After

the
Crash
After
the
Crash:
Architecture
in
Post-Bubble
Japan
Thomas Daniell
Foreword by Hitoshi Abe, Afterword by Ari Seligmann
Princeton Architectural Press, New York
Published by
Princeton Architectural Press
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© 2008 Princeton Architectural Press

All rights reserved
Printed and bound in China
11 10 09 08 4 3 2 1 First edition

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without

written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright.

Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Publication of this book was supported by a grant from the Graham

Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Editor: Linda Lee

Designer: Jan Haux

Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Sara Bader, Dorothy Ball, Nicola Bednarek,
Janet Behning, Becca Casbon, Carina Cha, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Russell
Fernandez, Pete Fitzpatrick, Wendy Fuller, Clare Jacobson, Aileen Kwun,
Nancy Eklund Later, Laurie Manfra, Katharine Myers, Lauren Nelson Packard,
Jennifer Thompson, Arnoud Verhaeghe, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and
Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Daniell, Thomas, 1967–
After the crash : architecture in post-bubble Japan / Thomas Daniell ;
foreword by Hitoshi Abe ; afterword by Ari Seligmann. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-56898-776-7 (alk. paper)
1. Architectural practice—Social aspects—Japan. 2. Architecture—
Japan—20th century. 3. Architecture—Japan—21st century. I. Title.
NA1995.D56 2008
720.952’09049—dc22
2008000244
 Contents

Foreword
8 Study on the Edge by Hitoshi Abe

10 Acknowledgments
12 Introduction

Genealogies and Tendencies 18

21 Less Than Zero: Minimalism and Beyond

28 Re: Contextualism
31 Kazunari Sakamoto: Keeping the Faith
37 The Visceral and the Ephemeral
45 Kazuhiro Ishii: Meta-architecture

Domestic Spaces 50

53 The Refraction House

57 Two Degrees of Separation
60 The Hu-tong House
63 Pushing the Envelope
3

New Prototypes 66

69 Brand Recognition: The FOB Homes System
76 Reflecting Modern Life
82 Living Dangerously

Public Places 88

91 The Sendai Mediatheque
97 The Glass Library
102 Immaculate Conception: The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art
106 Balancing Act: MVRDV in Japan

Revitalizing Metabolism 114

117 Organ: Metabolism without Megastructure
122 Kisho Kurokawa in Malaysia
130 Mirage City: Another Utopia
6

Nature and Artifice 140

143 Back to Nature
147 Strange Attractor: Yokohama International Port Terminal
155 Borrowed Scenery: Walking in the Footsteps of Laurie Anderson

Urban Views 160

163 Fitting In: Small Sites in Urban Japan
170 Pretty Vacant: The Photographs of Takashi Homma
176 Letter from Kyoto

Afterword
186 More Lines by Ari Seligmann

192 Credits
Study on the Edge
Hitoshi Abe

For millennia Japan has been absorbing the cultures of a wide variety
of nations located westward, such as Greece, Persia, India, and China.
These cultures have all drifted ashore here at the eastern edge of the
world, merged together, and—however strange it might sometimes
seem—given birth to a unique culture. In a sense, Japan has been a test-
ing ground for global culture over a very long period of time.
Until about twenty years ago, you often heard Japanese culture
being dismissed as “all copies, no originals.” Yet having passed through
the mania of the bubble period, it’s now an indisputable fact that Japan
has become a nation that exports culture. Over recent decades ongoing
globalization and technological advances have shrunk the world, and in
a complete reversal of the former situation, there has been a tremendous
revaluation of the creative output of Japan. In various environmentally
friendly technologies such as hybrid cars, in new management tech-
niques for earthquakes and other disasters, in the subcultures of anime
and manga, and in the potentials of innovative new art movements such
as superflat, the flourishing of Japanese design has generated all manner
of cultural and technological phenomena that are now being dispatched
from this edge of the world back toward its center.
These cultural phenomena being sent out to the world from Japan
not only attest to the increasing necessity of intercultural studies in
architecture and urbanism but also oblige us to reconsider our attitude
toward creativity and culture during an era of globalization. Creativity
is not able to emerge solely within one’s own territory but must instead
emerge discretely and diversely in the boundaries between territories.
The forefront of this process lies in the interactions between different
cultures. We will continue to enjoy exotica as we always have done, but
 its significance for our era does not lay merely in the way it allows us to
see our own cultures in a new light. By standing at the edges, we may
study the way the possibilities of new cultural forms emerge from the
interactions between cultures.
Tom Daniell has long been observing this major turnaround in the
evaluation of Japanese design culture, not merely as a foreign visitor
in a foreign land but also through his own active involvement. Located
right in the edge conditions—in many senses—of events in the Japanese
architectural world during the post-bubble period, this book is a valuable
study of the potential that may be discerned there.

Hitoshi Abe is currently chair of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at
UCLA. He is also the director of Atelier Hitoshi Abe, an international, award-winning
design practice established in 1992 and based in Sendai, Japan.

9
Acknowledgments

It is always risky to take the liberty of commenting on a culture other than

your own. Roland Barthes’s idiosyncratic book on Japan, Empire of Signs
(Hill and Wang, 1982)—the outcome of his brief visit in 1966—begins with
a preemptive escape clause, indemnity against charges of incomprehen-
sion and Orientalism:

If I were to invent a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it

declaratively as a novelistic object. . . . I can also—though in no way claim-
ing to represent or to analyze reality itself—isolate somewhere in the world
(faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed in linguistics), and
out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall
call: Japan.

Although certainly not intended to be definitive statements, my

own observations in the book address the reality of Japan as I have
experienced it over the last decade. Accurate or otherwise, I do take
full responsibility for my views, yet I also owe thanks to a great many
people for their advice, assistance, and support over the years. Above
all, I am grateful to the architects and artists I have written about, who
generously took the time to explain their intentions and show me their
projects.
Of course, without invitations from the editors of various publica-
tions, I may not have written much at all, and I am especially grateful to Ole
Bouman (former chief editor of Archis and now director of the Netherlands
Architecture Institute) for my earliest commissions and his consistent
trust in the topics I proposed. I also thank, among others, Deyan Sudjic at
Domus, Axel Sowa at L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Arthur Wortmann at
 Mark, Arjen Oosterman at Volume, Harm Tilman at De Architect, Julia
Gatley at Interstices, Jiro Iio of the Media Design Research Lab, and
many people at the Architectural Institute of Japan.
For providing other venues to write or speak, for critical feedback
or insight, for entertaining debates, for hospitality in foreign places, and
in many cases for ongoing friendships, I am indebted to Mark Burry,
Hera Van Sande, Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama, Christopher Kaltenbach, Taro
Igarashi, Leon van Schaik, Hannes Rössler, Birgit Huber, Peter Ebner,
Franziska Ullman, Tom Heneghan, Mark Dytham, Astrid Klein, Manuel
Tardits, Felix Claus, Moriko Kira, Christopher Mead, Michelle Penhall,
Sanaz Eftekharzadeh, Satoru Umehara, Shumon Basar, Lucy Bullivant,
Akira Hasegawa, Christopher Wilson, Esther Tsoi, Greg Walsh, Mil De
Kooning, Günter Nitschke, Uche Isichei, Peter Allison, Christina van
Bohemen, Timothy Hill, Henry D. Smith, Frank Salama, Kiyokazu Arai,
Mariko Terada, Shin Takamatsu, Shuji Funo, Shingo Fujiwaki, Katsu Ume-
bayashi, and many others. I am hugely grateful to Gary Paige for the cru-
cial impetus leading to the publication of this anthology, to Ari Seligmann
for reading and commenting on the entire text, to Hitoshi Abe for kindly
writing the foreword, and to Ellen Van Goethem for her unfailing and es-
sential support.

11
Introduction

The majority of these pieces are revised versions of essays that were
written for various European architecture publications during the last
decade or so. Never intended to form a complete or coherent narrative,
I have reorganized them thematically rather than chronologically. The
occasional, inevitable repetitions and contradictions reflect shifts in my
own understanding of the Japanese built environment—its causes as well
as its effects—over the years. Collectively, they trace an outline of the
Japanese architectural world across a tumultuous and difficult period.
I first moved to Japan in June 1992, the same month that then–
Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa declared his intention to turn Japan
into a “lifestyle superpower” in response to a growing public perception
that the inhabitants of the richest country in the world were not actually
enjoying the benefits of their putative wealth. Japan was just beginning
to grasp the implications of the collapse of the bubble economy, the
speculation-driven frenzy of the late ’80s and early ’90s that briefly inflated
the nation into an apparently unstoppable economic powerhouse. Japan’s
economy underwent spectacular growth in the decades following World
War II, but it was the 1985 deregulation of bank interest rates that threw
it into overdrive: the Japanese were suddenly buying up vast quantities
of expensive international real estate, taking controlling shares in global
corporations, hanging canonical works of Western art in private Tokyo
boardrooms. The world responded with a mixture of admiration and hos-
tility, fear and fascination—and a paranoia that occasionally crossed the
line into overt racism. Yet concurrent with Japan’s more or less absurd,
more or less doomed spending sprees, the economy was able to support
an unprecedented quantity of innovative (if indulgent) architecture. Not
only did the bubble period incubate Japan’s talented young architects,
 it offered the Western avant-garde—many of them at that point sullenly
resigned to producing nothing but paper architecture—commissions to
build in Japan on the most generous terms imaginable. The astonish-
ing qualities of the resulting buildings were not solely due to seemingly
unlimited funds; Japan’s construction industry consistently demon-
strated the requisite intelligence, initiative, and sheer skill to realize the
most implausible architectural visions with immaculate precision.
By the beginning of the 1990s, the dream was over. Well aware
that this phenomenal economic growth was based on loans using
absurdly overvalued real estate as collateral, the Bank of Japan raised their
interest rates on Christmas Day 1989—the first of a series of hikes that
inadvertently triggered a devastating, albeit gradual, stock-market crash.
Over the following year, the entire Japanese economy began a leisurely
avalanche into what is now known as the Lost Decade. The economic
recession was further exacerbated by two deadly and unpredictable
catastrophes in early 1995, one natural and one all too human: the Kobe
earthquake and the poison-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by
religious terrorists. Both were cruel revelations of the potential fragility
of a society so predicated on efficiency and order.
These events coincided with a series of embarrassing bid-rigging
scandals in the construction industry, and the cumulative impact on the
architectural world was profound—although the surfeit of extravagant
(and publicly funded) architectural opportunities did not vanish immedi-
ately. Major construction projects are very difficult to launch, yet once in
motion their armatures of vested interests make them equally difficult to
stop—witless, unwanted golems that continued lurching toward comple-
tion throughout the worst years of the post-bubble recession. They even
generated their own epithet: “bubbly,” most famously used by Arata
Isozaki with regard to Rafael Viñoly’s spectacular Tokyo International
Forum (competition 1989, completion 1996).
Though major projects did continue, the pace of new construc-
tion drastically slowed. Architectural experimentation for its own sake
became more difficult to justify. Adaptive reuse became a pressing
necessity rather than a romantic choice. The symbolic end of bubble-era
profligacy occurred in 1995, when Tokyo’s Governor Yukio Aoshima made
good on his election promise to cancel the 1996 World City Expo. This
was to have comprised a fantastic collection of experimental structures
13 designed by a group of innovative young architects under the direction
 of Toyo Ito, located on reclaimed land in the Odaiba district of the Tokyo
waterfront. Even now, traversing Tokyo Bay on the way to Haneda Airport,
you can still see traces of the moment when the money evaporated—
train stations and other large-scale infrastructure servicing curiously
empty tracts of land.
Big public projects never completely disappeared, but politicians
and citizens alike began to demand far more accountability in price and
purpose—Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque (competition 1995, completion
2001) is exemplary of the new breed of projects incorporating intensive
public participation right from the outset of the design process. The
recession also provided a welcome period of respite from the earlier
delirious excesses, a time to rethink the architect’s mandate and, quite
literally, take stock of the existing city. This was the environment that
gave birth to the Bow-Wow Generation, a term first used by critic Akira
Suzuki in tribute to Tokyo’s Atelier Bow-Wow, the research-and-design
practice founded by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima in 1992.
Without access to megaprojects or megabudgets, or much real work at
all, Atelier Bow-Wow and its peers began their careers with “fieldwork,”
detailed empirical analyses of the urban conditions they saw around them.
This wasn’t an unprecedented approach: in 1986, architectural
historian Terunobu Fujimori formed a similarly motivated group called
Rojo Kansatsu Gakkai (Roadway Observation Society). Situationist style,
they wandered the streets of Japan, taking note of things too ordinary
to be noticed by the average person. Their photographic documentation
of the weird scenes they stumbled across is the direct ancestor of
Atelier Bow-Wow’s seminal books Made in Tokyo (Kajima, 2001) and Pet
Architecture (World Photo Press, 2002), intelligent and witty inventories of
the detritus left in the wake of decades of rampant industrialization and
urbanization. When the real work finally started to come in, the Bow-Wow
Generation was already in possession of an intellectual apparatus for
engaging with their context. They quickly demonstrated the ability to trans-
form a problematic environment into a source of invention.
Among other things, the Bow-Wow Generation shifted the empha-
sis of Japanese architectural discourse from an interest in kaleidoscopic
urban intensity to a more pragmatic and humble examination of urban
and suburban settlement patterns, not to mention the practices of every-
day life. The results have been astonishingly productive so far, although it
14 might be argued that the old set of clichés about hypermetropolitan chaos

After the Crash

 has merely been stealthily replaced with a new set of clichés about hyper-
suburban pragmatism. Yet even this approach is showing signs of having
run its course, or at least of being superseded by a new set of interests
and techniques. The liberating and perverse pleasure of the Bow-Wow
Generation’s counterintuitive exploitation of restrictions tends toward
self-fulfilling prophecy. Ironic reflection on a mundane reality risks
becoming indistinguishable from the reality itself. The future of Japanese
architecture no doubt lies in an amalgam of the subtle cunning of the
post-bubble architects (but with less banality) and the wild inventiveness
of the bubble architects (but with less irresponsibility). Indeed, many of
the most promising younger architects—Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata,
Yasutaka Yoshimura, Junya Ishigami, for example—are focused on the
invention of more or less arbitrary systems of rules that may be used to
generate architectural form and space prior to any consideration of con-
text or program. The aftermath of the bubble has affected more than the
techniques of the avant-garde, of course—across the profession there is
now a reassuringly genuine interest in sustainability and adaptive reuse.
A practicing architect myself (with FOBA, for the most part)
throughout the period covered in this book, I have been living in the old
capital Kyoto—a major cultural center to be sure, but well outside the
concentration of activity in Tokyo—thereby maintaining a certain physi-
cal distance as well as a critical distance while writing about what I saw. I
talked to other practitioners, attempting to understand their motivations
and ambitions, analyzing the constraints and pressures we were all work-
ing under. Along the way, my understanding of Japan has constantly been
challenged and transformed. Gradual immersion in the culture—architec-
tural and otherwise—is like burrowing deeper through alternating layers
of exotica and normality. Over time, initially incomprehensible protocols
seem less strange, yet each revelation of apparent ordinariness is, in turn,
superseded by an overwhelming wave of weirdness. And so on, endlessly.
With the economic downturn finally over, the construction indus-
try cautiously expanding, land prices and birth rates rising, and the
ostentatious works of architecture that epitomize the bubble period
(such as Shin Takamatsu’s 1987 Kirin Plaza Osaka) being demolished, the
following essays are already historical. They make up a personal docu-
mentation of this key chapter in the evolution of Japanese architectural
culture, if not the end of an era. It’s an appropriate moment to collect
15 them all in one place, and then move on.

Introduction
Momoyo Kaijima, Junzo Kuroda, Yoshiharu
Tsukamoto, Made in Tokyo map, 2001

16
17
Kazuo Shinohara, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Centennial Hall, Tokyo, 1987, sketch

1
Genealogies and
Tendencies

The relationships between the approaches that make up the protean

landscape of contemporary Japanese architecture are best clarified by
tracing their historical lineages. Comprising a variety of intertwining
discourses—historical, phenomenological, technological, functional,
ritual—each design methodology evolved across many succeeding
generations of teachers and employers. While drawing to some extent
on aspects of Japanese tradition in their strategies of material assem-
blage and spatial composition, they all incorporate parallel influences
from a wide range of other sources—above all Western modernism and
Le Corbusier. An important conduit for the introduction of early mod-
ernism was Kunio Maekawa (1905–86), who spent 1928 and 1929 at Le
Corbusier’s Paris atelier, then became a mentor to Kenzo Tange (1913–
2005) and by extension to Tange’s students in the metabolist movement
of the 1960s and their own progeny. The expressionism of late-period
Corbu entered Japan via Takamasa Yoshizaka (1917–80), who worked
for Le Corbusier from 1950 to 1952. Several of Yoshizaka’s students
went on to form the idiosyncratic Team Zoo collective, whose work is
one manifestation of a crucial yet often overlooked stream of Japanese
architecture.
A key figure who explicitly rejected Western influences yet
appears on almost every branch of the family tree of contemporary
Japanese architecture, from the most understated “dirty realism” to
the most sophisticated diagrammatic minimalism, is Kazuo Shinohara
(1925–2006), whose influence is present throughout this book. Across
the four self-defined stylistic periods of his career, Shinohara addressed
tradition and modernity, banality and mysticism, vernacular archetypes
19 and futuristic sculptures. His effects on the discipline as a theorist,
 designer, and teacher have been immense. Indeed, many of the former
students of Shinohara, and their own successors, make up what is
famously known as the Shinohara School. This term is now ubiqui-
tous in discussions of contemporary Japanese architecture but first
appeared in print in 1979 as the title of an article in the journal SD:
Space Design1 that linked the work of Kazuo Shinohara to Kazunari
Sakamoto, Toyo Ito, and Itsuko Hasegawa,2 all architects who have
been highly influential on the following generations. The article was
part of a regular series of critiques published under the byline Gruppo
Specio, the pseudonym of a small group of postgraduate architecture
students at Tokyo University. Gruppo Specio included Kengo Kuma
and Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama, then students in the studio of Hiroshi Hara
and themselves seen as part of the so-called Hara School (actually,
Hara Schule, due to Hara’s love of the German language), which over
the years has also included important contemporary figures such as
Riken Yamamoto and Kazuhiro Kojima.
The essays in this first section are provisional attempts to iden-
tify some of these evolving lineages and constellations of reciprocal
influence.

1. Gruppo Specio, “Shinohara sukuru no kenchiku” [The Architecture of the Shinohara

School], SD: Space Design 7901 (January 1979): 223–28.
2. Sakamoto studied under Shinohara, later becoming his teaching assistant and even-
tually a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT). Hasegawa spent a period
working for metabolist Kiyonori Kikutake before doing postgraduate studies at TIT,
later becoming an assistant in Shinohara’s studio. Ito worked for Kikutake at the same
time as Hasegawa and, despite never having any official ties to Shinohara, maintained
a close relationship with his circle.

