastic or stone floor covering. The elevated areas often feature imitation parquet rather than real wood, and the living rooms and bedrooms in many houses still have tatami mats on which low tables sit during the day and futons are rolled out at night to sleep. The floor in a Japanese home thus still conveys information about how certain areas are used, intended to offer signals about how to interact with the space, and shows by means of steps and differences in floor covering where shoes are permitted, where to use slippers instead, and also when the latter should be removed again. In architecturally ambitious homes today, however, many architects dispense with these eloquent elements from the past or reinterpret them in favor of a stronger concept of space (see, for example, Kondo House by Makiko Tsukada [p. 74] or Tree House by Mount Fuji Architects [p. 84]).

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sapporo

2008

jun igarashi Architects

rectangle of light

light catcher

Where there is a window, there are, as a rule, views out: views of trees, of the sky, or, as if often the case in Japan, of the walls of the neighboring buildings. Jun Igarashi wanted to avoid one such view from Rectangle of Light house in Sapporo in northern Japan: the local architect designed an almost completely closed-off concrete box with wood siding, whose interior is lit largely indirectly. The building stands on a plot measuring a hundred square meters, though in accordance with Japanese building codes only part of that can be built on. On forty square meters with two floors,

Igarashi created room for a family of four. The maximum building height was stipulated by the code; in order to make the most of it, the architect placed the level of the ground floor and its live-in kitchen sixty centimeters below the level of the lot. A suspended gallery provides the two children with a place to play in the living room; it can be reached by ladders or via the north-facing stairwell, which also provides access to the upper floor and its bedroom. The architect put the limited space to optimal use; for example, in the area around the stairs, the bathroom is located below them in the semibasement, and the landing as well as the 81

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small gallery that terminates the stair area above serve as workspaces. The architect placed the stairs slightly away from the wall, so that its users can sit on its treads and let their feet hang down as they work at the desks mounted in front of them. The natural light enters through a kind of addition Igarashi placed in front of the building on the south side. Light enters the interior through two vertical rectangular windows on the addition’s short side. White surfaces reflect the brightness and immerse the rooms, which open generously toward this area, in a gentle light. The conscious experience of bright and dark areas should be the focus for the occupants of the house. Igarashi does not therefore see the space, which extends the full vertical height of the building, as a substitute for a garden; he even hopes that it will be left unused, and thus remains solely a light catcher. The concept of this nearly windowless house conflicted with Japanese building code, which stipulates a certain area of windows in residential building. The architect resolved the conflict by means of peepholes that can be closed with synthetic fiber elements and ventilation openings that are integrated almost invisibly into the wooden facade.

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Mount Fuji

Architects Studio

tree house 2009

trunk house

A residence that gently twists upward, Tree House in northern Tokyo sits on a sloping lot and is surrounded by houses on all sides. Rather than orienting the building toward one of the neighbors, Mount Fuji Architects created for the husband-and-wife clients a compact living space whose spaces evolve radially around a center. Via a cluster of secondary rooms including the entry, a storage space, and the bathroom, visitors reach the living space formed by frames of veneered plywood ties fifty-one millimeters wide. The frames are fastened together on one side

in the center of the room, resulting in a central column that resembles the trunk of a tree. The beams are not arranged at the same height but rather form a spiral upward, so that the circle does not close after reaching 360 degrees. Instead, the difference in heights between the frames totals 1.70 meters. This produces a kind of gallery space as a third floor. This area, which can be accessed from the living room by a space-saving ladder, transitions to the roof of the house. The individual living spaces are also separated by a step, so that a second spiral forms, providing yet another modulation of heights. 85

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The architects inserted horizontal boards into the niches of the regularly arranged frame, making it possible to utilize the construction as multifunctional furniture. Hence there are shelves on all sides that can be filled in accordance with the way the room is used, underscoring the character of each area. With its shadelike roof, Tree House is a little like a further variation on a classic of Japanese architecture for single-family homes: Umbrella House by Kazuo Shinohara, which was built it 1961 but had neither a central support nor differences in height in the roof construction.

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Yuusuke Karasawa architects

Kimitsu 2009

Villa Kanousan to be or not to be Villa Kanousan is no ordinary weekend house but rather a fascinating experiment with space. The building lies on the slope of a mountain on the Boso Peninsula in the Chiba Prefecture and is based on a simple geometric form: the cube. The architect has subdivided it inside with walls and ceilings to create eight also cubic spaces. Precisely where the various building parts meet, this construction is penetrated by smaller cubes. The cubes, whose slight incline corresponds to the surrounding landscape, are

subtracted from the basic form according to the rules of an algorithm. This results in hollow spaces that form the true character of the building. The strict grid determined by the walls and ceiling is partially broken down by the perforations, causing the spaces to enter into new relationships with one another and creating an enthralling structure. The cubic hollow spaces are placed at the same distance from one another but rotated fifteen degrees. As a result of the slightly deviating slopes of these “holes,” the order of the basic structure is at times

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scarcely recognizable. By contrast, the architect’s placement of the uses is relatively rigorous: both the living spaces on the ground floor and the bedrooms on the upper floor occupy a quarter of the square floor plan, respectively. One exception is the bathroom, which could not be designed as an open space and hence is pushed, somewhat ashamed, into one of the corners of the upper floor. All the other rooms of the house – whether the entry, the kitchen, or the bedrooms – occupy more or less the same area. The floor covering on the ground floor is oak parquet; the architect chose a bright carpet for the upper floor. The white surfaces reflect the

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light and ensure the living spaces are pleasantly bright, despite relatively small windows. The fascinating constellation of interior space is scarcely perceptible from outside. For the exterior siding, the architect chose a type of mahogany that is primarily used to build musical instruments. This results in an outward appearance associated with sounds and music. This can be read either as a contrast to the rational conception of the interior or as a playful development of the basic idea: after all, the well-thought-out arrangement of the hollow spaces in a resonant volume also account for the quality of the sensory experience.

