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about articles interviews typology: daycare center typology: nursing home typology: three generation house

typology: collective living

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Community Area Model – Riken

Yamamoto & Field Shop
April 28, 2013

The Community Area Model is a research project by Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop for a more resilient housing community. It is not a
typology that focusses not just on the ageing society and elderly people specifically, but it proposes a general rethinking of living
communities in the city and in the suburb. As it nevertheless contains several ideas for the ageing society and the place of elderly
people within the community, we were very interested to include this project in our research. Riken Yamamoto and Fieldshop have
sent us the images of the concept and the article displayed below, explaining why a paradigm shift in housing is wanted immediately.

Riken Yamamoto has already published several articles and ideas about collective living and the housing community, and has been
working on this subject steadily from an early moment in his career onward. For example the designs for the Hotakubo Housing and
the Inter-Junction City already show many of the ideas in the Community Area Model already. Also the Shinonome Canal Court
housing projects try to deal with functional flexibility and communal spaces between private homes. The basis of his research is his
conviction that the nuclear family, the entity on which all housing projects are based, is no longer the right unit of measurement. He
pleads for a housing environment that celebrates diversity, in lifestyles and household composition, but also functionally: all kinds of
small-scale functions are integrated within the living area such as shops, restaurants, offices, daycare, communal living rooms etc. All
are stacked on top of each other offering also a wide variety of enclosed and open spaces and flexibility in use.

The lives of people will be more turned outward, not just as part of a nuclear family but of a bigger community. Elderly people but also
children can play a natural role in this environment, being supported by a wider network of sharing, micro-economics and sustainable
‘new neighbouring’.

(Image 1-3 courtesy of Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop, Image 4 courtesy of Takeru Kamoi, via Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop)
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Article by Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop:

“Limitations of the ‘One House = One Family’ System

The ‘One House = One Family’ system, or ideology, was first established in Europe in the 1920’s. This system assumes a single
family unit to inhabit a single residential unit. In the 1920’s the aftermath of the First World War and the large number of working class
labourers gravitating toward cities created a huge demand for inexpensive mass housing. Until then, urban housing for the working
class had been pitiful at best. In fact, in 1910’s Vienna there were 5,734 housing units which would fall under the category of the ‘one
house=one family’; yet the total number of such residents comprised only 1.2 percent of Vienna’s population.i Photographs from this
era show that the majority of urban working class housing was shared between strangers at a disastrously high density. In such
context, a house that can be inhabited by a single family was no doubt a dream home for the urban working class.

As housing based on the ‘one house=one family’ system had to be provided in immense quantities, they required rigorous
standardisation as well as rational construction methods. This lead to the extensive use of copying and pasting of the same housing
layout, establishing a new building type: mass housing. Standardisation was synonymous to ‘repetition of the same housing layout’.
Furthermore, standardisation of housing units lead, in turn, to the standardisation of families that inhabited them. In other words, by
living in a ‘standard house’, people were imprinted with the concept of a ‘standard family’. Soon housing became a spatial devise in
which its inhabitants were moulded into ‘standard families’. In Foucaultian words, housing became a training and disciplining device
for standardising families. Therefore ‘one house=one family’ is a system for standardising houses and its inhabitants, as well as a
system for providing houses.
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Standardised specimens of the ‘one house=one family’ system have the following characteristics. Firstly, they are extremely closed to
the outside. This is primarily due to them being devices for reproduction – to raise children. Autonomy was also required within the
‘one house=one family’ system in order for the management and care of the inhabitants. Management and care, in this case, refer not
only to that of children but to the management and care of all family members. Generally this has been the housewife’s role. If more
families are self-sufficient in terms of the management and care of its members, communities and the country need to do less to
support them. By assuming the standardised ‘one house=one family’ as the minimum unit of a nation, efficiency in governing that
nation improved remarkably. Of course the autonomy and privacy amongst households achieved by the ‘one house=one family’
system were also beneficial to individuals.

The 1920’s was the era of the Weimar Republic in Germany. 1918 saw the end of the First World War, with Germany on the losing
side. In 1919 the Weimar constitution was written with the aim of creating a new national system. The Bauhaus was founded in the
same year. The first CIAM conference was held in 1927. How cities should be, how housing should be standardised, and how they
should be provided, were amongst the top agenda both at the Bauhaus and CIAM. It was then that the ‘one house=one family’
system was adopted. The ‘one house=one family’ system was effectively employed when countries required a new system for its
government. In other words, the ‘one house=one family’ concept was introduced as a kind of national management system. It was the
ultimate system conceived in the desperate aftermath of the First World War.

After the Second World War this system was introduced via America to Japan, a country trying to create a new national image. Thus
the ‘one house=one family’ system was brought to Japan, whose housing situation was more or less similar to that of 1920’s Europe.
Until recently, the ‘one house=one family’ concept has served the country more than enough.

This system, however, has become outdated. Today the average family size in urban Tokyo is 2.0 persons per family, most of which
are elderly citizens. The current birth rate of 1.32* also testifies against the validity of the ‘one house=one family’ system. The fact that
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the birth rate must be raised to 2.07 in order to maintain the current national population already indicates a crisis for the system. The
reality is that the ‘one house=one family’ unit is no longer effective as a device for reproduction. If the two members of a household
were both elderly, the autonomy of that household in managing and caring for its members is compromised. If the basic principles of
the ‘one house=one family’ system were based on the household’s autonomy and closed nature, the principles are already invalid. To
make matters worse, there is a major contradiction in the way that ‘closed’ housing are still produced, whilst households are unable to
maintain their autonomy and closed nature from within. Tragic incidents which keep occurring within these ‘one house=one family’
households are in fact outcries coming from the failing system itself. There is an urgent need to consider an alternative system which
would eventually replace the outdated ‘one house=one family’ system.

The debacle of the ‘one house=one family’ system is not only a family problem; neither is it a housing problem. It signifies the failing
of a nation’s governing system.”

i Tourmin, S.& Janik, A.,Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001.

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