20

After the Crash

Less Than Zero
Minimalism and Beyond

In Hi-energy Field (30 September to 17 October, 2004), an exhibition of

work by young artists held at Tokyo’s Tamada Projects Art Space, one
of the objects on display was a table. Although completely mundane in
shape and function, it was surreal in its proportions: a single sheet of per-
fectly flat 3-millimeter-thick (0.1 inch) steel, 9.5 meters (31 feet) long and
2.6 meters (8.5 feet) wide, supported only at its four corners by steel legs
1.1 meters (3.6 feet) high. Seemingly an optical illusion or magic trick,
the extraordinary span was achieved by prestressing the tabletop and
legs, giving them a slight curvature that then became straight under the
table’s own weight.
Designed by Junya Ishigami, a young Tokyo-based architect, in
a sense this table represents the culmination of a trajectory that many
Japanese architects have been following for more than a decade. The
post-bubble period has been dominated by architecture that tends toward
simplicity, flatness, insubstantiality, and even banality. Like Ishigami’s
table, forms are reduced to the absolute minimum, surfaces are trans-
lucent or bleached of color, structure appears disturbingly inadequate,
materiality is ignored or contradicted. With results that often seem
intended as no more than temporary art installations, there tends to be an
inverse relationship between formal purity and physical longevity. The
overall effect is an apparent effortlessness that, of course, requires a
huge amount of effort to achieve.
The lucid, ephemeral beauty of this approach owes much to the
buildings and concepts of Toyo Ito and Kazuo Shinohara and can argu-
ably be traced back to sukiya carpentry and the delicate refinement of
the traditional teahouse. This historical connection is most obvious in
21 the essentially two-dimensional quality of the architecture. Just as the

Genealogies and Tendencies

 spatial composition of traditional Japanese buildings can be almost
entirely comprehended from their modular floor plans, much of this con-
temporary work comprises little more than flat diagrams of astonishing
simplicity. These abstract schematics—simple geometric shapes, grids,
spirals, parallel bands, concentric boxes, occasionally even freeform
curves—are translated into built form with a minimum of articulation
and elaboration. The cross sections provide almost no surprises; the
spaces are effectively vertical extrusions of the plans. Designs that do
display complexity in section generally have a complementary simplicity
in plan, suggesting that the generating diagram has just been rotated 90
degrees.
Indeed, the impact of this work is entirely reliant on the clarity
of the organizational systems, although this does not necessarily imply
functionalism: in many cases functional efficiency is sacrificed for the
sake of maintaining the consistency of the diagram. The value of these
diagrams lies in their instant comprehensibility. While defining spatial
and programmatic relationships, they also act as logos or icons, graphic
symbols that have a strong visual appeal—notably, to competition juries,
as clearly evinced in many recent prize-winning projects. For example,
two new community centers, Onishi Hall (Gunma, 2005) by Kazuyo
Sejima and the unbuilt Environment Art Forum in Annaka (Gunma, 2003)
by Sou Fujimoto, appear to be nothing more (and nothing less) than the
bubble diagrams an architect might make on the first day of design. The
genius of the work lies in the materialization of the buildings without any
loss of the childlike clarity present in the early sketches. The strength of
this approach is even clearer in two recent competition-winning museum
22 designs: the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa,

After the Crash

Junya Ishigami, Table, 2004

2004) by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) and the Tomihiro
Museum (Gunma, 2005) by aat+ (Makoto Yokomizo). Despite being very
different in their execution and experiential quality, they have an anal-
ogous planning strategy: simple geometric shapes floating within an
equally simple frame. This basic arrangement has been directly trans-
lated into a physical object that simultaneously defines form, space,
structure, and program.
It is an approach that owes a clear debt to Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque
(2001). Significantly, Sejima and Yokomizo both worked for Ito early in
their careers. Among other projects, Sejima was in charge of the influ-
ential Pao: A Dwelling for Tokyo Nomad Women installation (1985), and
Yokomizo oversaw Ito’s equally influential contribution to the Visions of
Japan exhibition (1991) at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Just as
these two architects have been refining and extending aspects of the
work of their former employer, it is not surprising to learn that Ishigami
spent five years working for Sejima, notably on the Kanazawa museum.
In recent years, however, Ito has become disturbed by his own
influence on this widespread fascination with luminous, weightless
objects. In 1998, architecture critic Takashi Hasegawa defined what he
called the “transparency syndrome” in houses designed by the younger
generation:

Structures framed with steel or wood, extremely large openings, an unusual

concern with transparency, a few vertical walls that are white and flat, neu-
trality everywhere, and absolutely no pretence of structural strength. . . .
Overall, this series of houses gives an ephemeral, light impression, yet on the
23 other hand each one looks like an undistinguished version of work by the

Genealogies and Tendencies

this page opposite
top left: Toyo Ito, Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai, 2001,
Kazuyo Sejima, Onishi Hall, Gunma, 2005, plan concept sketch

top right:
Sou Fujimoto, Environment Art Forum in Annaka,
Gunma, 2003 (unbuilt), plan

bottom left:
SANAA, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary
Art, Kanazawa, 2004, plan

bottom right:
aat+, Tomihiro Museum, Gunma, 2005, plan

24

After the Crash

 1920s avant-garde, the influence of which subtly infuses their shapes. . . .
These houses are being designed by young architects who were mostly born
after 1960. Faced with this type of design, my sense of taste goes numb and I
lose the ability to speak.1

A few months later, Ito wrote an essay in which he quoted Hasegawa’s

statements and acknowledged his own complicity:

Although editorial selection may play a part, houses of this flavor are cer-
tainly conspicuous. Of course, many of these characteristics apply to my own
architecture, and I am aware that due to my advocacy of lightness, ephem-
erality, and transparency, I must bear some of the responsibility for this syn-
drome among my colleagues born only twenty years after me. Nevertheless,
I have to sympathize with Hasegawa’s loss of taste and speech. I suppose
this is because it seems to me that many of these houses by young archi-
tects share a feeble introversion. Of course there are some to which this does
not apply, but so many have a light and transparent aesthetic sophistication
throughout. However beautiful and delicate, they do not engage the exterior
and are somehow negatively closed to reality. Put another way, while persist-
ing with the critique of modernism, I think an overwhelming number of these
houses fail to clearly demonstrate any criticality of their own. I think that very
few attempt a positive engagement with reality.2

In the decade since he wrote this, the younger members of the Japanese
avant-garde have been increasingly preoccupied with crisp, monochrome
boxes. Yet Ito has indirectly responded to these trends within his own
25 work. The turning point was the completion of the Sendai Mediatheque,

Genealogies and Tendencies

 the epochal project that sealed Ito’s reputation as the definitive architect
of the cyberspace era. Developed in collaboration with Japan’s leading
structural engineer Mutsuro Sasaki, the design was, among other things,
an attempt to architecturally express the amorphousness and volatil-
ity of information flows. Ito had initially seen the resulting structural
arrangement (undulating, hollow tubes supporting open, flat plates) as
a future prototype for other public buildings, yet during construction he
was made keenly aware of the huge physical effort required to achieve
his desired “floating” imagery:

As the architecture progressed I began to see that it wasn’t something that

could be built just anywhere at any time; it was a “one time proposition”
that could only be constructed here. That idea became stronger when I wit-
nessed the enormous amount of welding work on the large steel tubes. . . .
Mediatheque is a space made by hand, so much so that there is almost no
repetition in the use of materials.3

This experience triggered a swerve toward opacity, weight, and

structural expression. Ito’s work since then is by no means a return to
conventional building types but instead has reinvigorated a design
approach that, in our cyber-saturated culture, had begun to run the risk
of cliché. He has continued collaborating with Sasaki to develop inno-
vative and expressive structures based on natural archetypes such as
trees, mollusks, ripples, and caves. There is an overt weight and struc-
tural logic to these new designs. The pavilions of the Relaxation Park in
Torrevieja (projected completion 2009), for example, celebrate their own
26 spiraling timber and steel envelopes. Designing the astonishing freeform

After the Crash

left:
Toyo Ito, Torrevieja Relaxation Park, Spain, projected
completion 2009

right:
Toyo Ito, Grin Grin, Fukuoka, 2005

shapes of Grin Grin (Fukuoka, 2005), an exhibition center located on an

artificial island in Hakata Bay, relied on a computerized structural opti-
mization method developed by Sasaki to generate asymmetric concrete
shells with uniform stress distributions—a computer-aided, nonlinear
revision of Antoni Gaudí’s experiments with catenary curves and other
natural geometries.
It remains to be seen what influence this may have on the younger
generations. New developments in Japanese architecture still seem to be
moving inexorably toward ever-increasing smoothness and insubstantial-
ity: sensuous curves and sharp boxes, flat facades and porous screens.
The underlying ideology is exemplified by another recent Ishigami proj-
ect, an installation design for the 2005 Milan Salone that consisted of
little more than a thick mist permeating all-white spaces. It seems an
appropriate finale for the architecture of the last decade, an ethereal
beauty evaporating into nothing at all. As the mist clears, perhaps it will
reveal a new generation of Japanese architects with a rekindled interest
in weight, thickness, opacity, texture, and reality.

2005

1. Takashi Hasegawa, “JT Review,” Jutaku Tokushu 144 (April 1998): 74. Author’s translation.
2. Toyo Ito, “Datsu Kindaiteki Karadazou: Hihyousei nonai Jutaka wa Kanou ka?” [Shedding
the Modern Body Image: Is a House without Criticism Possible?], Jutaku Tokushu 149
(September 1998): 22. Author’s translation.
3. “Cover Interview: Toyo Ito,” Axis 90 (March/April 2001): 23.
27

Genealogies and Tendencies

Re: Contextualism

In skimming through Japanese architectural production of the last cou-

ple of decades, responses to the urban context can be divided into at
least three modes:

to retreat, withdrawing behind blank walls in silence and solitude, open only to the sky;
to reflect, mimicking the fragmentation and noise of the surrounding city;
to blend, dissolving into the kaleidoscopic blur of traffic, neon, and rain.

However sensitive or critical, each approach—whether Tadao

Ando’s introversion, Shin Takamatsu’s aggression, or Toyo Ito’s “vanish-
ing act”—was ultimately a means of avoidance, not engagement. Context
was treated as a generic external condition, not a specific arrangement of
objects and spaces. Whatever the accompanying rhetoric, this architec-
ture maintained its autonomy, isolated from and indifferent to its neigh-
bors—and given the “chaos” of the Japanese city, perhaps that was an
appropriate stance to take.
But that was then. If the disparate work of the Japanese architects
now in their thirties has a unifying theme, it is contextual relationships.
This is not a rejection of the methods of their predecessors, who are also
their former teachers and employers, but an inevitable process of exten-
sion and adaptation.
While the fortified exteriors and hermetic interiors of those
earlier paradigms are still present, there is also a new sense of trans-
parency: inside is tentatively reconnected to outside. Form is generated
in response to adjacent buildings; internal space is visually linked to
external views as much as to inner courtyards. Even when there are no
28 actual windows, contextual relationships are created and maintained

After the Crash

 Atelier Bow-Wow, Mini House, Tokyo, 1999, section
perspective

29

Genealogies and Tendencies

1:50
Mini House

via protrusions or penetrations in over-thick walls, interstitial slots, or

translucent skins.
It is true that the environment is not quite the same—much of this
newer work is located in the outer suburbs, not the congestion of the
inner cities. Context there is gentler, more open, more generous. It is
also true that in post-bubble Japan, construction budgets are smaller,
and so the materials are simpler, the finishes rougher, and, perhaps most
importantly, the spaces tighter. Without room for spatial elaboration,
visual complexity and interest must often be borrowed from outside, dis-
tant views incorporated to experientially enlarge a room.
Perhaps it is ultimately just humility, a rejection of the exuber-
ance and assertiveness of the preceding generation. Despite occasional
moments of monumentality in the work of these architects, their insis-
tence on individual authorship and isolated objects is fading—these new
buildings are willing to be part of a street, a city, a society. The emerging
generation in Japan is equally comfortable as either ensemble players or
soloists, and deserve all the more applause for it.

2000

Postscript
This text was written for the catalog of the touring exhibition Minihäuser in Japan, curated
by Munich-based architect Hannes Rössler. The exhibition comprised houses with floor
areas of less than 100 square meters (1,076 square feet), designed by Jun Tamaki, Mitsuhiko
Sato, Shinichi Okuyama and Hitoshi Wakamatsu, Taira Nishizawa, FOBA, and Atelier
30 Bow-Wow.

After the Crash

Kazunari
Sakamoto
Keeping the Faith

The easiest way to make sense of the stylistic diversity of contempo-

rary Japanese architecture is to draw a family tree. Classification can
be controversial but identifying the intergenerational chains of mentors
and protégés—or sibling rivalries and affinities—is one way of drawing
softer outlines around the various “schools.” Discrete branches may be
separated and common roots revealed.
Among these various lineages, it is the photogenic extremes—
whether gratuitously sculptural expressionism or ostentatiously reduc-
tive minimalism—that have always attracted the most attention. Yet as
the dust settled from the collapse of the bubble economy at the begin-
ning of the 1990s, a more modest approach became increasingly promi-
nent. Much of the residential architecture that appeared over the ensuing
decade is remarkably conventional in appearance. Although no doubt
necessitated by lower budgets, the best of this work is a subtly nuanced
elaboration of the potentials of the ordinary. It engages the contemporary
context without overt critique or irony and draws on traditional architec-
ture without fetishizing craftsmanship or materiality.
Finding beauty in the mundane—or, more precisely, finding the
mundane to be beautiful—is a constant theme in the history of Japanese
aesthetics. The manifestation of this sensibility in recent architectural
design has undoubtedly been influenced by the buildings and writings of
Kazunari Sakamoto (1943–), who is himself part of a noteworthy postwar
lineage of architecture professors at the Tokyo Institute of Technology
(TIT). This effectively begins with Kiyoshi Seike, who graduated from TIT
in 1943, spent two years in the navy, and then took up a teaching posi-
tion at the same university. His student Kazuo Shinohara graduated in
31 1953, then became Seike’s teaching assistant and eventually a professor

Genealogies and Tendencies

Kazunari Sakamoto, House in Nago, Chigasaki,
1978, orthographic projection

opposite:
Kazunari Sakamoto, Hut T, Yamanashi, 2001

himself. Kazunari Sakamoto was a student of Shinohara’s. He gradu-

ated in 1966 and later took up a teaching position at TIT, where he is now
professor emeritus. Sakamoto’s most celebrated student, Yoshiharu
Tsukamoto, graduated in 1987 and became an associate professor at TIT
in 1994, shortly after establishing Atelier Bow-Wow with his own former
student (and now wife) Momoyo Kaijima.
Each of these figures began their career with research into the
contemporary vernacular and the typology of the private house, followed
by design projects that address similar themes.1 Yet however experimen-
tal, the work is always unashamedly grounded in everyday experience.
This attitude is most clearly distilled in the work of Atelier Bow-Wow:

Our designs are increasingly determined by trivial everyday things, such as

the clients’ intentions, tastes, styles, budgets, site conditions, and intended
usages. We have no ready answers to the criticism that we are merely float-
ing on reality. Far from perpetuating the heroic image of the architects sur-
mounting reality, we have been fallen from the very beginning. But rising from
a fall does not just occur by itself. Perhaps there are points of view that will
allow all these trivial things to be transformed into a rich design resource.
Trivial things are, after all, part of the world.2

Sakamoto’s own preference for gabled roofs and irregular fen-

estration is partly a commentary on the iconography of the typical
suburban house and partly a deliberate avoidance of overt expression:
he admits making a conscious effort to resist the attraction of pure geo-
metrical shapes and symmetrical elevations. His work tends toward
32 conventional forms, readily available materials, standard detailing, and

After the Crash

 a quality of construction within the reach of any competent builder. The
physical manifestation of his architecture occurs by default, so to speak.
This indifference can be seen as a kind of minimalism wherein the con-
struction is resolved adequately, but no more and no less. Minor building
elements (skirtings, cornices, flashings, eaves) are allowed to remain—
eliminating them for aesthetic reasons can require just as much effort
as concealing them with elaborate ornamentation. In inverse proportion
to their visual simplicity, flat roofs, immaculately smooth surfaces, and
invisible connections entail far more expense and risk than conventional
methods, both in initial construction and later maintenance.
Sakamoto’s attention is always focused on the space, rather than
its envelope, and above all on the one aspect of architecture that is never
adequately captured by photographs: scale. He has an intuitive yet pre-
cise sense for the balance between ceiling height and wall separation,
for subtle modulations of expansion and enclosure. The rooms may be
small and intimate but never confining; they may be large and gener-
ous but never intimidating. Clients and visitors invariably describe these
houses as “comfortable.”
The prioritizing of scale begins to explain the two recurring fea-
tures of Sakamoto’s designs that might actually be described as stylistic
motifs: walls as open grids of timber shelving, exemplified by the House
in Nago (Chigasaki, 1978) and Hut T (Yamanashi, 2001); and floors as gen-
tly stepping terraces, exemplified by the House in Imajuku (Yokohama,
1978) and House SA (Kawasaki, 1999). These gestures are only inciden-
tally related to storage or circulation. Their real purpose is to articulate
the surfaces, breaking them down visually and experientially for the
33 building users. Stepped forms appear at every scale, from balustrades

Genealogies and Tendencies

 to elevation profiles. In the larger housing projects, this articulation
extends to the overall massing and landscaping. At Sakamoto’s Common
City Hoshida (Osaka, 1992), an array of low-rise dwellings dispersed
in a terraced landscape, the building volumes and facades comprise
step-shaped collages of varied colors and materials. High in density yet
porous at the perimeters, the master plan sacrifices the potential for
larger open spaces while producing a delicate balance between privacy
and community. Specific elements perhaps matter less than the over-
all level of variation, a compositional method that permits weathering
and the inevitable accumulation of junk without detracting from—even
enhancing—the original design intent.
Certain forms and elements in Common City Hoshida, and even
more so in House F (Tokyo, 1988), suggest an increasing convergence
with the work of his peers, such as Toyo Ito and Itsuko Hasegawa, who
had also been heavily influenced by Shinohara. In retrospect, these proj-
ects were a detour rather than a permanent shift in direction. While Ito
and Hasegawa, and their own heirs, such as Kazuyo Sejima and Makoto
Yokomizo, continue to pursue a level of elegant abstraction that increas-
ingly distances their work from any orthodox architectural typology,
Sakamoto has remained loyal to a heritage of more or less conventional
buildings. Although Sakamoto’s Hut T, for example, has a clear affinity
with the lightweight minimalism common in contemporary Japanese
architecture, the design decisions remain rationally and contextually
based. Without adjacent buildings or regulations to influence the vol-
ume, it has been resolved as a default cube open to the environment. The
gridded shelves form a central freestanding cross that acts as the pri-
34 mary structure, modulating the interior space while allowing the visual

After the Crash

left:
Kazunari Sakamoto, House SA, Kawasaki, 1999,
axonometric

right:
House SA

weight of the exterior envelope to be minimized, as it no longer bears

structural loads.
Many of Sakamoto’s houses achieve a similar sense of weightless-
ness, but not through the pursuit of translucency or structural innova-
tions. As exemplified by House SA, perhaps the culmination of his career
to date, it is, instead, the ordinariness of the materials and the sensitiv-
ity of the proportions that cause the physical building to recede into the
background, the forms merging into their suburban neighborhoods, the
spaces unnoticed backdrops for everyday life. Any utopian ambitions are
sublimated in a gentle reworking of the environment as found. Sakamoto
has succeeded when he vanishes.
It is a risky approach. There is a fine line between simplicity and
banality, between minimizing the presence of the designer and eliminat-
ing his very necessity. Yet however unassuming and unimposing, these
houses always somehow exceed themselves. Their restraint reflects a
laconic confidence without need for drama or monumentality—an archi-
tecture of quiet integrity and, one might even say, innocence.

2004

1. Kiyoshi Seike published extensively on house and garden design, vernacular Japanese
architecture, and modern living patterns, notably Kasou no Kagaku—Kenchikugaku no
Hakken shita sono Shinjitsu [The Science of House Divination—Its Truths Discovered
through Architectonics] (Tokyo: Kobunsha, 1969). Kazuo Shinohara’s first of many books
was Jutaku Kenchiku [House Architecture] (Tokyo: Kinokuniya, 1964), followed by Jutakuron
35 [House Theory] (Tokyo: Kajima, 1970). Kazunari Sakamoto’s writings on house design have

Genealogies and Tendencies

Kazunari Sakamoto in Hut T

been collected as House: Poetics in the Ordinary (Tokyo: Toto Publishing, 2001). Yoshiharu
Tsukamoto’s publications on houses include Chiisana Ie no Kizuki [Insights from Small
Houses] (Tokyo: Okokusha, 2003), Contemporary House Studies (Tokyo: INAX Publishing,
2004), and the well-known Made in Japan (Tokyo: Kajima, 2001) and Pet Architecture
(Tokyo: World Photo Press, 2002). These latter two comprise research into the contempo-
rary urban vernacular, produced in collaboration with Atelier Bow-Wow partner Momoyo
Kaijima and others.
2. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, “Parameter Shift 1: ‘Yomukoto’ to ‘Tsukurukoto,’” [Parameter Shift
1: “Reading” and “Making”], Shinkenchiku 0109 (September 2001): 73. Author’s translation.
My use of the word “fall” is an inadequate translation of a pun by Tsukamoto implying that
the work of Atelier Bow-Wow is like moss on the accumulated legacy of other architects.
All Atelier Bow-Wow’s texts are full of such puns, neologisms, and onomatopoeias, making
them impossible to translate satisfactorily.