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In Japan, traditional architecture had demonstrated virtually no concern with three-dimensional, solid spacial composition and had instead preferred to sever time into instances and space into floor areas, and to organise these fragments with intervals (ma) among them. 1 Arata Isozaki

1… Isozaki, Arata: The Island Nation Aesthetic. London, 1996, p. 46. 2… Oshima, Ken Tadashi: Arata Isozaki. Wien/London/ New York, 2009, p. 7 and p. 156. 3… Nitschke, Günther: “Architecture and Aesthetic of an Island People,” ed., trans. Ingrid Taylor, in Schittich, Christian: Japan: Architecture, Constructions, Ambiances. Basel, 2002, p. 21. 94

space without space

The sign 間 [ma] actually means “in-between” and can be interpreted as an interval of time and/ or of space. In this definition, the term is used in all Japanese art forms, including No ¯ theater and painting (To ¯ haku Hasegawa’s painting Pine Forest is probably the most famous example). In architecture, ma was originally a unit of length or area, defined not by walls but by the supports common in wood construction (see also p. 60). The concept of ma indicates an understanding of space that is fundamentally different from the Western view. Arata Isozaki defines it as follows: “In Japan, these two concepts [of time and space – Auth.] are blended together. Time goes across space, creating folds in it. […] By comparison, the word ma does not differentiate between Western understandings of time and space. Rather it describes both time and space through a notion of interval” 2. According to Isozaki, spaces are determined not by their external dimensions and boundaries but rather emerge “in between” and in harmony with time – that is, by means of transient actions and moods. Only at the moment at which the empty spatial unit is “occupied” by something is it transformed into a space. Both the active effect of a user and the changes produced by wind, light, and shadows play a role in this. In any case, space is intensely perceived through the mediation of a sense of time (just as the perception of time requires space). Studying earlier forms of the Japanese house shows that fixed spatial boundaries within the building were a late development: the shinden that emerged in ancient Japan were originally single rooms that could be subdivided with flexible partitions or curtains. Rooms were always temporary and had no fixed use. The invention of suspended ceilings made it possible to improve

the separation of the individual areas from one another – the sliding partitions necessary to do this were fastened with square rather than round supports from the late Heian period (794–1185) onward. 3 The installation of sliding partition elements necessitated supports at regular distances – a first step toward creating a modular system. In the Middle Ages, tatami mats began to be placed as a permanent floor covering, which established another module that could provide the basis for a definition of area. Whereas the Western interior is determined by the dimensions of the boundaries – as a rule the clear dimensions of the walls – the Japanese interior is composed of units of area or space whose dimensions are determined by the scale of tatami mats or the sum of areas defined by four supports. The traditional residential forms since antiquity nearly always feature the so-called engawa: a kind of veranda which could often be closed in with amado, wooden folding or sliding shutters, transforming it into an interior space. This space between inside and outside provided the occupants with an elevated area protected from the elements by a projecting roof. It could be used without really leaving the house. The perception of space described above enables one to see additional spaces, both present and imagined, in all existing spaces. The appreciation of “emptiness” anchored primarily in Zen Buddhism may have been another reason Japan has a tradition of designing with the absence of space or with elements that delimit space. Projects in the present volume such as Pilotis in a Forest by Go Hasegawa (p. 96), the Villa Kanousan by Yuusuke Karasawa (p. 88), and House H by Sou Fujimoto (p. 150) demonstrate the ability of Japanese architects to think of spaces in a different way.

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go hasegawa & associates

tsumagoi

2010

pilotis in a forest capturing voids To most viewers, Pilotis in a Forest looks like a pavilion on stilts. The Tokyo-based architect Go Hasegawa sees something else in it: the embracing of voids. These subtle nuances in the perception of space are typical of Japanese architects. Their designs are not only about the surrounded, the housed, but also about the space that lies outside it. It is thus not only positive forms but also negative ones that count, and beyond that the many stages between them that the spectrum has to offer. The building is a vacation home in Gunma Prefecture. It is located in the middle of the forest and is

connected via a cul-de-sac to a somewhat larger street. There was a very pragmatic reason Hasegawa elevated the pavilion and its living area into the sky: in winter, when the trees lose their leaves, the clients can look out the large windows at a nearby mountain. At the same time, placing the house on stilts results in an interesting space beneath the box, which mediates between the wilderness of the forest and the artificial habitat. The architect furnished this open space, which is more than six meters tall, with a walk-in closet and a seating area. The wooden box above it even offers a kind of ceiling when seen from below. The open area and the 97

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apartment proper are connected by a steel stairway that runs around the corner, opening onto a terracelike plateau above, from which the interior can be accessed. The approximately square floor plan of the box is roughly divided into three areas: a semiopen entrance plateau; a bedroom and secondary rooms, each of which take up about a quarter of the floor plan; and the live-in kitchen, which occupies half the area. The plateau in front and the open space beneath the box are generously dimensioned, showing that the emphasis of the project lies on living outdoors. In the kitchen, for example, there are not only two large windows facing the forest but also a glazed opening in the floor, through which one can watch the activity on the lower floor. Apart from the steel supports on which the pavilion stands, the project is largely wood. Both the construction of the box and the interior furnishings are made of this warm material. Only the facade shimmers metallically: as in this earlier project in Komae (see p. 48), Hasegawa used corrugated metal panels here.

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Hiroshi Nakamura

& NAP architects

Chiba

2008

house c

covered in clay

During the week, the owners of this weekend house live in a densely populated district of Tokyo. During their free time, the family wants to retreat from the hustle and bustle of the big city. They wanted the Tokyo-based architect Hiroshi Nakamura to create a modest lodging on the relatively large, by Japanese standards, property in Minamiboso in Chiba Prefecture, with the rest of the lot serving as a garden. The region in which the vacation home is located is known for a certain kind of clay, from which high-quality pottery is produced. The haptic quality of that material is supposed to characterize the walls of the house,

thus reflecting the uniqueness of the place. In earthquake-prone Japan, however, clay construction can be problematic, which is why reinforced concrete was ultimately used here. The architect did, however, have a roughly five-centimeter-thick layer of clay applied to the walls of the house. The residents helped with the plastering, digging the argillaceous earth needed with their own hands. The earth was then mixed with mortar and artificial resin to create a weatherproof, emphatically irregular outer skin. This plastering gives the shell the same color as the soil and at the same time protects the concrete walls against corrosion. 101

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The floor plan is divided into two relatively selfcontained areas in which the secondary rooms were placed, and a live-in kitchen with glass on two sides located between them. Thus the house is shielded from the neighbors on the right and left while at the same time providing a view of the coast on one side and of the mountains on the other side. The bedrooms occupy a kind of intermediate position: they are placed in the auxiliary wings but have generous windows on the side facing the sea. Nakamura calls his work Clay-Layer House and wants to evoke in viewers the association of a building that has risen out of the earth. The impression of the terrain being cut out and elevated is supposed to be reinforced by the green roof, the top layer of which is made of local loam and is planted with native grasses.