36

After the Crash

The Visceral and
the Ephemeral

Minimalism is nothing new in Japan. Despite the visual confusion and

aesthetic excesses of contemporary Japanese cities, the tradition of wabi-
sabi (a key term in Japanese aesthetics, which might be approximately
translated as “deliberately impoverished”) still runs deep. After an
extended period of experimentation with deconstructivism—an enthusiastic
embrace of the supposed “chaos” of the Japanese city—minimalist
tendencies have come to dominate the Japanese architectural avant-
garde.
This is part of a global trend, with analogous movements through-
out Western Europe, but it is also linked to the national sobriety that
followed the collapse of the bubble economy at the beginning of the
1990s. Overheated land speculation and commercial development
generated huge quantities of bizarre architecture in Japan throughout
the 1980s, indulging young talent and providing opportunities for the
Western avant-garde to realize their most extreme ideas. In the wake
of the economic downturn, with its legacy of cancelled projects, there
has been a welcome period of respite, a scaling-down of ambition—and
aesthetics. Minimalism may be no less ostentatious than excess, but it
suggests a certain maturity and restraint, a reconsideration of intent.
The results are by no means homogeneous. There is a proliferation
rather than convergence of approaches. At the risk of oversimplification,
two main streams can be identified: the visceral and the ephemeral. The
first—with a genealogy including Louis Kahn and Tadao Ando, Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe and Yoshio Taniguchi, and the sculptures of Donald
Judd and Tony Smith—is concerned with structure, tectonics, and
expressions of constructional rationality. The second—with a genealogy
37 including Kazuo Shinohara and Toyo Ito, OMA and its offshoots, and

Genealogies and Tendencies

SANAA, Kumano Kodo Nakahechi Museum,
Wakayama, 1997, plan

opposite:
SANAA, Koga Park Cafe, Ibaraki, 1999, plan

the installations of James Turrell and Dan Flavin—has no interest in

the physical, corporeal properties of building. Instead, it attempts
to abstract architecture to purely visual, perceptual effects. Such a
clear-cut taxonomy is unfair to the individual architects, none of whom
could be conclusively placed in either category. But bearing in mind
the arbitrary nature of the division, it is the second group that is of
greater interest in its freshness, vitality, and, arguably, relevance to the
contemporary city.
This ephemeral work—the best-known practitioners include Jun
Aoki, Toshiaki Ishida, Kazuyo Sejima, and Ryue Nishizawa—is a world
away from the solidity and solemnity of, say, Tadao Ando. Both light-
weight and light-hearted, it is an unsettling, problematic form of
minimalism, an abstraction that is far from reductive. While a more
conventional minimalist approach attempts to burn away the unnecessary,
reducing a building to its tectonic or functional core, this new work
instead eviscerates that very core. Rather than a manifestation of
architecture’s putative timeless essence, it offers only the most
insubstantial and ephemeral of shells.
What makes this work so overtly paradoxical is its debt to pop art,
ostensibly the opposite of minimalism. Where minimalism involves the
erasure of references and meaning, pop art is the promiscuous inclusion
of elements from any and every source—in architecture this was also
the project of postmodernism. In reconfiguring pop as abstraction, is it
possible to transcend mere irony? If the issue for visceral minimalism is
to be tranquil without being boring, the issue for ephemeral minimalism
is to be popular without being trivial.
38

After the Crash

 However disparate in appearance, these ephemeral projects share
common themes, both formal and conceptual. We see seductive
graphics, simple volumes, organizational diagrams of exceptional clarity—
and this describes the buildings themselves, not only their preliminary
models and drawings. There is a deliberate, systematic attempt to
reproduce the innocence and charm of a sketch or the incongruities of a
collage in built form. Reality is superseded by surrealism, implausibility,
and even frivolity. The buildings float—luminous, mysterious, apparently
unstructured—as close to virtual as physical objects can be. Artificiality
replaces authenticity—this architecture favors luridly colored
synthetic materials, ironically achieving the “faithfulness to materials”
of conventional minimalist art. It is some of the most photogenic
architecture around, with much of the seductive perfection (and, it must
be said, sterility) of computer graphic images.
The first impression is overwhelmingly of flatness, the erasure
of every trace of articulation from the facades. The walls, whether
smooth, undifferentiated screens or compositions of primary shapes,
are conceived as two-dimensional. There is no fenestration as such, just
variations of translucency in fields of glass or louvers, or else openings
treated as independent elements. Where a more traditional architect
might use a window penetration as an opportunity to reveal the depth of
a wall, and hence the building’s “authenticity,” in ephemeral minimalism
the architect tends to bring the glazing flush with the exterior, recess
the walls and roof planes, detail the corners so that different materials
meet at a crisp line, thereby reducing each wall to a flat, unframed
surface. No matter how substantial the walls are in reality, their visual
39 weight is zero.

Genealogies and Tendencies

Jun Aoki, Fukushima Lagoon Museum,
Niigata, 1997

Sejima and Nishizawa, for example, regularly apply graphic

patterns to glass: text on the walls of the Kumano Kodo Nakahechi
Museum (Wakayama, 1997), dots on the roof of the Gifu Multimedia
Center (Gifu, 1996), leaves wrapping the Koga Park Cafe (Ibaraki, 1999).
These applied textures are obviously decorative, and it is here that the
work becomes the most contradictory and disturbs one of architecture’s
most fundamental dichotomies: the relationship between structure and
ornament, essential and auxiliary. The desired “blankness” is manifest
as white noise rather than silence. Critic Jeffrey Kipnis has described
similar techniques as cosmetic, field effects that are intrinsic to their
supporting surface.1 To scrape away the decoration is to scrape away
the entire wall. If visceral minimalism removes the earring from the ear,
ephemeral minimalism removes the cheek from the rouge.
Structure is invisible, hidden within load-bearing walls or integrated
into window mullions, often as structural glass fins. Even when overtly
displayed, structure vanishes—the oversized trusses in Aoki’s Fukushima
Lagoon Museum (Niigata, 1997) read as compositional shapes rather
than as an expression of static forces. In other instances, such as the
columns in the Koga Park Cafe or the roof joists of the Multimedia Center
and Ishida’s T2 building (Tokyo, 1997), the combination of minimum size,
simple form, and dense repetition turns structure into simply another
graphic device.

As organizational systems, the buildings are based on the clearest

of partis—the helix of the Lagoon Museum, the parallel bands of the
Multimedia Center, the independent stacked volumes of Ishida’s Ariake
40 Ferry Terminal (Kumamoto, 1996). Hierarchy is avoided or dissimulated:

After the Crash

A major question for us is how our architecture
should create the visual or phenomenological
through the manipulation of matter, and how to
create relationships that will evoke reciprocity
between the architecture and the actual landscape.
Slipping such an architecture into a given context
to produce a surreal, dreamlike environment is
what we believe to be the appropriate response to
the context of Japanese cities. —Toyo Ito

various secondary forms are wedged into the central volume of the
Kumano Museum with a laconic randomness that prevents any legibility
of logic or order.
More disturbing is the sacrifice of functional efficiency for the
sake of spatial clarity. The initial generating diagrams are arbitrary,
with little or no pragmatic significance. There is an absolute minimum
of elaboration once the initial strategy is set. Shoehorning program
into a predetermined schematic requires the elimination of plan
components considered unacceptably messy, however important they
may be, and there is a danger of going too far, to an anemic, dysfunctional
formalism.
Yet it is in this extreme lucidity that the work gains its power.
Sejima in particular has the ability to know when to stop, to leave her
spaces untouched in what seems like an effortless, instantaneous
design process. The results are serene, luminescent, almost monastic.
Where Sejima is relaxed, Aoki can seem overwrought, producing spaces
loaded with elements abstracted from a more conventional architecture.
Graphic techniques are translated into building with wit and irony, a
formal and conceptual lightness. Aoki’s sadly unbuilt U house (designed
as the architect’s own home) is an amazing blend of spatial complexity
and formal simplicity. Elements such as the green acrylic rods “planted”
in the garden of the O house (Tokyo, 1996) humorously balance the
intensity and intelligence of his spatial experiments.
These differences in approach are no doubt related to their
respective backgrounds. Aoki was an employee of Arata Isozaki from 1983
to 1990, the height of his postmodernist period (from the Michelangelo-
41 inspired Tsukuba Center building of 1983 to the Mickey Mouse–inspired

Genealogies and Tendencies

left:
Jun Aoki, U, Tokyo, 1997
(unbuilt), plan

right:
Toshiaki Ishida, T2, Tokyo,
1997

opposite:
T2, unfolded elevations

Team Disney Orlando building of 1991), and has absorbed a mannerist

interest in the pastiche of styles and forms. Ishida and Sejima both
worked for Toyo Ito (Ishida from 1973 to 1981, Sejima from 1981 to 1987)
and shared an office in the early part of their solo careers. A decade
younger than Sejima, Nishizawa briefly interned with Ito before becoming
one of Sejima’s first employees. From the Saishunkan Seiyaku Women’s
Dormitory (Kumamoto, 1991) onward, Nishizawa made increasingly
important design contributions, and when he made the decision to go
solo in 1995 Sejima tried to dissuade him with an offer of partnership.
They reached a compromise: as well as forming SANAA (Sejima And
Nishizawa And Associates) in 1995, Sejima retained her original prac-
tice, and in 1997 Nishizawa established an office under his own name.
All three practices still share the same large office space, dividing the
projects while sharing staff and equipment.

Such elegant results necessitate a very sophisticated level of detailing,

but while the buildings may be immaculately assembled, the effects
of weathering are often harsh. Fragility and delicacy is more than a
carefully contrived image—this architecture really does not last long.
In many instances there is a single detail solution: silicone sealant.
Visiting these projects only a year or two after completion can be dis-
heartening.
Although tempting, it is incorrect to suggest this is callousness or
ineptitude on the part of the architect. Urban Japan is in constant flux,
and the longevity of any building is not determined by quality or utility but
by the much more invisible and pervasive forces of economics and
42 fashion. Not even the strongest architecture is permanent. Why build for

After the Crash

 the ages when it will be replaced within a decade? There is no need
for the expense of long-lasting materials or efficient waterproofing. At
best, you channel your resources into an intense moment, a brief plateau
in the constant destruction and reconstruction of the city. Buildings are
conceived as urban installations, high-turnover fashion statements—or
very slow performance art.
This architecture is not detached or ironic but a stylization of the
environment it is immersed in, acutely aware of its temporary status. As
such, it is a critical architecture, accepting its own mortality and dis-
interested in weathering, conversion, adaptation, resale value, or even
efficiency of core function. Alvar Aalto believed that a building should be
judged by how it looks thirty years after it is completed. In contemporary
Japan, longevity is a nonissue—three years, perhaps.
The huge popularity of this ephemeral work is perhaps best
explained by the Japanese appreciation of beauty not despite its
transience, but because of it. The poignant allure of blossoms, of mist,
of youth, is valorized in Japan precisely because of its imminent
disappearance. The plum blossom is considered less beautiful than the
cherry blossom because it turns brown while still attached to the branch.
When the cherry blossom falls, it is flawless.
Images of weightlessness and insubstantiality notwithstanding,
the aim of these projects is ultimately not the dissolution of form—they
are just as insistent on their object status as the most monumental mod-
ernist structures. The difference is that they abandon the heaviness,
the seriousness, the authority of conventional architecture for a realm
of pure perceptual effects. Where visceral minimalism retreats and
43 withdraws from the deluge of information in contemporary culture,

Genealogies and Tendencies

Jun Aoki, O, Tokyo, 1996

ephemeral minimalism delights in that same deluge. Transient flows

of media and information technology are represented in a way that
seems finally—optimistically—nonarchitectural. On the other hand, if
architecture begins where building ends, this work may be some of the
purest architecture the world has yet seen.

1999

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Toyo Ito, “Architecture in a Saran-Wrapped City,
Part 5: Function/Context,” GA Japan: Environmental Design 5 (1993): 220.
1. Jeffrey Kipnis, “The Cunning of Cosmetics: A Personal Reflection on the Architecture of
Herzog & de Meuron,” El Croquis 84 (1997): 22–28.

44

After the Crash

Kazuhiro Ishii
Meta-architecture

The architecture of Kazuhiro Ishii (1944–) is fundamentally a search

for authentic cultural identity—in his case, Japanese or Asian, but
in any case, that is an extremely problematic ambition. The deliberate
attempt to create identity is inherently self-defeating: self-conscious
construction of the authentic can only ever be inauthentic. The result is
often awkward pastiche, defended by earnest references to history and
tradition. Ishii convincingly transcends these risks. His architecture is
about architecture, a meta-architectural discourse, saved above all by its
sense of humor. And he is very serious in his joking.
The orientation of Ishii’s architectural career was set by two
experiences at Yale University, where he studied under Charles Moore
and James Stirling in the early 1970s. The first was hearing historian
Vincent Scully assert that modernist architecture was an outcome of the
Industrial Revolution and hence a specifically European phenomenon.
The second was discovering that over half the buildings shown in a book
on traditional Chinese architecture were located in Japan—the origi-
nals may have been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, but Japanese
temples were stylistically accurate enough copies to be used as textbook
examples. What Ishii had previously believed to be authentic Japanese
architecture, both contemporary and traditional, suddenly became mere
imitation, however skillful. He was left wondering whether Japanese
architecture could even be said to exist at all.
Ishii has gone on to produce an extraordinary body of work, its
diversity based on a broad knowledge of architectural history, without
claiming that it represents a true Japanese architecture. The influences
are primarily Asian, often overtly Chinese, and the results are an East-
45 meets-West postmodernism: an irreverent collage of traditional and

Genealogies and Tendencies

left:
Kazuhiro Ishii, 54 Windows, Kanagawa, 1975,
fenestration diagram

right:
Kazuhiro Ishii, Seiwa Bunraku Puppet Theater,
Kumamoto, 1992, ceiling

contemporary typologies and motifs. Geocosmology, a rethinking of every

field of human endeavor with reference to ecological processes, provides
the underlying ideology from which Ishii also takes formal metaphors:
images of rotation, fluctuation, abrupt juxtaposition, and self-similar
repetition appear throughout his work.
For Ishii, the use of wood, as both structure and surface, is the
essence of Japanese architecture. In premodern Japan, wood was the
primary building material, but following the firestorms that devastated
Japan’s cities during the final months of World War II, its use became
almost extinct. Postwar reconstruction was primarily in concrete and steel,
even for temples. Ishii’s Seiwa Bunraku Puppet Theater (completed in 1992
as part of the Kumamoto Artpolis1 program, its extraordinary twisting roof
structure a geocosmological analogy) was the first wooden public building
in Kumamoto Prefecture since the war, and implementing it was an almost
illegal act. Having convinced the clients of the cultural importance of
wood, Ishii commenced construction without the necessary permission
from the national building authorities in Tokyo. He believes the building’s
subsequent success was a key factor in changes to building legislation:
as of June 2000, individual prefectures are permitted to set their own local
building codes, and wood architecture is again on the rise in Japan.
Even projects for which Ishii was unable to persuade the client
to use wood tend to have a timberlike construction. The Hisamatsu
Hospital Obstetrics and Gynecology Annex (Hiroshima, 1993) is a mod-
ernist glass cube, yet it does not use curtain walls. Concrete columns play
the role of both structural posts and giant window mullions, themselves
containing circular operable windows, scrambling the expected hierarchies
46 of detail, function, and form.

After the Crash

 Ishii’s compositional method is one of quotation and collage, his
architectural vocabulary borrowed from any time and any place: from
the West (his 1986 GA House, a research facility for a lighting company,
quotes relevant chunks of projects by Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, Louis Kahn, and Alvar Aalto), from the East (the 1989 Sukiya Village
is a collection of teahouse pavilions, each one designed as a tribute to a
different master of the style), from nature (the 1996 Sant Juan Bautista
Museum in Miyagi undulates across the landscape in mimicry of terraced
rice paddies), and from the city (the facade of 54 Windows, a combined
house and medical clinic built in Kanagawa in 1975 and designed in col-
laboration with Kazuhiko Namba, is based on the image of an Asian slum;
Ishii also calls the building Tokyo Boogie Woogie in reference to Broadway
Boogie Woogie, Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s homage to Manhattan).
It is these moments of ingenuous humor in Ishii’s work that
invariably raise smiles. The Bi-coastal House (Tokyo, 1985) is a company
guesthouse for visiting American staff in which Ishii uses miniature
replicas of the Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco) and Queensboro
Bridge (New York) as its roof structure. The intent is to make guests feel
right at home, no matter where in the United States they might be from.
The culmination of Ishii’s career-to-date is CO2, a day center for the
elderly (Ibaraki, 2001). All his favorite techniques are in evidence: wooden
structure, geocosmological principles, overt symbolism. The roof shapes
spell out an enormous C, O, and 2, all supported by rows of natural tree
trunks. By weighing these trees and estimating the proportion of carbon
they each contain, Ishii has calculated the quantity of carbon dioxide he
is keeping locked out of the atmosphere. However lacking in subtlety it
47 may be, the message cannot be avoided.

Genealogies and Tendencies

 Ishii first came to international attention with 54 Windows, and
critic Reyner Banham’s observations of the building are worth quoting at
length, as they apply to much of Ishii’s subsequent work:

The Western response to this design has usually been to praise or dismiss
the house as a joke, to praise it for its wit or condemn it for its frivolity. . . .
Ishii’s windows tend to be as similar in size, and as regular in their distribu-
tion as the unquestioned rules of Western modernism seem to require; it is
only the treatment that varies. But it varies relentlessly and without obvi-
ous signs of the kind of overt or disguised system to control the variations
that one might expect in a Western equivalent. The process seems to start
again with each window, from scratch, and it is this endless repetition of
the act of design, without repetition of the designed result, that seems to
be so unnerving to Western sensibilities that we find it more comfortable
to treat it as some kind of running joke. We Westerners, that is, for it is only in
the context of Western architecture that the joke, satire, or whatever, can be
perceived at all. The window, as understood here—the Western window as a
hole in the wall—has virtually no place in the historical Japanese tradition of
walls as sliding screens, so that every one of Ishii’s windows is a statement
in a foreign language, so to speak, and by constant repetition with variation
becomes part of a general statement about that foreign language. . . . Almost
everything that is strong about the chemistry that has Westernized Japanese
architecture, and is Japonizing the architecture of the rest of the world, is
summed up in this ridiculously simple, or simply ridiculous, building.2

Although the implication that the humor is only visible to Western eyes
48 gives too much credence to the dubious notion of an unbridgeable cultural

After the Crash

Kazuhiro Ishii, CO2, Ibaraki, 2001

divide—the design is indeed intentionally funny, and the Japanese

audience most certainly appreciated the joke—Banham provides two key
insights: firstly, that a superficial frivolity may actually be a conceptual
profundity, and secondly, that this building (and indeed, all of Ishii’s
work) may be seen as a commentary on the language of architectural
symbolism.
This is primarily a linguistic or semiotic architecture, not a spatial
or programmatic one. Ishii designs without rationality or functionalism as
alibis. For him, the architect’s role is that of a storyteller. Most importantly,
he suggests, it does not matter whether the story is true or false, as long
as it is interesting and well told.

2000

1. Begun in 1988, Kumamoto Artpolis is an ongoing scheme for commissioning innova-

tive public architecture intended to enhance the environment and culture of Kumamoto
Prefecture (southern Japan) by implanting projects in rural as well as urban areas. The first
commissioner was Arata Isozaki, and the role was later passed on to Toyo Ito.
2. Reyner Banham, “The Japonization of World Architecture,” in Contemporary Architecture
of Japan 1958–1984, ed. Reyner Banham, Katsuhiro Kobayashi, and Hiroyuki Suzuki (New
York: Rizzoli, 1985), 26–27.

49

Genealogies and Tendencies

 2

50

After the Crash

Domestic Spaces

From its inner cities out to rural areas, Japan is swamped with detached
houses of every size, yet it is the very small urban house that fascinates
outside observers.The narrow living spaces found in many avant-garde
house designs are sometimes mistakenly seen as ideological choices,
yet they are generally no more than unavoidable consequences of the
size of the available building sites. It is true that as the available space
shrinks, there is often a corresponding increase in inventiveness and
ingenuity. Size constraints distill and crystallize architectural con-
cepts into diagrams of exceptional clarity (although not necessarily
efficiency).
As built manifestations of family life, private houses of any size
are venues for the architectural profession to test new proposals about
space, form, structure, material, light. The planning arrangements of
contemporary houses are symptomatic of sociological and demo-
graphic shifts in Japan: a declining birth rate, an increasing proportion
of elderly people, more adults living alone and working from home,
along with increases in juvenile delinquency and social withdrawal.
The interpenetrating spaces and thin partitions of many recent houses
can be seen as deliberate attempts to weaken privacy inside the home
and thereby improve family interactions—in a sense, a return to earlier
living patterns. However, the radical house designs of today are not
necessarily intended as overt social critiques. Rather, they can be seen
as pragmatic attempts to engage given social conditions, a shift in
approach that was predicted by Toyo Ito:

As modernist architecture was intended to change society, it consistently

51 took a negative stance toward social realities. Moreover, being rejected
 by society was always seen as a virtue. Yet until architects find more posi-
tive ways to engage society, that is to say, as long as the word criticism
is not abandoned, it seems that they will continue to make exclusionary
architecture. In order to escape this narrow path, the house is perhaps the
easiest genre with which to begin. Consequently, the thematic viewpoint
here is not, “How does a house embody criticism?” but rather, “Is it pos-
sible for a house to be without criticism?”1

Arguably, this ideal is being realized in one stream of contem-

porary houses, exemplified by the work of Atelier Bow-Wow. However
their houses are interpreted or misinterpreted—an exploitation of
contextual constraints, an elaboration of personal quirks, an explora-
tion of the potential of narrow spaces, and so on—they are predicated
on taking given conditions seriously, negotiating constraints without
overt criticism. The essays in this section examine a range of private
houses built during the post-bubble period—some large, some small,
yet each embodying a changing society.