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Kochi

Architect’s Studio

kch

tokyo

2009

duckling becomes swan

The renovation of this house inevitably recalls the story of the ugly duckling, as the white, translucent facade is the main element of the transformation of the inconspicuous single-family home from the 1980s in northern Tokyo. The architect, Kazuyasu Kochi, who was building his own residence and studio, could have simply torn the structure down to build a new one, in keeping with Japanese practices. He decided against that and used the existing structure as the basis for his design. The original two-story house grew out one story toward the street, and the plaster facade disappeared behind a facade

of corrugated, fiber-reinforced plastic panels. The stairway connecting the ground floor and upper floor wandered out of the building into the new space between wall and facade. By replacing the interior stairway with an exterior stairway, the architect drew a clear dividing line between two uses, working and dwelling, and at the same time extended the usable floor space of the house. The workspace on the ground floor includes a tea kitchen and a toilet as well as a new room in the semibasement that serves as a conference room and is accessed via a narrow wooden staircase. The original wood construction inside was left exposed 105

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and the outer walls were painted white. Through a glazed perforation in the ceiling, located where the stairs used to be, the architect can see part of the living space on the floor above as he works. Likewise, his wife and daughter can remain in eye contact with him, and thus enjoy a luxury rare in Japan: being close as a family even during the day. Kochi designed the second story as an open space with a generous live-in kitchen. Via an interior staircase that originally led to the building’s roof, the occupants reach the new third floor, an added

floor with the parents’ bedroom and a roof terrace. In addition to increasing the usable floor area, it was important to the architect to integrate different spaces into the monotonous existing fabric. The semibasement, with its four-meter-tall ceiling, provides for variety, as does the exterior stairway that connects all the floors and also provides views out through openings. The added floor with the bedroom had to conform to the local restrictions on height as defined by the width of the street. At just 1.90 meters tall, it is rather low. With this conversion Kochi demonstrates that the simple wood houses like those still found in large numbers in the so-called wooden house belt around Tokyo’s center, can be transformed into refined and contemporary accommodations. In the future, and not just for the Japanese, this kind of “house recycling” can provide an alternative to complete demolition.

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It is an ancient japanese belief that a house is only a temporary abode. If it burns down, it can easily be rebuilt. 1 ¯ Kurokawa Kisho

1… Kurokawa, Kisho ¯: Rediscovering Japanese Space. New York/Tokyo, 1988, p. 58, quoted in Locher, Mira: Traditional Japanese Architecture. An Exploration of Elements and Forms. Tokyo/Rutland (Vermont)/Singapur, 2010, p. 18. 2… See the show’s Japanese-language Web site: www.asahi.co.jp/beforeafter. 3… Kitayama, Koh, Tsukamoto, Yoshiharu, Nishizawa, Ryue: Tokyo Metabolizing. Tokyo, 2010, p. 29. 108

dealing with the existing fabric

The common approach to existing residential buildings in Japan today – the cycle of demolishing and rebuilding – is anchored in history; the preservation of buildings never really played a role. Until the twentieth century, most residential buildings were constructed of wood, and metal elements were scarcely used at all in them, so that for a long time it was a relatively uncomplicated matter to break houses down again into their component parts. The parts that were still viable could be reused; the rest could be used as firewood. When a house needed to be adapted to new living situations, which as a rule was the case when the building passed from one generation to the next, the existing fabric was either supplemented by new construction or redesigned from the ground up. The ideals of Shintoism presumably contributed to this attitude as well. Purity and cleanliness and regular renewal are characteristic of this ancient Japanese religion. The clearest suggestion that these principles might have influenced architecture is the famous Ise Shrine, which is rebuilt every twenty years (see p. 60). Regular earthquakes also meant that Japanese cities and housing colonies, which consisted largely of wooden buildings, burned down frequently. For a long time the Japanese responded to this threat more passively than actively: they did not build protecting walls but rather furnished their homes in such a way that the life inside, down to the tatami mats and sliding walls, could easily be removed and brought to safety in case of fire. For them, the house was not a fortress, nor an everlasting shield but rather a temporary shell for living in. After the Second World War, Western “active” precautions against damage increasingly replaced this flexible Japanese attitude, and consequently wood was regarded as a material inferior to steel and concrete. The perception of the house as a

shell suited to a specific period of one’s life that at some point becomes outdated did not, however, change. That is why in the 1980s, during the so-called bubble economy, as constructing private homes became increasingly unaffordable as a result of high land prices, more and more cheap products were employed for homes. The resulting homes age unattractively and can often be replaced only with great effort and expense. Although land prices have settled somewhat since then, as a rule – especially in large cities – the lot, not the building, is regarded as the true value. In recent years, however, the themes of rebuilding and renovating have met with increasing interest in the area of residential buildings as well (see, for example, KCH by Kochi Architects, p. 104). Two trends can be observed: some clients decide for financial reasons to continue to use the old structure; others are inspired by models shown, for example, on the popular Japanese television show Before + After 2, and want radical (and expensive) rebuilding. On the series, an architect is tasked with transforming an existing building. But unlike on similar programs in Europe, which work with minimal changes, the approach here is more radical: the architects have walls demolished, roofs changed, and new openings made. The original building is often barely recognizable when they are finished. It is not yet clear whether this represents a paradigm shift, with a culture of rebuilding developing in Japan in the coming years. In any case, one great obstacle on that path will be the construction methods commonly used, which do not necessarily promote long life spans of houses. Because the cityscape of Japanese metropolises is marked by the cyclical renewal of individual elements, and especially residential buildings 3 , a complete rethinking on the part of home owners would have crucial consequences for urban planning.

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uji

2008

kite architecture

tsui no sumika

distance and proximity

Anyone looking at Tsui no Sumika while walking past gets the impression the building is transforming slightly with every step. This house designed by the Tokyobased firm Kite Architecture lies on an irregular lot in the city of Uji, near Kyoto. The architects developed a pentagonal ground plan covered by a tent roof composed of three planes. This geometric play produced a refined building whose sculptural effect is underscored further by the uniform exterior skin of red cedar slats. The slats conceal a simple wood frame construction in the walls. The

roof is also constructed of wood: the supports are mounted on the beams of the ridge and eaves at various inclinations following the planned course of the roof surfaces. The interplay of roof and walls results in a fascinating space of different heights inside the pavilionlike building. The clients – a retired couple – were searching for a way to live together in which they could be apart without having to feel the presence of the other was missed. The architects thus divided the space by means of two inserted boxes that house that bathroom and kitchen. This results in

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an S-shaped series of spaces from one end of the house to the other. The two end points represent the places of retreat, while the centrally located living room permits closeness. Thus the presence of the other is always felt despite being separated visually. Each can decide in which area to settle and to signal by the choice of a room how much closeness is desired. The building was constructed without stairs and Plan eventuell auf 50% skalieren also has barrier-free access via a ramp from the slightly elevated entrance, in keeping with another request from the clients. After all, this is their tsui no sumika: their final home.