1. Toyo Ito, “Datsu Kindaiteki Karadazou: Hihyousei nonai Jutaka wa Kanou ka?”
[Shedding the Modern Body Image: Is a House without Criticism Possible?] Jutaku
Tokushu 149 (September 1998): 21. Author’s translation.

52

After the Crash

The Refraction
House

In an ordinary residential district outside Nagoya, surrounded by

detached prefab houses and squat apartment blocks, Kiyoshi Sey
Takeyama’s Refraction House (2000) appears to be dancing, or perhaps
laughing: the main volume contracts and expands along its length, clad
in a zinc skin deformed by an irrepressible internal energy. As if slicing
through this volume, the street facade is a sheet of rusting steel that
is both threshold and mask for the entirely white space within. To the
rear of the site, a small, rectangular concrete tower compositionally bal-
ances the distorted zinc box; the two are linked to each other only by
exterior balconies.
Like much of Takeyama’s architecture, there are exaggerated
contrasts between the two major components: the box is supported
by a twisting series of steel portal frames, dynamic and active, spa-
tially continuous, lifting toward the sky; the tower comprises orthogo-
nal, load-bearing concrete walls, static and stable, cellular, grounded
in the earth. The main activities—living, dining, and kitchen at ground
level, bedroom on a mezzanine platform—are contained in the zinc-clad
main volume, a tubular, gallerylike space that the combination of kinks
in plan and section, irregular fenestration, and an internal water gar-
den has turned into a dynamic environment of constantly shifting light
and shadow. The canted walls contribute to a psychological spacious-
ness greater than the structure’s actual footprint should allow. Space
is treated as if it is a physical medium, able to be compressed and
dilated, bent and refracted—Takeyama describes his intent as “sensory
reorganization.” The tower is sedate by comparison, containing a tiny
Japanese-style guest room at ground level and the house’s bathroom
53 facilities above.

Domestic Spaces
Architecture as experienced is never constant.
Visiting ephemeral factors always modify and
animate our relationship. The best photographs
have always captured the resonance of the
dancing of static objects and their fleeting guests.
—Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama

Against the abstract white planes of the walls, the floor surfaces—
terracotta tiles, wooden floorboards, tatami mats, polished concrete,
strengthened glass, natural bamboo—vary widely in their tactile and
acoustic properties. Takeyama’s architecture has always emphasized the
experience of moving through its spaces, and the floor is the only sur-
face with which the human body is always in direct contact. Although
the contemporary Japanese household tends to use Western-style tables
and chairs, the tradition of taking one’s shoes off at the entrance remains
unchanged.
At a detail level, the design is a virtuoso performance, Takeyama’s
most mature and sophisticated work to date. Nothing seems gratuitous:
every line is considered, every connection handled with consummate
skill. Moments of extreme refinement—the minimal balustrades and
paper-thin canopies, the elegance and near-invisibility of the sliding door
details, mundane elements, such as the washing machine, precisely inte-
grated into the overall composition—are balanced against raw, tectonic
brutality—unfinished concrete slabs for the kitchen counter and the low
bench in the bathroom, sections of the structural steel frame exposed
in the window openings, industrial-scale HVAC vents. The language of
multiple, overlapping screens and planes is emphatically Takeyama’s
own voice, a long way from the Tadao Ando–influenced projects of his
early career.
Beyond its specific architectural qualities, this project is part of
a significant trend in Japanese residential architecture. It is the home
of a single person (a restaurant owner), an increasingly common pro-
gram for Japan’s architectural avant-garde: private houses for men and
54 women choosing to remain single into their thirties and forties. Up until

After the Crash

Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama + Amorphe, Refraction House,
Nagoya, 2000, main living area

a decade or so ago, being unmarried at this age was cause for sympathy
or perhaps social ostracism. In today’s Japan it is an acceptable, even
admirable, eccentricity.
Ordinary family life has become a less attractive option for
both genders. The highly publicized drop in the Japanese birthrate is a
deceptive statistic. The average married couple is still having the same
number of children. It is the number of married couples that has dramati-
cally dropped, in large part due to the increasingly active participation
of women at every level of Japanese society. Already outside the main-
stream and without the expense of raising children, single individuals are
likely to be wealthier than their contemporaries and have the interest and
the means to employ an architect.
With only a single person to satisfy, the design process is free
of the conflicting requirements of a family “committee” and its lowest-
common-denominator compromises, while retaining the productive
intellectual friction between architect and client. In the case of the
Refraction House, it was the client who inspired or demanded many of
the most radical architectural gestures. His initial request was for a
naturally lit, all-white space, but the unusual materials and forms, the
lack of privacy (all primary functions contained in the same continuous
space, the bathroom fully on display to the outside), and the convoluted
circulation (the transparent glass walkway over the living area, the
exterior transition between the two main volumes of the house) were
all accepted without conflict or chosen from options presented by the
architect.
Despite its incongruous appearance, the Refraction House is a
55 deeply contextual design. Until recently this area was nothing but rice

Domestic Spaces
Refraction House

fields, large patches of which remain amid the ongoing housing devel-
opments. The result is a ragged, disorderly mosaic typical of Japan’s
urban periphery. Takeyama has attempted to create an anchor amidst
this anonymous flux but only as a temporary moment of intensity and
interest. With its warped form and rusting facade, the house has no
delusions about its own longevity, no pretensions toward eternity. In
ways both superficial and profound, it represents the contingency and
impermanence of contemporary urban Japan.

2001

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama, “Shashinka to Kenchikuka
no Taiwa” [Dialogue between a Photographer and an Architect], in Toshi wo Kokyuu Suru
[Breathing the City] (Tokyo: Libroport, 1994), n.p.

56

After the Crash

Two Degrees of
Separation

Whatever the generating concepts, intentions, or ideologies, the act

of architectural design is ultimately the partitioning of space: a series of
decisions about the relative separation or connection of inside and out-
side, the integration or isolation of each room within a building. Jun
Tamaki’s Hakama house (1998) is a lucid demonstration of two extreme
and opposing modes of division: maximum separation between interior
and exterior, minimum separation between the internal spaces.
As in Tamaki’s earlier Tofu house (1997), Hakama is a simple
cubic volume from which openings are incised and rooms extracted. The
main space is ringed by ancillary rooms, and natural light is brought into
the center via skylights and horizontal slots. From outside, these give the
appearance of extremely deep exterior walls, or an almost completely
solid house. Tamaki’s acknowledged precedent for the plan composi-
tion is Georg Muche and Adolf Meyer’s Haus am Horn (built for the 1923
Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar), but he has approached their organiza-
tional model from a fundamentally different conception of space. Rather
than a preexisting expanse to be partitioned and defined by walls and
roofs, space is here seen as something to be made, or at least shaped:
void is gouged from solid, the spaces apparently excavated from a ple-
num of white plaster.
The generation of Japanese architects that dominated the 1980s
made an almost total retreat from the city, creating hermetically sealed
interiors while dismissing contextual relationships as unworkable and
unnecessary. Tamaki and his peers are involved in a tentative reconnec-
tion between architecture and its surroundings: the walls may be thick,
but they are not impenetrable. At Hakama the placement of openings turns
57 what might have been a dark cave into a brightly lit interior: the glazed

Domestic Spaces
Jun Tamaki, Hakama house, Uji, 1998, sections and
plans
section 2
opposite:
Hakama house

section 1 2F plan

2F plan 1F plan
section 2

slots admit natural light and, incidentally, control visual relationships

1:200
between the house and its context by framing the adjacent tea fields
while cropping the neighboring houses from view.
Although the two houses share an exterior expression of weight
1F plan
and solidity, Hakama deviates from Tofu in the interior treatment. The
bedrooms are separated from the living room not by walls and doors but
by 5-meter-high (16.4 feet) curtains—like being inside a giant hakama,
1:200
2F plan a skirtlike item of traditional male clothing usually worn over a kimono.
There is visual screening when necessary but also an unavoidable spatial
continuity. The family members—parents and two young children—are
constantly aware of one another’s presence.
This is a relatively common paradigm in Japanese residential
architecture: a fortified exterior combined with a free-flowing interior.
Private rooms are not a feature of the traditional Japanese house.
1F plan
Partitioning comprises a flexible arrangement of sliding panels and
screens, and families sleep in the same room by choice, not due to lack
of space. It is only in recent decades that private, even lockable, rooms
for every member1:200
of the household have become common. Tamaki’s use
of the curtain as room divider has a social as well as spatial objective.
He attributes much of the recent rise in delinquency and occasional
horrific violence among Japan’s high school students to (unsurpris-
ingly) a breakdown of family structures and the increase in acute social
withdrawal, known as the hikikomori syndrome. Although comparable
behavioral problems exist worldwide, in Japan the official definition of
1:200 hikikomori is a person who has chosen to isolate themselves at home
for more than six months—the stereotypical image is of a teenage boy
58 sequestered in his bedroom with video games and the internet, avoiding

After the Crash

 all human contact and consuming meals left outside the door by a
despairing mother.1
It was these concerns that finally convinced the clients of the mer-
its of Tamaki’s initially surprising proposal. The gentle, ephemeral parti-
tioning and consequent lack of privacy in Hakama is about preventing
family division as much as avoiding spatial segregation. As contextual
relationships are revived, social ones are redefined.

2000

1. The term hikikomori was popularized by psychiatrist Tamaki Saitou’s book Shakaiteki
Hikikomori—Owaranai Shishunki [Social Withdrawal—Endless Puberty] (Tokyo: PHP
Institute, 1998). Surveys show it to be a predominantly male affliction, although it is widely
believed that a high proportion of female cases go unreported. Estimates of the total num-
ber of hikikomori vary. Saitou initially asserted that there are one million, but later admitted
having invented this preposterous statistic in order to draw media attention:

I declared the “theory of one million hikikimori” with almost no verification, having surmised
that one in a thousand would be seen as an issue for other people, but one in a hundred
would make it an immediate problem for everyone. My not-so-noble purpose was to have an
impact, and the media began to hype this figure. If you find somewhere an article stating
that there are “one million hikikomori,” please remember that I am the source, and moreover
it has no foundation.

Tamaki Saitou, Hakase no Kimyou na Shishunki [The Doctor’s Peculiar Puberty] (Tokyo:
Nippon-Hyoron-Sha, 2003), 9–10. Author’s translation.

59

Domestic Spaces
The Hu-tong
House

Behind discreet black walls, the Hu-tong House (2002) comprises three
simple pavilions facing a shared exterior terrace. Timber-framed and
pitched-roofed, the design seems positively rustic in comparison with
Waro Kishi’s usual urbane assemblages of steel, concrete, and glass.
The house was designed by Kishi as a residence and studio for a famous
Japanese avant-garde artist, whose concern about visits from uninvited,
overenthusiastic fans prevents his name from being published (along
with the location of the house, except to note that it is somewhere
in western Japan). A personal friend of Kishi, the artist made the
commission based on his admiration for the architect’s previous work,
and so the result seems all the more unexpected from such a stylistically
consistent designer.
Kishi describes the project as an attempt to create a contemporary
housing prototype using historical Asian precedents. The division of
a single house into several independent structures is an allusion to
traditional Balinese dwellings, but the essence of the design is the central
open space that gives the project its name. The term hutong is Chinese
and refers to the tiny lanes that form a web of public circulation amongst
the traditional hakka dwellings found in cities such as Beijing. A hutong
is not simply a public path but may be used constantly in the daily life of
the residents as a place for cooking, cleaning, and carousing.
During a visit to China, Kishi happened to visit some hakka houses
and was surprised to learn that their inner courts could also be referred
to as hutongs, suggesting that they were not conceived as tranquil
private terraces but as shared spaces of movement and connection. This
discovery became the starting point for the design. Kishi’s version of the
60 hutong is a continuous timber deck that fills the interstitial areas between

After the Crash

Waro Kishi, Hu-tong House, western Japan, 2002,
courtyard

the three enclosed volumes. In plan, it pivots across the site, linking
the front gate to the carport, with an upper balcony area reached by an
exterior stair. This space cannot be seen in its entirety from any vantage
point—one must move through it, accompanied by the spring, squeak,
and scent of wood. The conception of the house as a sequence rather than
a static composition is clearest in the lack of a direct internal connection
between the main living room and the tatami room on the mezzanine
above (accessed by going out into the courtyard, past a water feature
made of black stone, up a flight of stairs, and across a small bridge). The
initial gesture of treating the house as a promenade led to the distribution
of functions into a set of independent pavilions: the shared daily living
areas, the private bedrooms and bathroom, and the artist’s studio, none
of which contain interior corridors or halls. With the exception of ladders
to lofts in the studio and the children’s bedrooms, all the circulation is
external. The exterior deck is exactly level with the interior floors, and
opening the sliding doors turns the house into a continuous, partly
sheltered outdoor space. Two rows of perpendicular fin walls give some
visual privacy between the living room and the bedrooms.
Aligning the eave lines, window openings, and various other
notches visually integrates the three separate volumes into a coherent
composition, the sculptural qualities of which are emphasized by cladding
the walls and roofs with similar black panels. Evenly spaced roof joists
are visible across the white plaster ceilings, but their connections are
concealed, leaving them as no more than articulations of a flat plane.
Kishi says that although he always envisages his “white”
architecture in terms of strong sun and crisp shadows, he designed this
61 house with cloudy weather and uniform light in mind, hence the use of

Domestic Spaces
Hu-tong House, axonometric

black metal panels to downplay the contrast of shadow and light. The
inherent variations and imperfections of the structural and surface
elements will allow the Hu-tong House to weather far more successfully
than Kishi’s initially immaculate projects. Indeed, the house already
looks richer, warmer yet vastly different from published photographs.
The house acquires patina as it ages, absorbing the debris that collects
like a complementary installation in the wake of this extremely prolific
artist’s endeavors. The walls are festooned with collages, studies,
sketches, and works in progress. Smears of oil paint and charcoal deco-
rate the floors of the studio. Piles of art supplies and reference materials
occupy much of the available space. The wooden structure absorbs
sound as well as it absorbs paint, fortunate as the artist requires constant
music (the upper level of the studio is mostly occupied by an enormous
collection of vinyl records), and the sloping ceiling and plasterboard
surfaces have apparently resulted in ideal acoustics.
Despite its unexpected and unprecedented features, the Hu-tong
House is no longer an aberration in Kishi’s body of work. A number of recent
projects—some completed, others under construction or on the drawing
board—also use wooden structures, pitched roofs, and dark-colored
metal cladding. Kishi is perhaps entering his “black period,” abandoning,
refining, or inverting many of the motifs upon which he has always
relied. In his search for a residential prototype more relevant to Asian
conditions and culture, it is paradoxically in those places where Kishi has
most explicitly rejected the stylistic themes of mainstream modernism
that the ideological integrity of his own modernism is reaffirmed.

62 2003

After the Crash

Pushing the
Envelope

The apparent free-for-all of architectural form in Tokyo occurs, as in

most cities, within an invisible web of regulations. Aesthetic choices
may be limitless, but the allowable heights, setbacks, site coverage, floor
areas, and building profiles are strictly defined. The wedge-shaped office
blocks and apartment buildings that characterize the skyline of down-
town Tokyo are the direct result of maximizing building volumes inside
legally defined diagonal planes known as shasen.
Bulging from an inclined corner lot, Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama’s Sky
Trace house (2006) may look like an arbitrary sculptural shape, but it is,
in fact, an outcome of the constraints operating on it. This typically tiny
Tokyo site allows almost no margin for formal experiments; the build-
ing volume simply follows the site perimeter and rises to fill the three-
dimensional envelope defined by the code. There is a single exception:
the outward-leaning slice at one corner is a deliberate design move. With,
quite literally, a single stroke, the clumsy code-defined lump has been
turned into a poised, asymmetric crystal of concrete.
By maximizing the volume in this way, Takeyama exceeded the
permitted 60 percent site coverage, so his next move was to excavate
a courtyard space within, tunneling down two levels below ground. The
underground spaces are also a response to building regulations: although
total internal floor area is restricted, any rooms set at least a meter
(3.3 feet) below ground level are excluded from the calculations. Bringing
fresh air to the lower levels, the deep courtyard has become a resonant
chamber of reflected light and sound.
The built result is a set of simple structural planes that penetrate
deep into the earth, with scattered openings for framed views of sky
63 and street. A transparent waterproofing compound applied to the outer

Domestic Spaces
left to right:
Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama + Amorphe, Sky Trace, Tokyo,
2006

surfaces enables the extraordinary lucidity of the form, removing the

need for membranes, parapets, overhangs, joints, ledges, gutters, even
drainpipes. All the exterior planes have been painted white, but only up to
the edges of their openings. According to Takeyama the rough concrete
exposed at the reveals is meant as a humorous comment on the superfi-
ciality of the pure white volumes of modernist architecture.
From the inside looking out, these unpainted edges make the shell
of the building appear to be nothing but bare concrete. The interior walls
and ceilings are mostly a naturally mottled gray, but floors are pure
white and perfectly smooth. These light floors and dark ceilings echo the
stained wood ceilings and tatami-mat floors of traditional Japanese
spaces in which shoes are removed and daily life is spent on the floor.
In terms of visual contrast, they are an inversion of typical Western
spaces—photos of traditional Japanese interiors will occasionally appear
upside down in Western publications, due to unconscious assumptions
that the lighter-colored plane must always be the ceiling.
Sky Trace belongs to a photojournalist and a composer of contem-
porary music (he works in the basement, and she works in the loft) with
two children. The rich interpenetration of spaces throughout the house
balances privacy with family interaction. Fittings and fixtures appear
simple and inexpensive, although they are not without subtle touches of
luxury. Cupboard doors in the kitchen, for example, are plain wood, but
their inner faces are painted a lustrous red. The slight hint of color visible
along their lower edges is a deliberate homage to the traditional aesthetic
preference in Japan for concealed or implied beauty.
As in the work of many contemporary Japanese architects, a criti-
64 cal resistance to the surrounding urban situation is found in an uncritical

After the Crash

 surrender to its constraints—that is to say, the relationship of building
envelope to its context is not quite transgressive, yet not entirely sub-
missive. By tracing the extreme limits of what is permitted, Takeyama
indicates ways in which that invisible envelope might be pushed and, in
a sense, transcended.

2007

65

Domestic Spaces
Variations on the 9-Tsubo House by a group of
contemporary architects

3
Clockwise from top left:
Makoto Masuzawa (1952 original), Rikuo Nishimori,
Hisae Igarashi, Hitoshi Abe, Tatsuro Sasaki, Takaharu
and Yui Tezuka

66
New Prototypes

Japanese dwellings have a long history of systemization, in part to

deal with the need for frequent repair and replacement. This system-
ization encompasses construction techniques as well as planning
methods: traditional Japanese houses are based on a corridorless
enfilade layout of rooms, with sheltered engawa (veranda) spaces run-
ning along the outer perimeters and multipurpose internal spaces
partitioned by thin, mobile screens.
Inspired by Western living patterns, Japanese architects in the
early twentieth century began to propose hybrid house prototypes,
such as the nakaroka model—characterized by a central corridor that
enhances privacy and functional zoning—and the imachushin model—
characterized by a floor plan based around a centrally located, Western-
style living room.1 During World War II, Kyoto University professor
Uzo Nishiyama published an essay that advocated separate spaces
for sleeping and eating,2 which had a decisive influence on the devel-
opment of the so-called nLDK house planning system (n refers to the
number of bedrooms and LDK to living/dining/kitchen). This was first
formulated in 1951 by architect Yasumi Yoshitake with his students at
Tokyo University, setting standards that are now used by all the major
real estate and property development companies in Japan. It was in
fact only one of many proposals triggered by massive postwar housing
shortages. Others included Kunio Maekawa’s PREMOS prefabricated
wooden house system (produced from 1945 to 1950) and Makoto
Masuzawa’s Minimum House of 1952—a timber-framed, two-story cube
designed using a set of simple rules (square floor plan, two-story void,
gabled roof, cylindrical columns). Masuzawa built it for himself but
67 intended it as a prototype for postwar reconstruction. Fifty years later,
 the house has been revived as a prototype for contemporary suburban
living: architects Yasuyuki Okazaki and Makoto Koizumi have repro-
duced the original under the name 9-Tsubo House (a tsubo is a unit of
measure, approximately 3.3 square meters, or 36 square feet), and
invited other contemporary designers to develop their own versions
based on Masuzawa’s original set of rules.
As Japanese society continues to change, new architectural
prototypes continue to emerge. Though any building is a potential pro-
totype, the following essays examine three deliberate attempts to
create replicable systems. They each address emerging social issues:
the privileged “parasite singles” (mainly young, unmarried women liv-
ing with their parents and obsessed with conspicuous consumption);
the hikikomori (mainly young, unmarried men living with their parents
and obsessed with video games); and the aging (or “silvering” as it is
known in Japan) of society.

1. A detailed study of these developments may be found in Jordan Sand, House and
Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
2. Uzo Nishiyama, “Juukyoukuukan no Youtokousei ni okeru Shokunebunriron” [Separa-
tion of Eating and Sleeping Quarters in Small Houses], Kenchiku Gakuai Ronbunshu
25 (1942): 149–55. The Uzo Nishiyama Memorial Library is maintained by Sekisui House,
a major housing company.

68

After the Crash

Brand
Recognition
The FOB Homes System

A significant proportion of contemporary residential construction in

Japan consists of generic, mass-produced, mostly prefabricated houses.
Identifiable by their conventional fenestration patterns and gabled
roofs, unintentionally parodying Western houses, they are the prod-
ucts of companies known as “housemakers”: huge marketing / design
/ construction operations such as Misawa Home, Sekisui House, and
PanaHome, themselves often divisions of even larger corporations. Their
house designs are based on a set of modular plan typologies for which
every detail, fitting, and finish may be selected from enormous catalogs.
Factory-fabricated components, including entire walls and bathrooms,
are delivered to the site and simply bolted together. The marketing
brochures invariably show Western-style houses isolated amongst lush
gardens, but in reality they are likely to be ringed with narrow yards,
their windows facing directly onto neighboring walls. This is not “social”
housing: the target market is the affluent middle class, and these houses
can easily cost more than an architect-designed home with the same
floor area. Replacing Japan’s traditional extended-family dwellings,
they first appeared after the Second World War as the modern home
for the salaryman-and-housewife nuclear family. With an intended life
span of three decades, these houses are consumer items: conventional,
convenient, disposable.
Despite the widespread discomfort over these houses replacing
traditional architecture and dominating new suburban development,
they display a fundamental historical continuity. Traditional residential
construction in Japan—for every social class—was also essentially
prefabricated, comprising dimensionally coordinated structural frames
69 (timber post-and-beam) and modular infill elements (tatami mats, shoji

New Prototypes
70

After the Crash

FOB Homes typology chart

screens, fusuma panels). Although reflecting the legal regulation of

architectural aesthetics during much of the Edo period (circa 1600–1867),
this standardization was largely an outcome of the insubstantiality of the
primary building materials: wood, bamboo, clay, and paper. Repairs had
to be relatively fast and easy, whether the constant partial replacement
due to weathering or the occasional total replacement after a fire or
earthquake. The systemization of construction also worked in reverse:
traditional houses tended to be raised above the ground and without
basements, and it was not uncommon for them to be taken apart and
reassembled elsewhere.
While the ephemerality of the Japanese built environment is
invariably explained as a Shinto-Buddhist acceptance of transience
brutally enforced by regular natural disasters, post–World War II Japanese
society has valorized newness (although not necessarily novelty) for
its own sake—symbolic of the nation’s modernization and increasing
wealth. Traditional buildings may have required constant repairs, but
contemporary ones are often replaced without good reason; land is con-
sidered to be worth less when there is an old building on it than when it
has been completely cleared, further encouraging owners to tear down
unused buildings rather than find ways to reuse them.
Whatever the real reasons for this culture of constant replace-
ment, it did provide support for the 1960s metabolist architects’ vision of
buildings and cities in a state of constant evolutionary flux. The metabo-
lists’ biological metaphors may have been more short-lived polemical
statement than plausible design strategy—the few built examples
are more picturesque than actually metabolic—but it did provide an
71 architectural language for some housemakers of the 1960s. Companies

New Prototypes
left to right:
FOB Homes types A–E

such as Sekisui House and Misawa Home produced a number of pod-

and capsule-based house prototypes, which market forces quickly
transformed into simple boxes with pitched roofs. The Japanese public
demanded a more recognizable image of home, and preferably one based
on Western models.
Externally manifest in details such as street-facing gable ends
and side-hung windows, this Western influence extended to the internal
planning: while prefabrication may be seen as consistent with tradition,
the nLDK-defined housemaker floor plans are a radical break. The
flexibly divided, multipurpose rooms of the traditional house have been
replaced with solid walls and private rooms for each family member.
This culturally alien emphasis on individuality has been identified by
a number of Japanese architects and cultural critics as a contributing
factor to contemporary juvenile delinquency and social withdrawal.
Despite the housemakers’ phenomenal success over the last few
decades, their business model may lack the agility to adjust to recent
sociological and demographic shifts. As Japanese suburbia becomes
saturated by these houses and the birthrate drops (symptomatic of
a decline in the number of marriages), the perceived purpose of the
house has shifted from the family shelter and symbol of social status
of earlier generations to a comfortable retreat for indulging hobbies and
entertaining friends. Land prices have dropped to a fraction of what they
were a decade ago, making home ownership available to a much wider
range of people.The result is a potentially enormous client base dissatisfied
with what the housemakers have to offer, yet wary of commissioning an
architect—partly due to the profession’s (often deserved) reputation for
72 designing houses that are expensive, indulgent, and dysfunctional.

After the Crash

 Building unique or experimental houses for wealthy or progressive
clients is largely irrelevant to the general quality of housing in Japan.
The decision to use a housemaker instead of an architect is often not
based on price or quality but on the desire to fit in with the neighborhood:
for many Japanese, employing an architect seems self-indulgent to the
point of arrogance. While the housemaker houses are not seen as being
particularly high quality, their advantage is the reassurance of or
dinariness. They are like products from a convenience store: there are no
surprises in content or price, and everyone else is buying the same thing.
The gap between generic housemaker products and unique
architect-designed houses seemed like a niche begging to be filled, as
both business proposition and social vision. Beginning in 1999, Katsu
Umebayashi, the founding director of FOBA, began to develop the notion
of an alternative housing “brand”: FOB Homes. From the outset the
emphasis was on marketing and logistics rather than new materials and
construction techniques. Inventing yet another prefabrication system
would be an investment in methods that might become obsolete before
any large-scale implementation was possible. The total flexibility of non-
modular construction seemed far more promising. FOB Homes, therefore,
can be made of anything, anyhow. It is only the spatial and aesthetic
concepts that remain consistent. In situ concrete is always preferable,
precisely because of its complete absence of any modular or dimensional
restrictions; steel or timber structures are low-budget alternatives.
Architecturally, the FOB Homes system is based on two principles:
spatial continuity throughout the interior, and containment of external
areas within the main volume. Interlocking L-shaped rooms (allowing every
73 space to disappear around a corner) and courtyard gardens (conceived

New Prototypes
 as roofless rooms) visible throughout the house result in a psychological,
if not actual, spaciousness. The lack of clear room divisions resonates
in many ways with the traditional house types. At the very least, FOB
Homes have a functional ambiguity that makes it extremely difficult to
assign them codes from the nLDK system.
Visually, the FOB Home is a solid mass, a hermetic white
volume filling its site. The apparent insensitivity to context is, in fact, a
tremendous generosity. The blank external walls effectively “donate”
their surrounding yards to the neighboring houses—if not as accessible
space, at least as a huge increase in privacy (and therefore potential
activity) inside and out. Neighbors are no longer inadvertently forced to
observe each other’s living rooms and gardens. In one case, a neighbor
regularly uses the adjacent white wall as a video projection screen for
his own living room. While the stark facades might have been disturbing
in an earlier era, within the visual chaos of contemporary urban Japan,
they are welcomed by the neighbors. There is even a historical precedent
in the traditional kura, the white-plastered adobe storehouses that were
fireproof annexes for wealthier houses.
The aesthetic was not conceived as a pristine minimalism, but
merely an attempt to be as neutral as possible, resulting in a simple
white box. This is intended only as a starting point, a basic frame to
accommodate the personality of the inhabitants. Not coincidentally, two
of the earliest FOB Homes clients were graphic designers, well aware
they were being given a blank slate rather than a finished composition.
The typical FOB Home includes a large storeroom, allowing the daily
living areas to be kept empty of everything except the few items (books,
74 CDs, furniture) in current use.

After the Crash

FOB Homes brochure

The FOB Homes system is partly an attempt to reunite modernist

aesthetics (minimalist white boxes) with modernist ideology (democratic,
affordable design). It thereby joins a historical lineage containing more
examples of failure than success, whether due to co-option by a wealthy
elite, as in the California Case Study Houses, or rejection by the intended
inhabitants, as in Le Corbusier’s Pessac housing estate. Perhaps only in
Japan, where simplicity has always signified luxury, are such ambitions
plausible.

2003

Postscript
For various reasons the FOB Homes business quickly peaked and then faded over a
period of about five years, approximately 2000 to 2005. The ambition was always less about
big business than making a polemical statement on the quality of residential construction
in Japan. Similar systems have arisen since, most convincingly the modular houses the
Muji Company is producing with architect Kazuhiko Namba. Interestingly, the housemakers
themselves have introduced new, “modern” lines that seem to borrow much of their design
approach (not to mention their advertising copy) directly from FOB Homes. Given the lack of
originality of FOB Homes to begin with—the designs borrowed from sources as diverse as
Le Corbusier, Álvaro Siza, and Ian Moore—Umebayashi never considered the imitation to
be a problem but precisely the kind of wider influence he had always hoped for.

75

New Prototypes
Reflecting
Modern Life

Despite its apparent rationality and restraint, the Gifu Kitagata

Apartment Building (phase one 1998, phase two 2000) is one of Kazuyo
Sejima’s most radical designs—experimental spatial organizations may
be welcomed in a private art museum or holiday villa, but their impact
is far more dubious when applied to daily life in publicly funded social
housing. This building may well have a beautiful physical presence, but
the real importance of the project is in its subtle subversion of domestic
living patterns.
The building was commissioned as part of a low-cost public hous-
ing development coordinated by Arata Isozaki, for which he assembled
a group of female designers: Kazuyo Sejima, Akiko Takahashi, Christine
Hawley, and Elizabeth Diller each contributed a housing block design,
with Martha Schwarz as the landscape architect. Beyond the explicit
political gesture of commissioning only women, Isozaki’s implicit inten-
tion was to raise the issue of gender relationships and family structure
in contemporary society. The project was above all about living patterns,
not urban-block patterns: he initially requested that the architects pro-
vide only floor plans for the residential units themselves, as an attempt to
find alternatives to the nLDK system:

Once one understands that the image of the urban family has collapsed in
postwar Japan, one cannot help but call into question the nLDK dwelling
form, put together as it was on the principle of the nuclear family and con-
ceived as its container. And yet the nLDK as a form of urban dwelling was
not only used for public housing, but also used in private developments. . . .
In the fifty years since the end of the war all urban housing in Japan has
76 been conceived according to the nLDK formula, regardless of whether it was

After the Crash

Kazuyo Sejima, Kitagata Apartment Building, Gifu,
phase one 1998, phase two 2000, typical plan

built by public agencies or private developers. And despite the collapse of

the concept of the family that it created, this formal concept has remained
unchanged. The only thing that can dismantle this relation is a reform of the
dwelling units which act as the receptacles.1

Sejima began by developing five types based on typical apartment

building parameters in Japan: 120 units per hectare (2.5 acres), each
with an average size of 70 square meters (750 square feet). These types
comprise one low-rise proposal (a continuous carpet of patio dwellings),
two medium-rise proposals (a linear S-curve and a rectangular courtyard
block), and two high-rise proposals (a linear zigzag and a set of discrete
towers), each one simultaneously a flexible, modular system and a com-
posed, coherent object. Sejima was explicit about her interest in the per-
ceived mass of the building in the landscape and the effects it would
have on the surroundings: “Urban communal housing must be studied
more as a problem of exterior space than interior, in terms of the con-
figuration of the many different kinds of volumes that compose urban
space.”2 The five prototypes addressed a wide range of alternatives for
access routes and integration of the units, with the notable absence of
any double-loaded corridors—the units in the low-rise patio type are
accessed from outdoor avenues, the discrete towers are entered from
internal cores, and in the other three cases, the buildings are one room
wide with external balcony access to all the units. There is a certain
anonymity to each prototype, a visual variety that paradoxically acts to
deemphasize the individual identity of each unit: “The composition of the
units gives us some privacy, because no one can understand which part
77 belongs to any given family.”3

New Prototypes
78

After the Crash

Kazuyo Sejima, housing studies, 1995

Isozaki’s chosen team collectively decided to make relatively tall

blocks that would cumulatively define the perimeter of the site. Develop-
ing her linear high-rise prototype, Sejima combined modular spaces into
about ten different unit types, arranging the plan as a linear band and
the section as a regular grid. Shared access routes are located along the
opaque north facade, whereas the fully glazed south facade comprises
spandrel panels set flush with the glass. The resulting horizontal stripes
are interrupted by an irregular pattern of double-height spaces and out-
door terraces. The latter form the most striking aspect of the architec-
ture: rather than continuous balconies running across the facade, they
penetrate the building, revealing its exceptional thinness.
All the south-facing spaces are narrow sunrooms that link the
other rooms to the private terraces: “This plan, with continuous corridors
along each facade, means that we are trying to hide the interior, to
retain some privacy.”4 This makes the bedrooms enclosed spaces with-
out views or direct sunlight; the washbasins are located within the
sunrooms abutting the glazed facade. Daily ablutions thereby become
the focal point of each unit; the most private activities are put on public
display.
While the planning may seem perverse, simply reversing conven-
tional expectations for domestic comfort and family interaction, it is also
a considered response to contemporary lifestyles. Bedrooms are treated
as no more than places to sleep between working hours, and the over-
all building composition is a strange mix of total anonymity and total
exposure. As critic Akira Suzuki has pointed out, one effect of the archi-
tecture is to prioritize, or at least emphasize, the lifestyle of the young,
79 unmarried daughter:

New Prototypes
Kitagata Apartment Building

The middle-aged father, the erstwhile head of the family, uses the washba-
sin once in the morning and once at night, at the very most. Even his wife is
unlikely to be at the washbasin for long in the course of her daily chores. It is
the daughter who is most concerned with keeping her face in tip-top shape
for presentation to the outside world. It is for her sake that the washbasin,
where this ritual is performed, is placed centre stage and exposed to the
external gaze.5

Although there is a similarity with the layout of Sejima’s

Saishunkan Seiyaku Women’s Dormitory (Kumamoto, 1991), the origins
of this concept may in fact lie in Toyo Ito’s Pao: A Dwelling for Tokyo
Nomad Women (1985), for which Sejima was project architect and
her own lifestyle at the time used an inspirational model. As an ironic
commentary on the phenomenal economic power of young women in
Japanese society and the concomitant pervasiveness of cuteness—a
feminist reclaiming of innocent femininity, perhaps—the apartment
building is also ideologically linked with Sejima and Nishizawa’s provoc-
ative contribution to the Arata Isozaki–curated City of Girls installation
at the 2000 Venice Biennale.
If Sejima does indeed intend the teenage girls living in the Gifu
Kitagata apartments to be looked at while looking at themselves in
the mirror, it is perhaps the single “decorative” aspect of the design
that symbolizes the entire project: small, arbitrarily placed mirrored
panels projecting from the south facade. While initially seeming to be
no more than fashionable gimmicks, they encapsulate the underlying
architectural and conceptual intentions—random elements that disrupt
80 legibility, imply porosity, dissimulate transparency. At a glance these

After the Crash

 mirrors appear to be windows onto other people’s lives, but they actually
only reflect our own.

2006

1. Arata Isozaki, “Il complesso residenziale di Kitagata, Gifu” [The Kitagata Housing
Complex, Gifu (Japan)], Lotus International 100 (1999): 45.
2. Kazuyo Sejima, “Housing Studies,” Japan Architect 19 (1995): 160.
3. Alejandro Zaera Polo, “A Conversation with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa,” El
Croquis 99 (2000): 13.
4. Ibid., 12.
5. Akira Suzuki, “A Washbasin at Centre-Stage: Planning Reversed by Gender,” in Do
Android Crows Fly over the Skies of an Electronic Tokyo? (London: Architectural Association,
2001), 43.

81

New Prototypes
Living
Dangerously

Looking like a magnified chunk of tropical coral reef beside a quiet street
in suburban Tokyo, Reversible Destiny Lofts is a work of architecture that
purports to defeat death, or, in the words of its creators, “an apparatus
through which we bring our life closer to eternity.” Designed, and funded,
by a pair of artists living in New York—Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline
Gins, a painter and poet who have reinvented themselves as architects—
it is a product of the motto that guides their entire body of work: “We
Have Decided Not To Die.”
Achieving immortality via architecture? How seriously should
we take Arakawa + Gins? Abstruse philosophers and merry prank-
sters they may be, but given that this building first came to public
notice in Japan as the October 2004 cover story of the Japan edition of
the Journal of the American Medical Association, perhaps we should
take them very seriously indeed. What appears to be a whimsical and
spectacularly indulgent artwork masquerading as a nine-unit condomin-
ium is in fact a built fragment of Arakawa + Gins’s comprehensive pro-
posal for a new approach to inhabitation, one that denies the comforts of
home in favor of unstable environments that stimulate and challenge their
inhabitants. The incongruous colors, shapes, textures, and juxtaposi-
tions are intended to produce spaces that simultaneously embrace and
disorient—never comfortably receding into the background.
As residences they may seem inconvenient, even dangerous
(although they do fully comply with Japanese building regulations), but
even so, the target market is the aged and infirm. The demographic pro-
file of Japan, along with the rest of the First World, is fast skewing toward
the elderly. Providing housing for senior citizens has become an urgent
82 social priority and architectural challenge. Yet the prevailing ideology and

After the Crash

Reversible Destiny Hotel, proposal

New Prototypes
Features of the surroundings call forth from
organisms-persons the actions and gestures that
architect them into persons. On all occasions and
any, an organism that persons disperses landing
sites, and, by so doing, turns itself into a person
having an architectural body.
—Madeline Gins and Arakawa

84

After the Crash

Arakawa + Gins, Reversible Destiny Lofts, Tokyo,
2005, typical unit

legislation of “barrier-free” design is, for Arakawa + Gins, only killing with
kindness: enforcing the production of innocuous, soothing environments
that gently hasten senility and death.
Arakawa + Gins’s interests lie in “difficult” spaces that challenge
and thereby invigorate their inhabitants. After all, if death is seen as a
process rather than an event (not the moment of total metabolic shut-
down, but the ever-accelerating physical decrepitude that begins the
moment puberty ends), then their rejection of mortality seems far more
plausible. If death is equilibrium, then instability is life. By demanding
that the inhabitants be fully aware of their own existence, these spaces
enhance proprioception, the internal bodily sense of balance and posi-
tion. Arakawa + Gins refers to the intersection of the biological body and
its architectural surroundings as the “architectural body” (also the title of
a manifesto they famously printed and sold on rolls of toilet paper). Their
hope is that the final moment of life might be indefinitely postponed, an
asymptote we are always approaching but never quite reach.
These ideas are being taken seriously in the world of medical care
and perceptual psychology, which in turn provides design inspiration for
Arakawa + Gins (Arakawa studied medicine and biochemistry before
becoming an artist—in fact, they both prefer to describe themselves
as philosophers and scientists). Even the building’s wild coloration is a
tactic for stimulating the nervous system. The palette of fourteen colors
used throughout prevents any color combination being repeated exactly
but also draws on studies showing that, past the threshold of eight dis-
tinct colors, intense hues no longer agitate or even consciously register.
As much as the building demands to be looked at, in dedicating it to the
85 memory of deaf-and-blind Helen Keller, the architects imply that it could

New Prototypes
Reversible Destiny Lofts

be understood by touch alone. Avoiding the usual design rulebooks, with

every dimension determined intuitively, Arakawa + Gins defines the
spaces with irregular surfaces punctuated by unusually placed elements
and fittings—nothing is quite where you would expect, right down to the
door handles and power sockets. Not only do the living rooms have gently
sloping floors, the floor surface itself comprises a mixture of irregular
bumps of two sizes—the smaller intended to accommodate the feet of
children, the larger for the feet of adults. Continuously recalibrating your
balance is not difficult, and in fact easier than on a more ordinary floor.
A partly disabled woman touring the apartments shortly after comple-
tion found herself able to stand without difficulty—the uneven surface
provided purchase where an ordinary flat, smooth floor would give no
second chance if she began to topple.
For most people, however, this building is an object to be admired
or puzzled over from outside. The neighbors are mostly enthusiastic, and
during construction a nearby bakery began sculpting and selling muffin
clusters in a humorous homage to the design—yet sales of the apart-
ments themselves have been slow. A nice place to visit, perhaps, but
living here full-time is an intimidating prospect. Undeterred, Arakawa +
Gins has been proposing entire cities based on the same principles, but
it is the plans for Reversible Destiny Hotels that seem most likely to suc-
ceed. Experiencing these types of spaces for a night or two might be the
only longevity boost people want.
This is joyful, valuable work—aesthetics as therapy. The quirky
shapes are a means to avoid an end: “What could be more optimistic and
constructive than a living space that in every way both prods and coaxes
86 its residents to continue living for an indefinitely long period of time?”

After the Crash

 ask the artists. Indeed, even if death remains inescapable, living more
intensely in the here and now seems like a good suggestion. Arakawa +
Gins just wants us to stay awake, not fade away.