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Jun Igarashi Architects

Hokkaido

2008

House of Trough

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Japanese houses traditionally face south: in residences from antiquity to the Edo period, the rooms for receiving guests faced that way, and the view onto the garden also extended in that direction. But to the south of House of Trough on Hokkaido, the most northerly of Japan’s four islands, there is an iron-processing factory; and the other directions do not offer idyllic prospects either. The architect Jun Igarashi thus decided to create an introverted home for his husband-and-wife clients.

On two sides of the house, Igarashi placed buffer zones: on the north, on three levels, are the bathroom and toilets, storage areas, and a workspace; on the south, on four levels, are the entrance, the bedroom, and the guest room. The living room is placed between these two areas, sandwiched by them. Its location at the center of the house becomes, according to the architect, a kind of forum. Indeed, the house, whose north and south wings are characterized by relatively small, modest rooms, seems unexpectedly spacious in

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this area, almost like a villa. The viewer obtains a composed of the engawa – a continuous veranda sense of the room’s dimension from the central, – and a projecting roof. But rather than designsquare wooden supports, on which the ceiling of ing these side zones as transitions to the exterior, the tall room rests like a shade. The structure of as was done with historical buildings, Igarashi the ceiling in the live-in kitchen is distinct from interpreted them as a bulwark against unwanted that of the two side zones, since less insulation influences. The central living room gets natural was used in the outer areas. The construction is light through several small windows to the east less thick, making it look a little like an eave, thus and west but also from openings onto the buffer zones. The light that enters there is reflected recalling a traditional Section Japanese S=1/250house, whose mainunder ground floor S=1/250 1F S=1/250 into room is also surrounded by the in-between space the interior by bright ceilings and floors.

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tna

takei nabeshima architects

tokyo

mosaic house sun worshipper

The property originally served as a small parking lot, but now a house for a couple with children was to be built there. The neighboring building already shaded the lot; nevertheless, building codes required it be built in a way that it deprived neighboring buildings of as little natural light as possible. The crucial features here are the imaginary diagonal lines resulting from the maximum permissible height of the building edges. TNA conformed to all the codes but nevertheless managed to produce a light-flooded building by slanting the house to the south and treating the roof as the largest opening. Thanks to the curvature of

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the volume and the stairwell with a spiral staircase that extends the full height, light reaches from the top to the bottom floor. The slope of the roof thus approaches the angles of the lines that define the maximum permissible building edges. This principle is not fundamentally new. Many buildings can be found in Japanese cities whose upper floors appear to be cut off at an angle as a result of these lines. But TNA’s solution is considerably more elegant, since these slanting lines are not a necessary evil but rather the central motif of the design. The uses are distributed in the house according to their need for light: the bedroom is located on 119

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the ground floor; the nursery and bathroom on the second floor; and the living area with the kitchen on top under the glass roof. The generous glass surface provides the occupants not only with natural light but also with views of the sky. Passing clouds and the patter of rain, for example, can be experienced just as intensely as the atmosphere of the light at different times of day. In summer, a white fabric awning inside prevents too much sun from entering, so that the interior is bright but not blinding.

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atelier bow-wow

tokyo

tower machiya Vertical Tea garden

The plot was the size of a parking space, but the clients nevertheless wanted to build their dream house there. Atelier Bow-Wow met this challenge in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district with another machiya (see also Tread Machiya, p. 42), this time in the form of a tower. The stairwell replaces the corridor of the traditionally one- or two-story machiya and snakes like a garden path through the four slightly staggered floors. On the second level the architects even added a kind of bench. As in a typical Japanese tea garden, the end point and climax of the path is a teahouse,

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or in this case a tearoom. Both clients are well versed in the Japanese tea ceremony, and would like someday to instruct students in this room. Visitors enter Tower Machiya on the southeast side and via a narrow entry area enter directly into the elevated live-in kitchen. Via a white filigreed steel stairwell, which stands out clearly against the parquet floor, they begin the climb to the upper floors. The individual rooms are articulated around the stairwell like stations on the edge of the path. The building makes no secret of the steel construction that supports it: crossovers and rough

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cladding remain visible. The architects combined this open and clear structure with modern glass elements, traditional Japanese sliding doors, and tatami mats, resulting in a contemporary and yet thoroughly Japanese house. scale 1:250 That is also reflected in the exterior view of Tower Machiya: the entrance area is characterized by traditional sliding doors of thin wooden slats; the upper stories are dominated by the steel construction and narrow balconies. Tower Machiya is an example of the extreme verticality that now dominates Japan’s urban structures, which were originally so horizontal. Rather than low buildings that develop into the depths of the plot, there are rather multistory point-block residential buildings. With this design, however, Atelier Bow-Wow demonstrates that a vertically arranged house need not contradict the original living style of the Japanese city but can instead build on it.

1 . Ground floor plan 2. First floor plan 3. Second floor plan 4. Third floor plan/attic 5. Longitudinal section 6. Cross section Scale 1:250 125

Looking over the bay, spring blossoms and autumn leaves are as nothing Compared to those grass-thatched huts in the autumn twilight. 1 見わたせば 花も紅葉もなかりけり 浦の苫屋の秋の夕暮 1 Fujiwara Sadaie

藤原定家

(1162–1241)

1… Blyth, R. H.: Haiku, vol. 3. Summer-Autumn. Tokyo, 1986, p. 900. 2… Japan Illustrated Encyclopedia: Keys to the Japanese Heart and Soul. Tokyo, 2008 (19th ed.), p. 29. 3… Ibid., p. 31. 126

beauty and ephemerality

That the Japanese cultivate a special relationship to fleeting moments is reflected in the attention they pay to seasonal events such as the blooming and fading of various sorts of flowers or to the fall colors of leaves. In the case of cherry blossoms in particular, mankai – that is, the day on which the blossoms have opened completely and remain visible only for a brief time – is feverishly anticipated. It is about perfect beauty, on the one hand, but also, on the other hand, about the fact such beauty cannot be captured: perfection is not a state that endures. The Japanese call the aesthetic principle behind this mono no aware: “a deep, empathetic appreciation of the ephemeral beauty manifest in nature and human life” 2 . This motif first occurs in writings of the Heian period – around AD 1000 – and plays an important role in the literature of later centuries as well. To understand mono no aware, it is important to understand mujo ¯ – the Buddhist doctrine of ephemerality, according to which “everything that is born must die and […] nothing remains unchanged”3. Because Buddhism began influencing Japanese culture as early as AD 700, it is reasonable to assume that mono no aware evolved in part based on engagement with the doctrine of mujo ¯. With the refinement of the tea ceremony and developments in poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, two other aesthetic principles gained in importance: wabi and sabi. Whereas the former goes back to the tea master Sen no Rikyo ¯ (1522–91) and primarily praises the austere beauty of the simple life relieved of worldly cares, the latter is closely associated with the poet Basho ¯ (1644–94) and is found – even beyond poetry – where the ephemerality and imperfection of life are expressed in the form of a patina or slight defects. Both principles are sometimes juxtaposed with perfect beauty – of cherry blossoms,

for example – so that the contrast will reinforce the intended image of wabi or sabi. In the teahouses, the principles of wabi and sabi were transferred to architecture: on the one hand, they influenced the architecture of shoin, a very formal type of building that evolved from the medieval residences of warriors. In addition, they gave impetus to the development of a more informal type of house: the sukiya, which is now considered the model of traditional Japanese residential architecture (the most famous example is the Villa Katsura in Kyoto; see p. 14). This traditional aesthetic is reflected in contemporary architecture as well, as in the simple beauty of the construction of Tower Machiya by Atelier BowWow (p. 122). Although mono no aware and sabi had no direct influence on architecture, they do have a mutual relationship to it: the living material of wood, which dominated Japanese architecture into the twentieth century, ages in a clearly visible way; historical roof constructions of rice straw or bark must be replaced regularly; and sensitive materials with short life spans, such as tatami and shoji (sliding doors of rice paper) characterize many houses even today. In the case of sho ¯ji, moreover, space itself becomes ephemeral, since the floor plans can be changed in accordance with current needs. This flexible subdivision of space makes sense even today, since the often relatively small houses can quickly react to new requirements (see, for example, Kondo House by Makiko Tsukada, p. 74). In contemporary architecture, the shoji are sometimes replaced by curtains. The approach to light and relationships to the garden or the changing seasons often reflects architects’ desire to provide a place in architecture for the ephemeral or to think of the building not just spatially but also temporally.

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2009

moriyama house nagoya

GREEN HEART

The clients dreamed of a lavish garden. But a tiny property in Nagoya was all the architect Makoto Tanijiri, founder of the Hiroshima- and Tokyo-based Suppose Design Office, had to make this dream come true. Moreover, because it closely adjoined buildings on three sides, he proposed an alternative to the young family: rather than reducing the area for the building to the absolute minimum in order to create an open-air garden that would scarcely be usable in this dispersed environment, he wanted to bring green spaces inside.

The house is accessed via a front yard facing the street to the north. Seen from outside, the building, clad in white corrugated metal, somewhat resembles a container placed here temporarily between the two clearly taller neighboring buildings. Only the tall, narrow door suggests that a residence could be located behind the facade. The few, rather small openings are arranged in a way that makes views in almost impossible. Instead Tanijiri opened the building upward; two large skylights, placed above the stairwell and a two-story patio, respec-

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tively, allow light vertically into the interior and provide an open view of the sky. Another light source is a provided by a slight shift in the two levels of the building. The upper story recedes on the east side slightly, so that the semibasement also receives light from above on one long side. Tanijiri placed the indoor garden directly under the skylights. At a slight slope it extends from the entrance to the live-in kitchen in the semibasement, and forms a two-story garden between the living space and the bathroom. The plants that have since grown there ensure that the family does not have to face a view of the toilet while eating lunch. To get from one room to the other, the residents generally cross one of the garden areas, so that life there is intensely permeated with greenery, forming a house in which the view into the garden is no longer a view outward. The family’s sleeping areas are reached via the stairs in the entrance. A separate nursery is planned as merely temporary, since the beds of the parents and the child are separated only by a curtain. The most private of all the rooms is located beyond the bedroom, directly above the bathroom. It can only be reached by a footbridge, and thus functions for the family – in part because of its generous opening onto the green space – as something like a garden pavilion, where they can enjoy a cup of tea or read a book.

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shinichi ogawa & associates

minimalist house itoman

three times three The city of Itoman lies on Okinawa – a group of islands roughly two thousand kilometers southwest of Tokyo. The average temperature is around 25 degrees Celsius. On this archipelago bordering on the South Pacific, the architect Shinichi Ogawa created a house that presents itself to the outside as a closed white box. Minimalist House is lit by a striplike opening that runs along the long side of the house and reduces the surface of the roof by about a third. The width of this strip was not chosen by chance, since the Hiroshima- and Tokyo-based architect selected several simple mathematical rules and rigorously developed the

2010

floor plan from a grid. The smallest common denominator of all the dimensions is the number three: the building is three meters tall, nine meters wide, and eighteen meters long. It is subdivided lengthwise into three strips of equal width, which serves as the zones for the secondary rooms, the living space, and the outdoor space, respectively. The zone for the secondary rooms is in turn subdivided into three strips: workspace, corridor, and a multifunctional furnishing that leads into the living space. The latter accommodates the dining table and beds. A wall of glass between the living room and the outdoor area creates a boundary between 135

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these two strips and the outside. Ogawa’s design is a reminder that Japanese rooms were traditionally defined by modular dimensions: distances between supports and the dimensions of tatami mats (see p. 61). The heights of rooms scarcely vary either, since there were usually standard dimensions for wood construction. The architect takes up this feature of Japanese architecture and takes it to its limits with his modules of three by three meters. Whereas the boundary between the secondary rooms and the living space is a wide, handy Corian wall element, the living space and the outdoor area form a visual unity thanks to generous windows. The uses overlap as well: for example, the clients use the partition wall of the outdoor space as a screen

on their video evenings by projecting through the glass. At night this white wall is brushed by light from uplights, so that the few plants and the pond in this outdoor space are presented to the residents like works of art. The austere, linear composition of the Minimalist House is not a corset into which its occupants are forced – its arrangement can be softened, emotionalized, at any time. The completely different and seemingly completely separated areas of the house are connected by the interaction of its users with one another. From the perspective of the residents, the house has numerous facets. In the end, the radical reduction of the house only dramatizes all the more the focus here: dwelling.