2006

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body
(Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2002): 65.

87

New Prototypes
Hiroshi Hara, Kyoto Station, Kyoto, 1997, concourse

88

After the Crash

Public Places

In Japan, urban public space, as understood in the West, is rare. Archi-

tect HajimeYatsuka even asserts that the concept of “public realm” has
no equivalent in the Japanese language.1 Although it may be true that
European-style town squares did not exist in premodern Japanese cit-
ies, there were certainly equivalent places for gathering and carousing:
the sakariba amusement districts that emerged around major bridges
and other transitional zones, in which the hierarchy of social classes
could be temporarily forgotten or even inverted. Indeed, there is a clear,
if simplistic, contrast in the way European public life centers on points
of rest—the square—while Japanese public life occurs in zones of
maximum movement—the street. The sakariba survive in a somewhat
different form today, but Kazuo Shinohara asserts that they are the
definitive Japanese urban place:

As shapes they might be described as utterly chaotic, but there is a fasci-

nating vitality in the bizarre sense of architectural freedom on the streets
of some of Tokyo’s sakariba. Although I think this vitality is largely an
effect of our current economic prosperity, as a mode of the city for every-
day affairs this urban condition is the antithesis of the elegance of typical
European modern cities. Nevertheless, compared as basic urban models,
they seem to me to have more potential. The teeming streets of Tokyo were
the starting point for the formation of my architectural and urban theme,
which I call “progressive anarchy.”2

Along with government-sponsored efforts to introduce open

spaces into the city, a number of recent urban-scale private devel-
89 opments incorporate freely accessible public spaces, as exemplified
 by the pioneering Roppongi Hills (2003): 11.6 hectares (28.7 acres) of
apartments, shops, offices, restaurants, bars, cinemas, parks, and a
major art museum. It took seventeen years just to assemble the land—
and, for better or worse, to prove that order could indeed be imposed
on the “chaos” of Tokyo.
Many significant new public buildings include unprogrammed
areas for general social interaction, such as Hiroshi Hara’s Kyoto
Station building (1997). Built for the twelve-hundredth anniversary of
the city’s founding, its main concourse contains vast flights of steps
interwoven with escalators and balconies, all sheltered by a glazed
steel roof—an unprecedented generosity of public space and a valu-
able new paradigm for Japanese cities. In analogous ways, each
public building addressed in this section attempts innovative spatial
arrangements with the intention of triggering public gatherings and
interactions.

1. Hajime Yatsuka, “Between East and West Part IV: Nippon—Postmodern,” Telescope
9 (Winter 1993): 144–61.
2. Kazuo Shinohara, “Ima, ‘Modan Nekusuto’” [Now, “Modern Next”], Jutaku Tokushu 23
(March 1988): 24. Author’s translation.

90

After the Crash

The Sendai
Mediatheque

Iconic, if not canonic, from the moment the competition-winning design

was published, Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque (Sendai, 2001), essen-
tially a combination of public library and art gallery, is already a key
reference in the discourse on the relationships between architecture
and information technology. Its realization makes clear the paradoxes of
the program: as a public multimedia archive and telematic node, it must
embody the virtual, localize the global, freeze the ephemeral, turn the
solitary into the communal. That is a heavy conceptual burden for any
physical structure to bear.
While developments in the mechanical and material sciences
simultaneously enable and demand new architectural typologies—
climate-controlled interiors and mechanical circulation methods, long-
span factory roofs and high-rise office blocks—the effects of information
technology are far more problematic. Even as the traditional symbolic
and communal roles of architecture are usurped by the new media, with
a concomitant dispersal and disappearance of the public realm, the
direct consequences for building design are largely metaphoric. Virtual
reality may suggest new spaces, and computer technology may facilitate
new forms, but media technology facilities could be just as efficiently
contained in an underground bunker or in multiple isolated booths with
no need for overall architectural coherence. If the Industrial Revolution
hugely increased architecture’s potential, the electronic revolution has
dramatically reduced its necessity.
The design of the Mediatheque may be no more than an analogy for
the relationship between the physical world and the digital world, but it is
a brilliant one: a cool, translucent crystal permeated by dynamic, twisting
91 flows. The parti is a modified Corbusian Dom-ino (the archetypal free-plan

Public Places
The mechanical and the electronic... are in fact
expressions of two continuous, interdependent
historical-ontological modalities: those of Matter
(substance) and Intelligence (order, shape) ....
To speak of a mechanical paradigm of material
qualities and perceptible functions and to oppose
this to an electronic one of immaterial processes
and pure intelligence is at once absurd and
dangerous. —Sanford Kwinter

structure), a stack of flat steel floor plates supported by thirteen distorted

tubes composed of welded steel pipes. The tubes physically and visually
interlink the levels—spatial tunnels that emerge from the underground
parking level, burrow through the building volume, and escape through the
roof. They act as transparent conduits for light, air, and people, channeling
daylight from two mobile rooftop reflectors. Even the main fire-escape
stair is contained in a glass enclosure—something normally not permit-
ted by the Japanese building code. The holes in the floor plates create
some surprising connections: staff communicate between floors by
mobile phone while gesturing at one another and from the public library
mezzanine there are views into the administration offices below.
This unique structure (the plates are honeycomb sandwich panels
and the tubes are single-layer, three-dimensional hyperbolic-paraboloid
trusses) was developed by Mutsuro Sasaki, structural designer for
some of the most innovative Japanese architecture of recent years. He
defined parameters for the tube layout—limits for diameter and height,
twisting and deflection, maximum separation, maximum cantilever—
leaving Ito sufficient play to develop the functional and sculptural
properties of the architecture. The apparent randomness of the tubes is
constrained by an invisible web of parametric interdependency. Altering
any attribute—form, size, location—of any tube entails sympathetic
change throughout the system. The actual design is a selection from a
continuous yet constrained array of potential configurations. To see it
as an arbitrary freeze-frame from a virtual ballet of swaying, protean
tubes is almost literally true. The genius of the Mediatheque’s structural
solution is not simply that it appears insufficient to support the building
92 but that it does not even appear to be structure at all. Precisely at the

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Toyo Ito, Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai, 2001,
cross section and model

places where a building is expected to be the most rigid, repetitive,

opaque, the Mediatheque is free, irregular, transparent. Even the nonex-
pert eye can intuitively recognize the “correctness” of structures that
form diagrams of their own load paths—whether a pyramid or a suspen-
sion bridge, a stone-block catenary arch or the Eiffel Tower. Attempts by
architects to escape gravity tend to be based on visual tricks: precarious
tilts and cantilevers that only make the tyranny of gravity more obvious.
The frozen moments of explosion or collapse in deconstructivist archi-
tecture were predicated on an overt resistance to static forces, whereas
the Mediatheque serenely ignores their very existence, buoyant without
ever seeming unstable.
Interestingly, the experimental nature of the design necessitated
the use of archaic, intuitive building methods in combination with cutting-
edge technologies. Despite the extreme precision of the computer sim-
ulations, dealing with the behavioral nuances of the materials—even
given the homogeneity and predictability of steel—required human fas-
tidiousness and intuition at every stage of assembly. The structure was
prefabricated, partly at shipbuilding yards, but its variety and complexity
made standardizing or systematizing the process all but impossible: the
pieces were mostly handmade, with minimal robot assistance. Groups of
adjacent components were tested for fit in the factory then transported
by truck to the building site, but in almost every case, the tubes no longer
lined up with the holes in the floor plates. Reforming the tubes on site
required the empirical knowledge and experience of a few elderly ship-
builders, who identified by eye the exact points to be manipulated. Under
their direction, small teams of workers used a combination of weights,
93 cables, acetylene torches, and water hoses to correct the shapes of

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94

After the Crash

 Sendai Mediatheque, structural tube

the tubes. In an era of increasingly standardized construction, the

Mediatheque demanded the restoration of a degree of flexibility and
freedom to matter, both in the animated, serpentine shapes and at a
more profound level in the parametric mode of design and the artisanal
method of construction. The strategy for the structural arrangement
shifted from predetermined to contingent, slid from a Cartesian grid
to parametric vectors, transubstantiated from solid support to evocative
image.
Funded entirely by local tax money, this unprecedented public
facility was the result of a similarly unprecedented process. The concept
of a “mediatheque” (the expansion of a bibliotheque to include media
other than books) belongs to Arata Isozaki, who rewrote the competition
brief after being appointed head of the selection committee. The basic
program called for a combination of library, art gallery, audiovisual
archive, and center for the disabled, but Isozaki invited applicants to
modify and extend the program as they saw fit. He also insisted on the
most transparent possible competition process, to the extent that the
final jury proceedings were broadcast live into the foyer of the auditorium
where they were held. The beauty of the Mediatheque concept is its
ambiguity—no one has ever really known what the building actually is.
From the instigation of the project until completion and beyond, the
building’s functions and intentions have been debated through specialist
consultation, public debate, newsletters, and a website. A symposium
entitled Aims of the Mediatheque, in which media culture experts were
invited to propose possible functions, was held at the Tokyo Design
Center in 1999—halfway through construction. The open framework of
95 the Mediatheque allowed its planning and programming to remain free

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Sendai Mediatheque

until the last possible moment. Ito’s office produced hundreds of floor-
plan variations (several of the actual installations were done by other
designers—Kazuyo Sejima, Ross Lovegrove, Karim Rashid), and even
now the layout remains in flux—ideally, permanently so.
While the competition and consultation process set new standards
of transparency for public projects in Japan, perhaps the most
provocative statement Ito has made about the design is that he intends
it as a prototype, a structural model for future public buildings. No doubt
in decades to come, the architecture of the Sendai Mediatheque will seem
as quaintly retro-futuristic as science-fiction images from the 1950s do
today, but the fluid organization of space and program may yet prove to
be paradigmatic for a new generation of public architecture.

2001

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Sanford Kwinter, “Not the Last Word: The Cruelty
of Numbers,” ANY 10: Mech-In-Tecture, Reconsidering the Mechanical in the Electronic Era
(February/March 1995): 60–62.

96

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The Glass Library

While the insubstantiality of the traditional teahouse and the ritual

rebuilding of Ise Shrine (a symbolic renewal that has been ongoing
since the seventh century at approximately twenty-year intervals) are
constantly invoked as precedents and explanations for the ephemer-
ality of contemporary Japanese architecture, there is a lesser-known
yet equally important historical lineage that has its origins in temple
architecture and prioritizes extreme longevity. In premodern Japan, the
roles of architect, engineer, and carpenter were combined in the daiku,
a profession that was itself divided into hereditary guilds specializing in
particular building types. The prestigious sukiya daiku, for example, were
(and are) responsible for teahouses—small-scale, delicate, intuitive, and
artistic work. Yet regarded with even greater respect by Japanese society
are the miya daiku, the builders of large temples—artisans who are nec-
essarily far more concerned with structural and constructional rigor.
Where the teahouse seems to float or recede, the temple has an overt
physical presence and weight.
The robust work of the miya daiku is exemplified by Horyuji, a
Buddhist temple complex located near Nara, generally considered to date
from the beginning of the eighth century (the late Asuka period). This
is the historical moment at which Japanese written records began, and
Japanese architecture itself emerged—that is to say, buildings from this
period are considered to be quintessentially Japanese in style, in spite
of a heavy influence from the mainland. Artisans were brought over from
Korea (then known as Baekje) to assist in the design and construction of
Horyuji, and to explain the newly introduced religion of Buddhism. Built
of trees felled 1,300 years ago, it is reputedly the oldest extant wooden
97 structure in the world. Not far away is now the enormous glass box of

Public Places
Fumio Toki & Associates, Kansai-kan, Kyoto, 2002,
central atrium

Kansai-kan (2002), a new annex to the National Diet Library in Tokyo (the
Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress). In architectural terms
it is not difficult to find parallels between Horyuji and Kansai-kan. The
library not only evokes the grandeur and serenity of a traditional Buddhist
temple, its planning also comprises the orthogonal volumes in extended
axial sequences and subtle asymmetries found in temple complexes.
Certainly for a project of this scale and importance, any sense of fragility
or impermanence would have been completely unacceptable, yet Kansai-
kan is not so much opposed to the tradition of transience in Japanese
architecture as it is part of the parallel heritage of temple construc-
tion. If the historical source of contemporary ephemeral minimalism is
the sukiya style, the substantiality and scale of Kansai-kan is clearly a
descendant of the miya tradition.
The National Diet Library was established inTokyo by the Japanese
Government in 1948, as a repository for every new domestic publication
and selected foreign ones. At the beginning of the 1980s, the librarians
calculated that the entire storage space of their facility in Tokyo would
be full by the year 2002 due to accelerating book production and the
proliferation of new media formats. With no adjacent land available, the
government decided to build an annex 400 kilometers (250 miles) away,
in the countryside midway between Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara. Kansai-kan
was conceived as a focal point for every library in Japan and throughout
Asia. A design competition was announced in 1995, and Fumio Toki’s win-
ning scheme opened to the public in October 2002, right on schedule.
The site is located within Kansai Science City, a compact research-
and-development zone established in the late 1980s. Kansai-kan is the
98 symbolic and actual focus of Kansai Science City, manifest as a glass

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99

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 box on an artificial plateau. The exposed, transparent volume contains
administration and research spaces, while the plateau is actually the
roof of the public reading room. Its street edge is a gentle waterfall
flowing down a granite wall, and the upper surface comprises an array of
grass-covered skylights. An entrance hall in the form of a smaller glass
box traverses this enormous plinth. These three primary volumes each
relate to a distinctive garden condition: the entrance hall is set within the
green field above the buried reading room; the reading room itself looks
out onto a sunken courtyard of trees and shrubs; the exterior terrace of
the rooftop cafe features a row of trees, visible from outside through the
translucent glass walls. With a storage capacity for six million volumes,
the library stacks themselves are hidden deep underground.
The simplicity of the exterior composition is complemented
by the clarity and calm of the internal spaces, and a central full-
height atrium gives instant orientation from almost anywhere in the
building. This combination of tranquility and monumentality induces an
entirely appropriate religious atmosphere. In the predominantly secular,
knowledge-based society of modern Japan, perhaps the only remaining
sacred space is the library.
The obvious divergence from the spaces of a temple is in the
quantity of natural light that floods the building. Even so, there is an
unexpected sense of density, if not opacity. The glass facades comprise
double-skin curtain walls. Subtle patterns on both surfaces create a
moiré effect, and the large air-handling pipes contained within the walls
are also made of glass. Rather than providing transparency and unifying
inside and outside, the multiple layers of glass make the building appear
100 almost solid. The floors are of natural wood and stone, and most of the

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left:
Kansai-kan

right:
Kansai-kan, entrance hall

internal walls are finished with authentic stucco—evident in the soft-

ness of the acoustics as much as in their surface texture. Compared
with the delicacy that characterizes so much contemporary Japanese
architecture, it is a work of distinctive presence and permanence.
This is not to suggest that there is any lack of refinement or
elegance in Kansai-kan. Hidden notches allow the various planes to meet
without frames or reveals, and the extreme sophistication of the various
connection details makes them visually very simple. Again, an analogy
may be made with temple construction, where apparently straightforward
wooden joints belie the convolutions of their individual components—
barely visible surface lines the only clue to their complexity of assemblage.
Required to act as a contemporary symbol of transparency and freedom
of information, the expression of Kansai-kan is inevitably a simple glass
box; yet as a cumulative time capsule of irreplaceable knowledge, it is
necessarily the sturdiest glass box possible.

2003

101

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Immaculate
Conception
The 21st Century Museum of
Contemporary Art

In the extreme abstraction and perfect clarity of both its spatial orga-
nization and its physical presence, SANAA’s 21st Century Museum of
Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (2004) is the definitive contemporary art
museum: white-cube gallery spaces of various proportions contained in
an iconic enclosure, with secondary functions in the interstices or under-
ground. That prototypical description could apply to many recently built
museums, but at Kanazawa the parti of the building is almost identical
to its actual assembly: the diagrammatic and the tectonic aspects of the
design precisely coincide.
Like much of the work of SANAA, the design partnership Kazuyo
Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa officially established in 1995, the lucid beauty
of the Kanazawa museum is simultaneously astonishing and familiar. It
is as if each of their design schemas has always existed in the collective
architectural unconscious, waiting for someone with the sensitivity to
perceive it and the audacity to materialize it. Such unadorned simplicity
takes tremendous conviction and courage: minimalism always runs the
risk of banality. Yet the Kanazawa museum avoids the kind of fashionable
pseudo-minimalism predicated on just not doing very much. It is rather
an ensemble of precisely chosen gestures, elegantly achieving expansive
effects via the fewest possible elements.
Located within a small public park in central Kanazawa, the
museum sits on a vast concrete disk embedded in the ground and is
sheltered by a polished white disk supported on implausibly thin steel
posts. The facade is a delicate membrane of full-height panes of glass
with silicone-jointed vertical connections, fixed at the top to a projecting
edge that obscures the thickness of the roof structure. Beyond, the gal-
102 leries are visible as opaque white volumes rising up through the center

After the Crash

 of the building. The interior is suffused with varying degrees of natural
light due to the combination of the transparent perimeter wall, glazed
inner courtyards, reflective ceilings, and translucent skylights. Moving
between the galleries is somewhat like walking outdoors in a miniature
city, along orthogonal boulevards lined with pristine white buildings. Yet
the ambience is surreal, with harsh acoustics and intense contrasts in
illumination: your eyes must constantly adjust between brightly lit court-
yards and darker corridors, other visitors often appearing as silhouettes
backlit by the framed views of the park that terminate every axis.
The outer edge of the building is a continuous foyer that incorporates
various public amenities facing onto the park: a restaurant, a small library
and lounge, a shop and information center, a children’s workshop, spaces
to simply relax and observe. Multiple entry points from the park provide
access to all these areas, but despite the apparent lack of hierarchy in
the plan, entry to the actual galleries is strictly controlled. An array of
enormous operable glass walls seals the corridors in various places,
resulting in an adaptable barrier between the freely accessible periphery
and the ticket-only central gallery area. It is this concentric zoning that
enables the simultaneous transparency and permeability of the building.
There is a clear affinity with traditional Japanese architecture: hidden
courtyards, a continuous perimeter zone that mediates between inside
and outside, ambiguous interior spaces that may be reconfigured by
sliding translucent screens, and a sense of increasing intimacy as one
penetrates deeper into the building.
Sejima and Nishizawa’s architecture has always been more static
than dynamic, more concerned with creating a gentle equilibrium than
103 tracing vectors of movement. This is manifest in their ingenious methods

Public Places
previous page:
SANAA, 21st Century Museum
of Contemporary Art, interiors,
Kanazawa, 2004

21st Century Museum of

Contemporary Art, night view

of handling circulation spaces. Corridors tend to be all but eliminated

or emphasized as spatial events in themselves, enlarged until they
effectively vanish due to unusual configurations and the incorporation
of additional functions. At the Stadstheater in Almere (Netherlands,
2006), for example, the circulation spaces are subsumed in the general
texture of room divisions. In the Kanazawa museum, the corridors have
expanded to engulf the entire building. The result is a disproportionate
amount of floor surface with no determined function beyond circulation.
Philip Johnson once described architecture as “the art of how to
waste space,”1 and his typically facetious humor contains, equally typi-
cally, a profound truth. The single shared attribute of all truly great works
of architecture is their inefficiency. It is in the moments of spatial extrava-
gance—extraordinary proportions, convoluted circulation routes, places
without defined function—that the specifically architectural qualities of
a building are most clearly manifest. The task of the architect is to con-
trive such excessiveness so as to make it appear rational, if not inevitable.
The layout of the Kanazawa museum may seem wasteful, but it is also a
planning solution with a clear efficiency: the unprogrammed areas may
accommodate unforeseen events and possible future modifications. Not
merely a primary geometrical shape, the overall circular form is a mini-
mal enclosure that gives the optimum ratio of wall length to floor area.
Ironically yet appropriately, the Kanazawa museum won the
Golden Lion for “most remarkable work” at the 2004 Venice Biennale
Metamorph architecture exhibition, where it seemed out of place within
the general theme of complex organic shapes. The almost childlike direct-
ness of the building is a welcome relief in an era when so much specula-
104 tive architectural design (by students and professionals alike) comprises

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A space of this type has neither texture nor scent;
it is physical but, at the same time, an abstract
plan. We cannot help but feel that our bodies are
like those of androids in a space where neither
body heat, perspiration nor smell exist. —Toyo Ito

computer renderings that seem to depict lumps of radioactive phlegm

floating in zero gravity.
The serenity of Sejima and Nishizawa’s spaces has always relied on
absolute precision and control. These buildings seem intended as refuges
from their surroundings, moments of provisional silence and stasis within
a corrosive context of speed, confusion, and pollution. They indirectly
reflect the environment in which they were developed, and perhaps
also the lifestyle of the architects. In comparison with, for example, the
relaxed and heartfelt love of nature visible in the work of an architect such
as Alvar Aalto, the fragile, pallid beauty of SANAA’s work seems braced
against the pressures of a volatile metropolitan environment: the apparent
calm is actually tremendous tension maintained in perfect equilibrium.
The spaces of the Kanazawa museum reveal a newfound sense of
generosity and relaxation in the architecture of SANAA. The building’s
visual and experiential permeability results in a brilliant integration of
park, architecture, art, and people. Beyond delicate luminosity, there is a
true sense of lightness, and even a kind of luxury within the austerity.

2004

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Toyo Ito, “Diagram Architecture,” El Croquis
77(I) (1996): 20.
1. Opinion of the Week: At Home and Abroad. “Ideas And Men,” New York Times, December
27, 1964.

105

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Balancing Act
MVRDV in Japan

The Dutch architectural practice MVRDV was commissioned in 1998

to design the main performance venue for the then–newly established
Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, an international exhibition of art and
architecture installations dispersed over six municipalities (762 square
kilometers, or 294 square miles) of rural Japan. Located in the small town
Matsudai and named the Snow-Land Agrarian Culture Center, it was
completed in time for the second Triennial, held for seven weeks in mid-
2003. The center includes a cafe, a shop, and exhibition spaces and is
intended to remain the focal point for future Triennials as well as to be
available for local cultural events during the intervening periods.
The Matsudai project was MVRDV’s first international commis-
sion, but they have since become a truly global practice, with less than
half of their current work located in the Netherlands. Their body of work
may epitomize contemporary “Dutchness” in architecture, but the export-
ability of the MVRDV methodology seems to be due to its lack of cultural
specificity. The designs have no overtly Dutch motifs nor do they make
aesthetic concessions to local traditions and histories, yet the underly-
ing strategies are absolutely contextual in intention. Whether or not one
sympathizes with the results, the techniques of MVRDV add up to a com-
pelling paradigm for dealing with almost any contemporary situation: a
hyperlogical interpretation of both the requirements of the client and the
context (understood in the widest sense), with the buildings presented as
no more, and no less, than manifestations of immanent economic, legal,
and demographic patterns.
This aspect of the work has become so dominant in critical
readings of MVRDV that the physical, experiential characteristics of its
106 buildings tend to receive cursory examination, if they are discussed at all.

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MVRDV, Snow-Land Agrarian Culture Center,
Nagano, 2003, sketch

Yet functionalist rationality is not enough to make architecture. There is

always an overlay of personal prejudices and preferences, intuitions and
ideologies—call it style. Even the most rigorous attempt at functional
determinism will encounter innumerable forks in the decision-making
process, where logic alone is insufficient to choose the optimum path.
Choices must be made; in the case of MVRDV, they reveal a preference
for variety (formal, spatial, material) rather than orderly repetition, as
well as a rich sense of humor.
Beyond translating statistical data into built form, there are at
least two additional themes that MVRDV introduces to the mix: density
and legibility. Simply put, the former generates the organization and the
latter the aesthetic. Exacerbating density has the dual effect of maxi-
mizing programmatic overlap (and hence experiential variety) within the
building and of minimizing the impact of the building itself on the wider
surroundings. The result is a stacking or superimposition of disparate
elements, producing compact, vertical buildings even in relatively open
surroundings.
The desire for legibility means that the abrupt juxtapositions are
never concealed or smoothed over, leaving the organizational strate-
gies of the building on full display. Even if the underlying rationale for
each project may not be immediately obvious, the resulting diagrams
are. The compositional systems of projects as diverse as the Villa VPRO
(Hilversum, 1997), WOZOCO (Amsterdam, 1997), the Dutch Pavilion for
Expo 2000 in Hanover, and the Silodam housing block (Amsterdam, 2002)
are clear to any observer (although the interiors may remain enigmatic).
It is this lucidity that makes the work so persuasive and that allows
107 often-absurd solutions to be presented with such conviction.

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 A secondary effect of the interest in legibility is that materials and
construction techniques often become reduced to visual coding, chosen
to achieve a desired spatial organization or clarify functional divisions
rather than to generate a language of details and surface finishes. It is
an architecture best understood in terms that are diagrammatic rather
than tectonic, which has led to charges of “inauthenticity” in its physi-
cal manifestation—a criticism that only applies if a work of architecture
must rely on its specific materiality, rather than an essential spatial dia-
gram that is only ever contingently materialized.
It is perhaps in a project like the one at Matsudai—a vaguely
defined program for a sparsely populated rural region—that MVRDV’s
specifically architectural, rather than programmatic or social, ambitions
are most explicit. Out here in the Japanese countryside, “datascapes”
(to use MVRDV’s preferred term) may not be entirely absent, but their
influence and relevance is minimal. In emphasizing the building itself, the
stylistic themes of compactness and clarity have become central to the
development of the project.
It is a work of laconic monumentality: a white box floating above
the ground, located between a river and a railway line, surrounded by ter-
raced rice paddies and forested mountains.The floating box automatically
creates two complementary exterior spaces: a sheltered plaza below and
an open roof-deck above. The box is supported by an irregular array of
rectangular tubes that begin horizontally then rise up at shallow angles
to awkwardly impact and penetrate the building like overscaled flying
buttresses. They are access corridors, connecting almost directly to key
points around the site, such as the railway station, the parking lots, the
108 river, and the plaza below the box. The composition is a contrast between

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On the one hand, the purely purpose-oriented
forms have been revealed as insufficient, monoto-
nous, deficient and narrow-mindedly practical....
On the other, the attempt to bring into the work
the external element of imagination as a correc-
tive, to help the matter out with this element which
stems from outside of it, is equally pointless.
—Theodor Adorno

two distinct approaches to making architectural form: the box as an

autonomous, platonic volume imposed on a place and program versus
the tubes as a contingent collection of elements subtly deformed by the
nuances of site and function.
Passing directly through the building, the tubes are bridgelike
elements that act as enormous bowstring trusses due to underground
tension cables linking their end points. Their apparently haphazard
arrangement is deceptive: two of them are perfectly aligned with the
main structural grid, oriented on a 45-degree diagonal to the box. It is the
third tube that creates the impression of randomness, placed at an angle
that visually disrupts all the other more or less regular relationships.
The region is subject to winter snowfalls up to 4 meters (13 feet)
deep, which traditional buildings shed using steep-pitched, often concave,
gabled roofs. Given the exceptional depth of the plan, MVRDV’s solution
was simply to make a flat roof strong enough to support the maximum
snow load with the rooms hanging below it—the absence of structural
members underneath incidentally allows continuous horizontal glazing
along the facades (one of several resonances with Le Corbusier’s Villa
Savoye of 1929). The depth and expense of the roof structure was reduced
by compensatory truss elements above: a jagged landscape of bolted
steel beams erupts through the roof deck along the axes of the tubes.
Entering the building initiates a series of perceptual shifts. The
tube interiors are black, dimly lit by single rows of ceiling downlights,
echoing the traditional “snow corridors” that allow movement through the
town during winter. Ascending the steps feels somehow like burrowing
underground; entering the box is similar to arriving in the streets of a
109 snow-shrouded village at night, with muffled acoustics and soft light

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Snow-Land Agrarian Culture Center, exploded
isometric

spilling out from tiny buildings on either side—each room in the box is
painted a single intense color, the brightness of hue varying in inverse
proportion to the floor area. The tube spaces that link them seem to
become exterior spaces by contrast—as one moves through the building,
the perceived relationships of inside and outside flip back and forth like
a textbook optical illusion.
This interior environment could be seen as the product of dynamic
tubes superimposed on a static box, or alternatively as a square frame
placed around overlapping movement vectors. In plan, the tubes slice
across the box without resistance, leaving a set of irregular trapezoids in
their wake. There is no attempt to rationalize the shapes or negotiate the
relationships of the resulting rooms. Where a more conventional method of
architectural composition would adjust the geometries by using poché (i.e.,
taking up the spatial slack with dead space, variations in wall thicknesses,
kinked corridors, or irregularly shaped secondary spaces), here they are
simply superimposed, allowed to intrude upon one another unimpeded.
In this way, it is the minor areas—the corridors and a couple of
small circular interventions—that are prioritized while the larger interior
spaces are left as interstitial. The exploitation of residual spaces and lack
of poché appears throughout MVRDV’s oeuvre, particularly evident in the
unbuilt Ypenburg Patio Houses (the Hague, 1999), where random shapes
(circles, crosses, blobs) are irregularly scattered throughout a basically
linear arrangement, and can be traced back to the dividing wall of the
Double House (Utrecht, 1997) or the interlocking units of the Berlin Voids
project (1991).
Beyond functionalism or minimalism, the Matsudai project is an
110 exercise in efficiency—at least conceptually, if not actually. The number

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111

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 of major architectonic elements has been reduced by giving them mul-
tiple functions: main building volume as sheltering canopy and floating
platform, structural supports as circulation paths and spatial dividers.
The result is enhanced legibility for the inside as well as the outside. It
is no labyrinth, however—the paths are absolutely clear. The plan is like
a variation on the famous nine-square diagram but focused on the grid
lines rather than the areas they define. Thickened, extended, and inhab-
ited, these lines act as links with the wider context. Their encounter with
the box effectively inverts any sense of enclosure, making the inside
somehow exterior, and thereby defining the surroundings as interior—not
only the plaza and roof deck but the entire landscape.
Seen in architectural terms, human civilization itself develops as
a process of progressive interiorization of the world. The boundaries of
the primitive hut expand into the walled city then blend into the global
metropolis—a cumulative annexing of the environment until even zones
of agriculture or virgin nature are caught within a rarefied infrastructural
web. It is in such a conceptual framework that projects like this one, and
indeed MVRDV’s wider body of work and research, can emerge.
The building would be equally comfortable—or equally incongru-
ous—almost anywhere, yet the invitation for MVRDV to build in Japan
remains significant. No nation has absorbed and imitated contemporary
Dutch architecture with greater enthusiasm. Figures such as Kazuyo
Sejima and Jun Aoki speak openly of the influence of Rem Koolhaas
on their work, while the local professional journals and architecture-
school reviews are filled with projects that parallel developments in the
Netherlands, in both design and graphic style. Yet, as always with the
112 Japanese appropriation of foreign ideas, the appearance of Dutchness

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Snow-Land Agrarian Culture Center,
computer rendering

is maintained while the substance is profoundly altered. At worst, it

becomes a mannerism, a set of easily recognizable and replicable motifs:
cartoons, collages, extreme schematic clarity, and willfully awkward
proportions. At best, the underlying diagrams are isolated from their
original purposes, enhanced and valorized for their own intrinsic beauty.
It is like a forced liberation from functionalism without quite being
reduced to caprice. Something similar may have occurred for MVRDV at
Matsudai; a functionalist design strategy avoids beauty as a generator
(while tacitly hoping for it as a result), but with most of MVRDV’s usual
rationales and methods unavailable, the artist is forced to take prece-
dence over the logician.
Despite the visual similarities, the contemporary Japanese
architect and the contemporary Dutch architect achieve their results
from opposite directions: while the former begins with a poetic concept
and refines it into plausibility, the latter begins with a logical analysis
and extrapolates it into poetry. A gross oversimplification, no doubt,
but at Matsudai these opposing impulses seem to have found a point of
equilibrium.

2003

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Theodor Adorno, “Functionalism Today,” in
Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge,
1997), 11–12.

113

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Kisho Kurokawa, Nakagin Capsule Tower,

5
Tokyo, 1972

114

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Revitalizing
Metabolism

Metabolism, the 1960s Japanese architectural movement that Rem

Koolhaas mischievously labeled “the only non-white avant-garde in
3000 years,”1 was a response to the phenomenal, apparently unlimited
economic growth Japan underwent in the post–World War II decades.
The metabolists advocated architectural forms that could fluctuate
and expand in response to their environments. Every building compo-
nent was to be replaced at longer or shorter intervals—that is to say,
at differing metabolic rates. More of a sensibility than a coherent
group, its four central architects were Kisho (then known as Noriaki)
Kurokawa, Kiyonori Kikutake, Masato Otaka, and Fumihiko Maki.
Arata Isozaki made some of the most important contributions but was
never officially considered a member. Kenzo Tange, their inspirational
teacher and sometime employer, produced the two pioneering proj-
ects that bracket metabolism’s existence: the visionary Tokyo Plan
1960 and the vast space-frame roof over the grounds of the 1970 Osaka
Expo. Indeed, metabolism effectively existed for one decade: officially
launched at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo—coinciding
with the publication of their manifesto Metabolism 1960: The Proposals
for New Urbanism—and unofficially moribund by the time of the 1970
Expo, which included a number of metabolist design contributions.
Despite formal debts to the megastructure architects of the
West and ideological resonances with Archigram and their ilk, metab-
olism was presented to the world as specifically Japanese, the out-
come of a Buddhism-inspired philosophy of transience, in tune with
the natural world. Critic and founding metabolist member Noboru
Kawazoe has implicitly connected the metabolist attitude with the
115 periodic reconstruction of Ise Shrine, a ritual that has been carried
 out intermittently since the seventh century and currently takes place
every twenty years. As historian Jonathan Reynolds notes:

When Kawazoe described architecture maintaining its basic structure

but regularly replacing materials (in a manner similar to the metabolic
processes of a living creature) and adding or subtracting parts as needed,
this was a clear expression of the core principles of metabolist theory.
And by equating Japanese architectural practices with natural processes,
Kawazoe could trump the seemingly mechanical or unnatural methods
that predominated in the West.2

Though only a few metabolist projects were ever actually built

in Japan—Kisho Kurokawa’s 1972 Nakagin CapsuleTower is scheduled
for demolition as of this writing, and his 1976 Sony Tower in Osaka has
already disappeared—their ideas had a significant influence in other
East Asian countries. As the modernization of Japanese cities was
approaching a degree of stability, nations such as Korea, Malaysia,
and Singapore were beginning the same kinds of delirious expansion
that had initially provoked the metabolists into developing their theo-
ries. These essays look at the extent to which metabolist ideas have
been revitalized and reinterpreted for the quieter economy and the
recent ideological emphasis on sustainability, and at the ways they
have had an influence outside Japan.

1. Rem Koolhaas, “Singapore Songlines: Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa,” in S,M,L,XL, ed.
Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1995), 1044.
2. Jonathan M. Reynolds, “Ise Shrine and a Modernist Construction of Japanese
Tradition,” Art Bulletin LXXXIII (2001): 331.

116

After the Crash

Organ
Metabolism without
Megastructure

Located in Uji, a historical tea-growing area on the outskirts of Kyoto,

Organ (1995) was designed by architect Katsu Umebayashi as his own
office building, shared with two other companies. While typical office
design comprises homogeneous, neutral spaces—the ubiquitous Miesian
“universal space” and its putative functional flexibility—Organ is an
experiment in spatial variety.
The building was conceived as a (potentially infinite) tube—the
extrusion of a rectangular section—clad in aluminum and lined in ply-
wood. Early study models show this tube extending, bifurcating, and
intertwining over the site, abruptly amputated where it meets the bound-
aries. The building floats above an outdoor parking area, balanced on
pilotis. Only the front door touches the ground, and from this minimum
footprint, the building stretches upward, turns back on itself in mid-
air, bulges and inflects to accommodate internal needs and contextual
constraints. Glass is inserted wherever the outer shell is cut or the tube
truncated, held by timber frames mitered in section to give the illusion of
minimum thickness to the building envelope.
The absence of dividing walls or partitions means there is a rel-
atively exact correlation between the outer form and the inner space.
The envelope is a smooth, almost seamless skin, which wraps an inte-
rior that flows unobstructed, unavoidably mingling the internal activities.
The three different tenants are spread along the length of the tube, with
occasional overlaps and knots of congestion.
The expressionist architecture of the first half of this century is
an important point of reference for Umebayashi. Drawing on German
architect Hugo Häring’s concepts of Organwerk (an abstract program-
117 matic diagram) and Bauwerk (the built manifestation of this diagram),

Revitalizing Metabolism
FOBA, Organ, Uji, 1995, conceptual sketch

opposite:
Organ 1 and 2, model

118

After the Crash

 Umebayashi has “shaped” the space as a direct result of functional
requirements. By avoiding the arbitrary geometric models of classicism
or modernism, design becomes an organic process that delays consid-
eration of the final form. Unlike many other so-called expressionists,
Häring’s intention was to translate the Organwerk as directly as pos-
sible into the physical building. Umebayashi has a similarly unrhetorical
attitude—his is a stripped-down, contemporary expressionism.
Organ suggests an alternative to the neutrality and order of mod-
ernist space, deliberately blurring service and served, circulation and
use. As a composition that arises almost accidentally out of the functional
specificity of each architectonic element, it has a debt to the theories of
Kazuo Shinohara—indeed, the floor plans of Organ pay subtle homage to
Shinohara’s 1984 House in Yokohama. At the same time, the project revis-
its the metabolist notion of buildings intended to grow and evolve. Rather
than a fixed infrastructural frame with plug-in modules, however, this is
a single continuous space that may be extended as and when necessary.
Organ is a synthesis and revision of its historical precedents: an attempt
to create metabolism without megastructure, expressionism without
ornament.
This apparent freedom of form is problematic: the building can be
a challenge to inhabit. Complex shapes may well denote a closer fit to a
given program, with spaces precisely tailored to their functions, but the
tighter the fit, the more inflexible and incapable of adaptation the building
inevitably becomes. Architecture that is the most uninhibited in its forms
may also be the most rigid in its patterns of use. As Häring’s friend and
colleague Ludwig Mies van der Rohe remonstrated:
119

Revitalizing Metabolism
Organ 1 and 2

Make your spaces big enough, man, that you can walk around in them freely,
and not just in one predetermined direction! Or are you all that sure of how
they will be used? We don’t know at all whether people will do with them what
we expect them to. Functions are not so clear or so constant; they change
faster than the building.1

Organ does not have the undifferentiated adaptability of a Miesian box,

but neither does it impose a single functional configuration. The building
comprises a palette of differentiated spaces without prescribed purposes,
inviting an ongoing rearrangement and recalibration of the activities
being contained.
An architect who is also the client is in a uniquely permissive
situation. Organ is fascinating enough as a one-off experiment, but
Umebayashi’s stated intention was to create a prototype, and so far he
has been successful: an extension to the tube (Organ 2) has been com-
missioned and is under construction immediately adjacent. The concept
is compromised in that the two buildings will not be physically connected,
but the experiments in free-massing and spatial continuity will be main-
tained and expanded upon. As a composition, it remains deliberately
incomplete, paused at an arbitrary point in its evolution.

1996

120

After the Crash

 Postscript
This was written just as FOBA was being established. Organ became the building in which
I worked for the following decade. FOBA soon took over the entire space, and the Organ 2
building was indeed completed and occupied in 1997. They were conceived as a single entity
comprising a functionally determined interior choreography with complementary exterior
spaces: the area between the pilotis, for example, is used for car parking and parties as
well as a meeting point for people in the neighborhood. However, during the construction
of Organ 2, an anonymous complaint to the local authorities correctly pointed out that the
building was taller than permitted by the building code (in FOBA’s defense, this is common
practice in Japan, and the only negative effect would have been slightly more shadow on
a supermarket parking lot). As a result, the steel frame was partially demounted and rear-
ranged into a lower, denser composition before being wrapped with the aluminum skin.
Although a minor crisis for FOBA, it demonstrated the validity of the underlying architec-
tural concepts. Even with a different form, the building design has the inherent flexibility
and indeterminacy to survive essentially unchanged.

1. Frank Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985), 109. The quote is taken from an interview with Mies by Horst Eifler and Ulrich
Conrads, recorded in October 1964 and released on vinyl by Bauwelt magazine as Mies in
Berlin (Berlin: Bauwelt Archiv I, 1966).