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UID

Architects

osaka 2010

Atelier Bisque Doll

floating bands A garden that fuses into a unity with the house to which it belongs, Atelier Bisque Doll is a workshop and residence for an older couple that spends a lot of time at home and therefore wanted a house in which weather and the seasons could be experienced intensely while preserving their private sphere. The wife, a doll artist, uses the northern wing that faces the street as her studio. In the southern area, which is slightly higher as a result of a sloping property, Keisuke Maeda, the architect from Hiroshima, arranged the couple’s home. The retired

husband can participate visually in the activities in the studio from the living area or close himself off from the workshop spatially by means of large sliding doors. Both uses seem to be wrapped in white bands: the lowest one is wrapped around the studio and the middle one around the living spaces. The third band is also the upper termination of the house and hence not made of sandwich panels like the other two but of reinforced concrete. The two lower bands frame the garden and make it seem like part of the house: they prevent views inward and at the same time hint at the openness

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of the lot. Plant beds in the area of the windows, which nearly reach the floor, and strips of skylight also cause the boundaries between outside and inside to blur. Where the studio transitions into the living area, the rings overlap and form a kind of corridor, which although it is already part of the house nevertheless belongs to the official access route. The latter winds in an S shape across the entire width of the lot and thus forms part of the longest access path imaginable on this property. It is intended primarily for visitors, since as a rule the occupants use the clearly more practical service entrance to the west as their main entrance. To those who take the long path, the garden seems somewhat larger: the architecture can be perceived from all sides; the doll artist’s works can be admired in display cases; the building is even passed on the way through the garden before one finally arrives at the entrance proper. This composition recalls the paths in traditional Japanese gardens, which lead visitors in subtly dramatic ways through the (green) spaces and employ miegakure, the alternation of hiding and revealing, to cause them to discover new things constantly.

1 . Floor plan 2. Section Scale 1:250 141

But what is it that almost intoxicates the eyes here? […] without analyzing the site in accordance with reason, one feels that the art of the garden reproduces here human relationships and connections and does so in an extremely refined form. 1 Bruno Taut (on the Garden of the Villa Katsura in Kyoto)

1… Taut, Bruno: Nippon mit europäischen Augen gesehen. Berlin, 2009, p. 25. 2… Nitschke, Günther, “Architecture and Aesthetic of an Island People”, trans. Ingrid Taylor, in Schittich, Christian, ed.: Japan. Architecture, Constructions, Ambiances. Basel, 2002, p. 26–27. 3… Ibid., p. 27. 4… Ibid., p. 29. 144

the garden as part of the architecture

One of the oldest surviving texts on garden design is the Sakuteiki, written in Japan during the Heian period (794–1192). Prestigious Japanese architecture is closely tied to garden design in Japan. As Günther Nitschke has put it: “In Japan the garden has traditionally always been a part of the architecture, and the architecture a part of the garden” 2. The shinden, the earlier known prestigious residential buildings, dating from the Heian period, already featured a garden, and the U-shaped building was located to the north of it. The most important element was a lake with an island, accessed by two low wooden bridges. The design was based on Chinese precursors. The garden served, on the one hand, as a way for the owner to display his status and, on the other hand, to entertain guests with walks or parties. Just as important as the garden’s actual use, however, was the view of it: into the twentieth century, the spaces in which guests were received faced the garden, and the visitor was given a seat from which he or she could enjoy a view into its greenery. In addition to these gardens of prestigious residences, which over time became smaller in size, there were also special forms of gardens: for example, the sixteenth-century rock gardens of Buddhist temples (karesansui) and tea gardens (chaniwa). The latter were considered essential components of the tearoom or of the tea ceremony. The point of departure for the design was a path leading to the teahouse, which can be interpreted as “a lonely mountain path which leads us out of our day-to-day trials and tribulations and into the peace and seclusion of nature” 3. Only later was the tea garden supplemented by artistic

elements such as the mie-gakure, the constant alternation of the hidden and the visible. A hybrid of the traditional villa garden and the tea garden is found at the Villa Katsura, the harmony of whose architecture and the designed landscape was praised lavishly by Bruno Taut in particular. In his book Houses and People of Japan, Taut describes it as if the architecture of the villa can only be conceived together with the garden. The layout of the space would indeed have no meaning without the garden, and the effect that the light, the sounds, and the seasons produce through thin rice paper walls would be completely different. Whereas in the architecture of villas it is possible to observe a development from an embracing of the garden to an interpenetration with it, 4 the narrow town houses that have existed in Japan since the Middle Ages could scarcely afford their own outdoor space. In lieu of outdoor space they developed tsuboniwa, or small gardens in inner courtyards. At least in cities, large gardens were always a privilege of the wealthy. Not until the twentieth century did ordinary citizens of Tokyo have opportunities to call a single-family house with a more or less large garden their own. But rapid urbanization of the periphery caused these “garden cities” to disappear again. But the dream of a garden remains alive, as evidenced by the lovingly arranged flowerpots in front of many minihouses in large Japanese cities, including several of the projects presented in the present volume, in which the creation of a gardenlike area played an important role for the clients (for example, Moriyama House by Suppose Design Office [p. 128] or the house with gardens by Tetsuo Kondo ¯ [p. 28]).

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A.L.X.

Jun’ichi Sampei

tokyo 2010

house tokyo

iceberg

Among the well-mannered residences of its neighborhood, this building seems mysterious. It sits like a foundling: a white building tapering toward the top on a corner lot in Mitaka in western Tokyo. Passersby probably suspect it houses some kind of urban infrastructure rather than the home of a young couple. The reason this building tapers toward the top is the Japanese building codes. The maximum allowable outline of the building that would permit the neighboring buildings to receive sufficient natural light is determined by steep diagonals. Within House Tokyo, therefore, the ground floor offers the

largest coherent area, which is why the architect placed the live-in kitchen there. But that area is bordered by streets on two sides and hence is just as exposed as a street-side café. The two steps that lead down from the entrance to the kitchen create distance and enlarge the usable space. A staircase designed to be as small as possible transitions from the entry area to the second floor. The latter consists of a concrete box painted white, between which the exterior walls have been spanned. Two uses are located there: a bedroom for future children and a hobby room for the husband, who collects figures from the Japanese anime series 147

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Gundam. From this intermediate floor, which is accessed by a glazed gallery, the sleeping area can be reached via a narrow and steep spiral staircase. Via various split levels one arrives at the bathroom and then finally at the sunken roof terrace, which is invisible from outside. To protect the owners’ private sphere, the architects surrounded the reinforced-concrete construction with a shell of white perforated metal that runs

around the entire exterior facade and all the openings. The surface of the building thus seems almost homogeneous. Passersby can only perceive the rooms lying behind it at night, when the house glows from within and the perforated metal looks like a veil. It is, however, not possible to look out of the windows covered by the metal facade. In exchange, there is an impressive view of the surroundings from the roof terrace on the top floor.

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house h tokyo

from branch to branch Sou Fujimoto modeled his design for House H in Tokyo on the structure of a young tree; the building is like a shoot that is constantly branching out as it spreads upward. The Tokyobased architect worked with separate levels, each of which serves a specific use, and with steps that either connect two levels or represent their own “spatial unit”. The house almost completely fills the lot – in lieu of a garden, Fujimoto created interesting spatial transitions that make the interior of the building seem like a unity. Via the carport one arrives at the entry to the house, from which a massive staircase leads into the living

2009

space. From there a wooden staircase provides access to the kitchen. Additional steps lead to the living room and finally the bedroom. Up to this point the steps lead upward in a spiral, but now one can choose whether to continue climbing upward or enter the nursery. There awaits one of the “aimless” staircases, placed over an opening in the ceiling, providing a place for their small daughter to play. From the parents’ bedroom one can continue up, again with two options to choose from: the path to the roof terraces or that to the bathroom. The individual rooms are connected to one another via large-format openings in walls and ceil151

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1 . Cross section 2. Third floor plan 3. Second floor plan 4. First floor plan 5. Ground floor plan Scale 1:250

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ings, so that the family members remain in contact across several floors or can at least sense the presence of the others. The numerous connections make the interior seem almost continuous. This vertically conceived landscape would probably Level 2-3 function best without any exterior walls, but its use as a residence and its location in a densely populated Tokyo neighborhood argued rather for a closed solution. An exposed concrete shell with large openings is wrapped around the living areas and also surrounds the roof terraces and the carport. Whereas the interior with its many steps somewhat recalls a narrow and winding ruin or a work by the Level 1-2 artist M. C. Escher, the house presents itself to the outside as ordered and restrained. The large windows, whose panes are fixed in the jambs at a slight angle, frame the exterior space. Views inward and outward connect the private and the public areas, so that the exterior space and street scenes can flow into the family’s everyday life.

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Architects

A.l.X. „Architect Label Xain“ Jun'ichi Sampei Sorte D-type 5-9-22 Hiroo, Shibuya-ku Tokyo, 150-0012 Phone/Fax +81-3-3280-6781 www.xain.jp

Inui, Kumiko Office of Kumiko Inui 3-57-6-303 Yoyogi, Shibuya-ku Tokyo, 151-0053 Phone +81-3-3303-2971 Fax +81-3-3373-2972 www.inuiuni.com

Atelier Bow-Wow Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Momoyo Kaijima 8-79 Suga-cho, Shinjuku-ku Tokyo, 160-0018 Phone +81-3-3226-5366 Fax +81-3-3226-5366 www.bow-wow.jp

Karasawa, Yuusuke Yuusuke Karasawa Architects 1-9-11-103 Sendagaya, Shibuya-ku Tokyo, 151-0051 Phone +81-3-5314-3558 Fax +81-3-5314-3559 yuusukekarasawa.com

Fujimoto, Sou Sou Fujimoto Architects Ichikawa Seihon building 6F 10-3 Higashienoki-cho, Shinjuku-ku Tokyo, 162-0807 Phone +81-3-3513-5401 Fax +81-3-3513-5402 Hasegawa, Go Go Hasegawa & Associates Gaien Building 5F 2-18-7 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku Tokyo, 150-0001 Phone +81-3-3403-0336 Fax +81-3-3403-0337 mail www.hsgwg.com Igarashi, Jun Jun Igarashi Architects inc. 81 Miyamae, Saroma-tou Tokoro-gun Hokkaido, 093-0501 Phone +81-1587-2-3524 Fax +81-1587-2-3561 jun-igarashi.web.infoseek.co.jp

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Kite Architecture Eri Ishida, Aki Takagi 2-24-11-301 Tomigaya, Shibuya-ku Tokyo, 151-0062 Phone +81-3-6407-8761 Fax +81-3-6407-8762 www.kite-architecture.jp Kochi, Kazuyasu KOCHI ARCHITECT’S STUDIO 2-17-1 Zoshigaya, Toshima-ku Tokyo, 171-0032 Phone +81-3-3986-0095 Fax +81-3-3986-0304 www.kkas.net Kondo, Tetsuo Tetsuo Kondo Architects 2-24-2-1F Haramachi, Meguro-ku Tokyo, 1520011 Phone +81-3-3714-4131 Fax +81-3-3714-4132 www.tetsuokondo.jp

Mount Fuji Architects Studio Masahiro Harada, Mao Harada, Naoto Ishii Akasaka Heights 501 9-5-26 Akasaka, Minato-ku Tokyo, 107-0052 Phone/Fax +81-3-3475-1800 www14.plala.or.jp/mfas/fuji.htm Nakamura, Hiroshi Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP Architects 2-15-7-1F Sakura-Shinmachi, Setagaya-ku Tokyo, 154-0015 Phone +81-3-5426-0105 Fax +81(0)3-3428-0886 www.nakam.info Nakayama, Hideyuki Hideyuki Nakayama Architecture #204, 26 Daikyo-cho, Shinjuku-ku Tokyo, 160-0015 Phone +81-3-6273-1567 Fax +81-3-6273-1568 www.hideyukinakayama.com

TNA Makoto Takei, Chie Nabeshima 3-16-3-3F Taishidou Setagaya-ku Tokyo, 154-0004 Phone +81-3-3795-1901 Fax +81-3-3795-1902 www.tna-arch.com Tsukada, Makiko Makiko Tsukada Architects 6-12-15 Shimoshakujii, Nerima-ku Tokyo, 177-0042 Phone +81-3-5372 7584 Fax +81-3-5372 7862 www15.plala.or.jp/maaa UID Architect & Associates Keisuke Maeda mori x hako 2F Kinosho-cho, Fukuyama-shi Hiroshima, 720-0082 Phone +81-84-927-0136 Fax +81-84-927-0146 www.maeda-inc.jp/uid

Ogawa, Shinichi Shinichi Ogawa & Associates 5-33-18 Inokuchi, Nishi-ku Hiroshima, 733-0842 Phone +81-82-278-7099 Fax +81-82-278-7107 www.shinichiogawa.com Suppose Design Office Makoto Tanijiri 13-2-3F Kakomachi, Naka-ku Hiroshima, 730-0812 Phone +81-82-247-1152 Fax +81-82-298-5551 www.suppose.jp

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about the authors Claudia Hildner Claudia Hildner, born in Munich in 1979, studied architecture at the Technical University of Munich and the University of Tokyo. After receiving her diploma, she was a trainee at the journal Baumeister in Munich before moving to Stuttgart as a freelance architecture journalist in 2007. There she wrote numerous contributions to specialist publications and worked as an editor for the architecture journal Metamorphose and for the emagazine, managed by frei04 publizistik, of the Web site german-architects.com. She has also participated in several book projects as author or editor. The focuses of her work are on building within existing fabric and Japanese architecture. She furthered her knowledge of Japanese culture and architecture in 2010 and 2011 while reporting from Tokyo on contemporary Japanese architecture. She lives and works in Munich. Ulf Meyer The architect, author, critic, and lecturer was born in Berlin in 1970 and studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin and at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. After receiving his diploma in 1996, he worked as a freelance architecture journalist, critic, and curator. He worked for Shigeru Ban Architects in Tokyo in 2001/2002 with a stipend from the Nippon Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft; in 2004 he worked in Berkeley, California, as architecture critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2008 he was appointed professor of sustainable architecture and urban planning at Kansas State University and Distinguished Hyde Chair of Excellence at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2010. He has written numerous articles for specialist and popular journals throughout the world as well as books, including publications on Japanese architecture and the city such as Tokio Architekturführer, which was published in 2010.

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Bibliography A Guide to Japanese Architecture. Compiled by The Japan Architect Editorial Section, Nobuo Ito. Tokyo, 1975. ARCH+ 151, “Minihäuser in der Megacity Tokio”. Aachen, 2000. Blyth, R. H.: Haiku. Vol. 3. Summer–Autumn. Tokyo, 1986. Bognar, Botond: The New Japanese Architecture. New York, 1990. Casa Brutus, special issue “Traditional Japanese Architecture and Design” (Part 1), 4/2008. Fackler, Martin: “Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened”, New York Times, October 17, 2010. FUJIMOTO, Sou: Primitive Future. Tokyo, 2008. Hagenberg, Roland: 20 Japanese Architects. Interviews and photos by Roland Hagenberg. Taiwan, 2009. Hara, Kenya: White. Baden, 2009. Henrichsen, Christoph P.: Holzkultur Japan. Bauten, Gegenstände, Techniken. Basel, 2004. Hirai, Kiyoshi: The Japanese House Then and Now. Tokyo, 1998. Hyatt, Peter and Hyatt, Jennifer: Designing with Glass: Great Glass Buildings. 50 modern classics. Mulgrave, Victoria, 2004. Isozaki, Arata: The Island Nation Aesthetic. London, 1996. – ISOZAKI, Arata, ANDO, Tadao, FUJIMORI, Terunobu, ITO, Toyo: 住宅の射程 (juutaku no shatei). Tokyo, 2006.

Japan Illustrated Encyclopedia: Keys to the Japanese Heart and Soul. Tokyo, 2008 (19th ed.). Kitayama, Koh, Tsukamoto, Yoshiharu, Nishizawa, Ryue: Tokyo Metabolizing. Tokyo, 2010. Kurokawa, Kisho: Rediscovering Japanese Space. New York/Tokyo, 1988. Locher, Mira: Traditional Japanese Architecture. An Exploration of Elements and Forms. Tokyo/Rutland (Vermont)/Singapur, 2010. Nitschke, Günther: “Architecture and Aesthetic of an Island People”, trans. Ingrid Taylor, in Schittich, Christian, ed.: Japan: Architecture, Constructions, Ambiances. Basel, 2002. Oshima, Ken Tadashi: Arata Isozaki, Wien/ London/New York, 2009. Pollock, Naomi: Modern Japanese House. Wien/London/New York, 2005. Rössler, Hannes: Minihäuser in Japan. Salzburg, 2000. Shinohara, Kazuo: Ju ¯ takuron (住宅論). Tokyo, 1970. Taut, Bruno: Nippon mit europäischen Augen gesehen. Berlin, 2009. TAUT, Bruno: Houses and People of Japan. Tokyo, 1937.

picture credits p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p. p.

10, 22: Tomio Ohashi, Tokyo 11–14, 20: Claudia Hildner, Munich 15 right: Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin/Carl Rogge 15 left, 16: wikimedia/wiii (Creative Commons) 17: Hirayama Chuji, Tokyo 19: Kawasumi Architectural Photography, Tokyo 21: wikimedia/Peachkiller (Creative Commons) – Osaka 23: Tadao Ando, 25: Mitsumasa Fujitsuka, Tokyo 28–31, 76 above, 77, 84–87: Ken‘ichi Suzuki, Tokyo 32–35: Ryota Atarashi, Tokyo 36, 38: Nakayama Hideyuki, Tokyo 39, 40–41: Takumi Ota, Tokyo

p. 42–45, 123–125: Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo p. 48–51, 64 below, 70–73, 110–113, 118–121: Daici Ano, Tokyo p. 52–55, 128–133: Toshiyuki Yano, Tokyo p. 56–58, 150–155: Iwan Baan, Amsterdam p. 62, 64 above, 74, 76 below, 96–98, 122: Shinkenchiku-sha, Tokyo p. 66–69, 146–149: Koichi Torimura, Tokyo p. 80–83, 114–117: Jun Igarashi Architects, Saroma p. 88–93, 138–143: Sergio Pirrone p. 99: Go Hasegawa, Tokyo p. 100–103: Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, Tokyo p. 104–107: Kazuyasu Kochi, Tokyo p. 134–137: Shinichi Ogawa, Hiroshima 159

imprint Concept: Claudia Hildner, Andrea Wiegelmann Texts: Claudia Hildner Editors: Andrea Wiegelmann, Katharina Sommer Translation from German into English: Steven Lindberg Copy editing: Keonaona Peterson Project management: Katharina Sommer Cover: Villa Kanousan, Yuusuke Karasawa Architects Photo: Sergio Pirrone Graphic Design & Book Production: ActarBirkhäuserPro Barcelona – Basel www.actarbirkhauserpro.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA. Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 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, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. This book is also available in a German language edition (ISBN 978-3-0346-0743-8). Distribution: ActarBirkhäuserD Barcelona – Basel – New York www.actarbirkhauser-d.com

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imprint Concept: Claudia Hildner, Andrea Wiegelmann Texts: Claudia Hildner Editors: Andrea Wiegelmann, Katharina Sommer Translation from German into English: Steven Lindberg Copy editing: Keonaona Peterson Project management: Katharina Sommer Cover: Villa Kanousan, Yuusuke Karasawa Architects Photo: Sergio Pirrone Graphic Design & Book Production: ActarBirkhäuserPro Barcelona – Basel www.actarbirkhauserpro.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA. Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 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, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. This book is also available in a German language edition (ISBN 978-3-0346-0743-8). Distribution: ActarBirkhäuserD Barcelona – Basel – New York www.actarbirkhauser-d.com

© 2011 Birkhäuser GmbH Basel P.O. Box, 4002 Basel, Switzerland Part of ActarBirkhäuser Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Spain ISBN 978-3-0346-0744-5

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