121

Revitalizing Metabolism
Kisho Kurokawa
in Malaysia

Kisho Kurokawa (1934–2007) is nothing if not prescient. During the 1960s

he was already referring to architecture and the city as a “flow of informa-
tion”; he contends that he invented the term jouhouka shakai (information
society) in 1961, long before it became common parlance. Throughout his
career he has single-mindedly pursued the biological metaphors of flux,
metamorphosis, and growth that are so prevalent in current architectural
discourse. As an architect/philosopher who intends his buildings to be
manifestations of his thoughts, Kurokawa is in a difficult position: the
works invariably and inevitably fail to deliver the promise of the words.
Yet he is well aware that his theories set unreachable goals, and as guid-
ing principles they deserve the attention of every architect.
Kurokawa’s philosophy of symbiosis—an extended argument for
coexistence without compromising diversity, which he has published in
many places and permutations—is superbly robust. It is literally beyond
criticism. How to contradict a philosophy whose central tenet says there
are ultimately no contradictions? These ideas have a resilience and flex-
ibility that neutralizes any opposition—like judo, it absorbs and reflects
attacks; like an oyster, it transforms irritants into pearls. Symbiosis is
relentlessly positive in its outlook, condemning the dualistic rationality
that preceded it while promising a vital, creative future.
As a founding member of the metabolist movement, Kurokawa
advocated a flexible, evolving architecture, directly responsive to environ-
mental pressure. Regeneration (staged replacement of parts) was to be
compulsory, and growth (directed expansion beyond the initial form) was
to always be an option. His proposals were innovative and provocative,
particularly in his experiments with modular buildings: Nakagin Capsule
122 Tower (1972) is the emblematic metabolist structure. Located in Tokyo’s

After the Crash

 Ginza district, it comprises a pair of concrete infrastructural shafts to
which 140 capsules have been affixed at various angles, suggesting
plantlike growth. Intended as apartments, a cluster of miniature pieds-à-
terre, it prefigured Kurokawa’s design for the original capsule hotel (the
Capsule Inn Osaka, 1979). This is a building type now found throughout
every major city in Japan: honeycombs of coffinlike accommodation for
salarymen who miss the last train.
At the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Kurokawa used modified ship-
ping containers bolted into place, with the intention that they would be
replaced at twenty-five-year intervals. The various technologies involved
quickly became obsolete, and the building has never been altered, or even
maintained—it has fallen into a sad state of disrepair, largely used as pri-
vate storage, with piles of junk visible through the porthole windows. In
1996, Docomomo (the International Working Party for the Documentation
and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighborhoods of the Modern
Movement, a nonprofit organization established in 1988) short-listed it for
preservation as a World Heritage historical monument—surely the ulti-
mate irony for this icon of mutable, regenerating architecture.1
Despite the impact and ongoing influence of those early projects,
the image of growth was finally just that—an image. The metabolists dis-
appeared all too quickly, following independent lines of thought and leav-
ing many of their most promising ideas undeveloped. Kurokawa’s current
work in Malaysia revisits, and to some extent realizes, his earliest ideas.
The new Kuala Lumpur International Airport is a combination of flexible
modular systems, with growth as a central requirement of the program.
The airport opened in 1998, but the project is intended to have doubled
123 in size by 2050.

Revitalizing Metabolism
Kisho Kurokawa, Kuala Lumpur International
Airport, Malaysia, 1998, plan

124

After the Crash

An architecture based on the philosophy of sym-
biosis must first be rooted in one’s own history and
culture, then endeavor to incorporate themes from
other cultures. —Kisho Kurokawa

The main terminal building is roofed with a repeated module of

hyperbolic paraboloid shells, supported on conical columns contain-
ing service ducts and rainwater pipes: “It has the roof structure of a
construction of cellular units. . . to be adaptable to future changes.”2
Simultaneously referring to traditional Islamic forms and the dynamics
of flight, the roof is like a mosaic of wings.
The containment of nature within the airport buildings is the
most overtly “symbiotic” gesture: all passengers pass by enormous
inner courtyards containing chunks of native rainforest, like enlarged
versions of the Japanese patio garden. The approach recalls Kurokawa’s
1991 Melbourne Central project, where an existing nineteenth-century
building is preserved within a glass cone: “This cone forms an atrium
at the center of the shopping complex, and the relationship between
the past and the present gives the building a feeling of symbiotic
co-existence.”3 Such gestures may seem overly literal, if not crude, but
that is their strength. Kurokawa is quick to point out that symbiosis is
not harmony but coexistence in sometimes-abrupt juxtapositions. As an
arrival experience, the airport gardens are extraordinary: a forest within
an airport within a forest.
In substituting mechanistic metaphors with biological metaphors
(his preferred phrase is “from the age of machine principle to the age of
life principle”), Kurokawa has always been a technological innovator. His
rejection of the machine is no Luddite nostalgia for a simpler, more “natu-
ral” past but a search for a clean, invisible technology. At its simplest,
this includes passive energy features such as sloping glass to reduce
solar heat gain. At the other end of the scale, the airport complex itself is
125 computerized to the point of being a vast, intelligent organism.

Revitalizing Metabolism
126

After the Crash

Kuala Lumpur International Airport, interior
courtyard

The new airport is connected to Kuala Lumpur by a superhighway

and an express-train line. All the intervening territory has been wired
with state-of-the-art fiber-optic cables for developments that include the
new administrative capital (Putrajaya) and a high-technology research
city (Cyberjaya). Forming a 15-by-50 kilometer (9-by-31 mile) strip, this
so-called Multimedia Super Corridor has the potential to become a
“linear city” larger than all of Singapore. The Corridor is kind of an eco-
nomic demilitarized zone, luring large-scale international investment
with promises of low overheads, tax incentives, and freedom from local
bureaucracy. Kurokawa convinced the Malaysian authorities that it is also
a perfect location for the implementation of his Eco-Media City concept:
small, technologically sophisticated towns, isolated in nature yet directly
connected to one another by transport and telecommunications.
Each city is to be privately funded and functionally specific: a
university town, an industrial hub, a biotechnology research center.
Kurokawa has planned five different cities, the size of each limited by a
public green belt. Beyond this is agricultural land and untouched rainfor-
est. The cities are to run on solar and wind power, use electric cars, and
intensively recycle materials and biological waste. A newly developed
paving material with 95 percent permeability will allow rainwater to be
freely recycled through the local ecosystem.
The modern precedent for the city secluded within nature is found
in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902), which has long
been influential in Japanese urban design; published in Japan in 1907
as Den’en Toshi, it inspired a series of suburban developments outside
downtown Tokyo. Yet Kurokawa emphatically denies the connection. This
127 is not about Arcadian isolation but intensive interaction: city, not suburbia.

Revitalizing Metabolism
Kuala Lumpur International Airport,
exterior detail

Nature is not external but simply another urban component. Kurokawa

sees the resulting dispersed network as a single urban field, taking as
his model Tokyo, the archetypal network city. Rather than a unified, hier-
archical form, it is an agglomeration of smaller units, in a structure that
Kurokawa describes as “holonic,” borrowing a term invented by writer
Arthur Koestler to describe nested hierarchies of systems in which each
whole is simultaneously a part of some larger system.4 The Eco-Media
City expands the scale of Tokyo, translating it into a set of dispersed
urban nodes. The critical difference is that the wide spaces between
them preclude the kind of shifting, amorphous relationships that exist
between Tokyo’s various enclaves.

A symbiosis between architecture and nature is an attractive concept but

ultimately unrealistic—architecture inevitably destroys nature to some
degree. Symbiotic and metabolist principles are far more applicable at
an urban scale as strategic principles than as formal compositions. The
Malaysian projects are, in a sense, a return to Kurokawa’s theoretical
origins, potentially the fullest realizations of his concepts to date, with
scales and programs adequate to his ambitions. Their importance is in
the precedents they set for sustainable architectural and urban models
in regions about to surrender their irreplaceable natural beauty to the
implacable forces of modernization.

1997

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After the Crash

 The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Kisho Kurokawa, Each One a Hero: The
Philosophy of Symbiosis (Tokyo/New York/London: Kodansha International, 1997), 311.
1. In 2005, Docomomo lost the battle at UNESCO, but negotiations continued between
Kurokawa and the current owners of the building (a U.S. hedge fund that bought out the
Nakagin company) until his death in October 2007.
2. Kisho Kurokawa, Kuala Lumpur International Airport project statement, 1998.
3. Kisho Kurokawa, Melbourne Central project statement, 1991.
4. Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (London: Hutchinson, 1967), 48.

129

Revitalizing Metabolism
Mirage City
Another Utopia

In the mid-1990s, more than two decades after the disappearance of

metabolism as a significant presence in global architectural discourse,
Arata Isozaki was given the opportunity to confront and critique his earlier
involvement with the movement. Commissioned to produce an urban-scale
project in China, Isozaki reinterpreted and revised metabolist principles to
create what he calls “Mirage City,” an entirely new place for an entirely
empty site; that is, to produce an ideal city, thereby contributing to the
historical legacy of utopian discourse in architectural and urban design.
Naturally, it is difficult to take comprehensive utopian ambitions
seriously these days. Their proponents are generally regarded as engag-
ing in some kind of naive fantasy, or worse, latent totalitarianism. Yet the
desire to envisage utopia—the perfect society, the ideal city, the ultimate
ideology—has a persistence that evinces its importance. For the utopian
architect, there is an implicit correlation between spatial and social
structure. Create a harmonious, ordered environment, and a harmoni-
ous, ordered society will inevitably follow. The ideal cities of architectural
history are blueprints for a perfect relationship between man, society,
and nature. From the snowflake-shaped towns of the Renaissance to the
potentially infinite Cartesian grid of Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine
proposal of 1922, there is a consistent faith in the deterministic rela-
tionship between space and sociology. It is only in recent decades that
such ambitions have become, literally, unthinkable. In a pluralistic world,
visions of unification are automatically suspect; the enthusiasm, not to
say hubris, of the regimented urban fantasies of the modern movement
is as embarrassing as it was once inspiring.
Since Plato’s Republic, utopianists throughout history have postu-
130 lated a fascinating, and occasionally frightening, variety of ideal societies,

After the Crash

 each symptomatic of changing worldviews. Pre–seventeenth century
utopias were not prescriptions for social change but fine-tuned versions
of the existing status quo. The classical architectural utopia was sym-
metrical, ordered, static, without past or future—simply an ideal society
operating in equilibrium. With society frozen in a perfect state, it was the
individual who was required to adapt. By the nineteenth century, the situ-
ation was reversed—utopias became radical rearrangements of society,
only indirectly concerned with the individual. Dealing with speculative
futures rather than an idealized present, architectural utopias became
dynamic, universal, and, most importantly, realizable.1
It was during the Enlightenment, the “crisis of modernity,” that
this shift occurred. For Enlightenment thinkers, the ideal society was one
that had somehow avoided contamination by Western civilization. Geo-
graphical isolation was the usual strategy: Sir Thomas More, originator
of the term “utopia” in his 1516 novel of the same name, placed his on a
remote island. He initiated a literary genre in which—sheltered from the
modern world, usually among the “noble savages” of the South Pacific
or the Americas—modern man could shed the accretions of culture and
return to his “natural” state, that “essential humanity” so valorized by
the classical mentality.
The possibility of such isolation evaporated almost as quickly as the
idea was formulated. Geographical knowledge was effectively complete
by the eighteenth century: the world map had no more blind spots, no more
unknown lands, no more frontiers. Globalization could begin in earnest.
The concept of utopia was transformed from local to universal, and uto-
pian discourse became a commentary on Western expansion, with its con-
131 comitant processes of cultural assimilation and commercial exploitation.

Revitalizing Metabolism
132

After the Crash

Arata Isozaki, Incubation Process installation detail,
from Cities and Lifestyles of the Future exhibition,
Seibu Deparment Store, Tokyo, 1964

Without frontiers, and without the possibility of limitless territo-

rial expansion, the world of independent cultures—each defined only
in relation to some external, unknown “other”—begins to disappear. As
Jean Baudrillard puts it, with characteristic hyperbole, “When there is
no more territory virgin and therefore available for the imaginary, when
the map covers the whole territory, then something like a principle of
reality disappears.”2 The classical utopia becomes inconceivable. There
is no longer a localized culture to be perfected, only the future, universal
utopia to be created.
If a particular society gains identity through contrast and compari-
son with others, it would seem that a globalized world lacks the possibility
of “otherness.” However, the process of globalization triggers its opposite:
as the world homogenizes, it simultaneously differentiates and regional-
izes. The ease of international travel and the pervasiveness of telematic
networks permit integration without loss of uniqueness. Dispersal is coun-
tered by an increased consolidation of resources, people, and economic
energy in the world’s main urban centers. Globalization becomes an
ongoing dialectic between cultural conservation and cultural assimilation.
Despite the hype about cyberspace, it really does matter where you are.
And so the desire for a self-imposed quarantine from the nega-
tive effects of modernity—though combined with an unwillingness to
relinquish any of its benefits—might reanimate the classical utopia in
a contemporary form. Neither remote, reactionary Arcadia nor global,
gleaming Technopolis, this utopia would be isolated yet integrated, in a
kind of conditional surrender to globalization.
At the western tip of the Zhu Jiang Kou (Pearl River Delta), in
133 the shallow waters off Hengqin Island in the South China Sea—located

Revitalizing Metabolism
Arata Isozaki, Mirage City sketches

within China’s Zhuhai Economic Development Zone and at East Asia’s

geographic and economic center of gravity—Arata Isozaki proposed to
build an artificial island, one that is unashamedly and explicitly utopian
in ambition. Mirage City is to be connected with Hengqin Island by two
bridges, the same layout shown in the frontispiece to the second edition
of More’s Utopia (1518), and even the shape recalls More’s description of
the island in his book:

The island of the Utopians is two hundred miles across in the middle part,
where it is widest, and nowhere much narrower than this except towards the
two ends, where it gradually tapers. These ends, curved round as if complet-
ing a circle five hundred miles in circumference, make the island crescent-
shaped, like a new moon. Between the horns of the crescent, which are about
eleven miles apart, the sea enters and spreads into a broad bay.3

The project was initiated in 1993 by the Zhuhai municipal govern-

ment, which approached Isozaki with a proposal to develop the southern
part of Hengqin Island as a center for international exchange, encompass-
ing business, convention, cultural, scholastic, resort, and residential facil-
ities. Isozaki’s response was an offshore city, which, he says, can be seen
as a “utopia, because a city on the sea evokes a world totally detached
from contemporary political institutions and social conventions.”4
Named Haishi Jimua, or Mirage City (in Chinese, haishi literally
means “sea city” but implies “mirage”), it was conceived in collaboration
with philosopher Akira Asada and developed by the Center for Science
and Engineering at Waseda University. Isozaki took the commission as
134 a launching pad for the exploration of a number of themes that have

After the Crash

 occupied him since the beginning of his career: growth, chance, collabo-
ration, the dubious viability of any kind of deterministic urban planning,
and the notion of authorship itself.
Mirage City is intended as a metropolis without a master plan in any
conventional sense, avoiding the imposition of a singular, rigid vision. The
desired indeterminacy is to be achieved by a process of layering in which
each successive intervention reinforces, contradicts, or subverts the pre-
ceding ones: urban form as a kind of interference pattern. Having estab-
lished a rudimentary functional zoning, Isozaki applied various techniques
to create specificity and variety. Ranging from the traditional Chinese geo-
mantic techniques of feng shui to experimental environmental technolo-
gies, some of these overlays are based on economic or contextual issues,
others are more or less arbitrary. In one version, feeding a diagram of church
locations in Venice through a computer-based genetic algorithm created a
pattern of building density. In another, giving randomly scattered particles
mutually attractive properties proportional to their size transformed them
into a web of vectors usable as a layout of streets and plazas.
Isozaki exhibited a preliminary version of the project at the 1996
Venice Biennale and then produced an exhibition of the project at
Tokyo’s NTT InterCommunication Center gallery (April 19 to July 13,
1997) intended to test the limits of indeterminacy and randomness as
a method of design. Visitors were invited to physically modify the exhib-
its, while twelve guest architects and artists also added their own layer
to the island, working directly in the gallery on duplicates of the main
model. Of these, perhaps the most radical contribution was from Diller
+ Scofidio (working together with dbox and Lyn Rice), who infested the
135 plan with drugs, gambling, piracy, and prostitution—every undesirable (or

Revitalizing Metabolism
 dystopian) activity conceivable. Built on the reverse side of the model, it
is metaphorically the grimy underbelly of paradise (with an inescapable
similarity to real conditions in nearby Macau). Forty-eight international
architects were directly invited by Isozaki to independently place their
own projects in Mirage City as part of the internet component of the exhi-
bition; the sites were allocated by superimposing a portion of Piranesi’s
famous Campo Marzio of Ancient Rome (1762) on the island. The architects
either created new conceptual works or, more often, simply provided cur-
rent projects from their offices. Without any realistic relationship to the
Zhuhai municipal government’s requirements, this process was partly an
attempt to foster dialogue and collaboration as architects on adjacent
sites negotiated their respective boundaries, smoothing the initial cadavre
exquis.5 The Mirage City plan was also freely available on the internet,
and design ideas sent via email were incorporated in the exhibition. As
Isozaki strayed ever further from the original commission, he simultane-
ously called into question its underlying premises.
For Akira Asada, and perhaps for Isozaki himself, the conceptual
base of the project is an update of 1960s metabolism. Indeed, Mirage City
has superficial similarities to Kenzo Tange’s seminal metabolist urban
plan for Tokyo Bay (1960)—an intense, evolving programmatic mix located
on reclaimed land connected to the mainland by bridge infrastructure.
Conceived within, and predicated on, the accelerating modernization,
urbanization, and economic growth of Japan’s spectacular recovery from
wartime devastation, the weakness of the original metabolist projects lay
in their reliance on megastructural principles—that is, the requirement
for an enormous (size, cost, risk) fixed framework into which the vari-
136 ous flexible components were to be plugged. The initial investment would

After the Crash

 never be returned, as technological advance would invariably outstrip
the benefits of modifying the existing architecture. At a diagrammatic
level, metabolist designs were limited to essentially treelike structures.
Attempts at a truly biological complexity were frustrated by the near
impossibility of conscious design activity ever replicating natural pro-
cesses of growth and evolution:

While metabolism intended to radicalize function, its structural model was

the organic whole, based on a hierarchy—stem (or spinal cord), branch, leaf,
organ, cell. No matter how complex metabolist projects seem, this hierarchical
schema of the organic whole can be easily detected behind that complexity.6

It is with Mirage City that the possibility of a contemporary metab-

olism is adumbrated. Asada borrows terminology from the French philos-
ophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to distinguish a new “molecular”
metabolism from the earlier “molar” metabolism—the former implying a
nonhierarchical, rhizomatic interlinkage, and the latter implying a tree-
like, branching structure. In fact, Isozaki’s suspicion of the underlying
rigidity of metabolism, and indeed of any design method with a single
author, was present early on. Isozaki’s contribution to the 1962 metabolist
exhibition Mirai no Toshi to Seikatsu (Cities and Lifestyles of the Future),
held at the Seibu department store in Tokyo, was a forceful critique that
prefigures the 1997 Mirage City exhibition. Entitled Incubation Process,
it comprised a supply of hammers, nails, and colored wire next to a huge
photo of Tokyo, with which visitors were invited to intervene as they saw
fit. By the end of the exhibition period, the entire space was a massive
137 tangle of wires, over which Isozaki symbolically poured plaster:

Revitalizing Metabolism
Arata Isozaki, Mirage City exhibition at the NTT
InterCommunication Center gallery, Tokyo, April 19
to July 13, 1997

A new incubation process begins with the engulfment and destruction of

a city of virtue and ease by viscous, formless matter welling up from the
earth....The task we are fated to undertake is to give dynamic order to
formless matter. 7

Comparing the two exhibitions held thirty-five years apart, he writes:

The city was once assembled by hand. Now it is visualized using electronic
media. However the process is the same: a city that is not the product of
intellectual decisions by some single controlling body inevitably becomes a
complex system and form.8

Questions of authorship and indeterminacy aside, the creation of

new territory in the sea is a common enough phenomenon where land is
scarce, yet it is invariably no more than an extension of the existing. If
Isozaki is successful, Mirage City might be an “other” place—perhaps no
utopia, but surely a “heterotopia” (to borrow Michel Foucault’s term). The
virtual becomes real—new territory on the old map—available (via the
internet) for our collective imagination.
In a sense all planning is utopian in intent—to design without
believing you are improving the world in some small way would be
unbearably cynical. Utopia, in its critical sense, is an escape from
borders, transcending the limitations of a world of nation states. Mirage
City presupposes a population of global nomads, perpetual change:
the constant flow of people as energy source, and community itself as
138 mirage. Mirage City is not about the design, it is about the process, about

After the Crash

 communication, collaboration, and interaction between architects and
thinkers worldwide. The shape of the island is secondary. The utopian vision
is one of supranational cooperation. Isozaki has no doubt been carefully
observing the progress of the network he has created, the paths he has
opened up.

1998

Postscript
Although serious efforts were made to solicit developers and investors, the Mirage City proj-
ect quietly faded away. Since 2005, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation has been negotiating
with the Zhuhai municipal government on their own utopian master plan for Hengqin Island,
currently known as the Venetian Hengqin International Convention and Resort Project.

1. A shift that is elucidated in David Faussett, “Two Visions of Utopia,” Interstices: A Journal
of Architecture and Related Arts, 1 (1991): 11–20.
2. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 158.
3. Thomas More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. George M. Logan, Robert M.
Adams, Clarence H. Miller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 109.
4. Akira Asada and Arata Isozaki, “Haishi Jimua,” in Anywise, ed. Cynthia Davidson (New
York: MIT Press/Anyone Corporation, 1996), 25.
5. The various approaches and participants involved in developing the design are docu-
mented in Kaishi/Haishi: The Mirage City—Another Utopia (Tokyo: NTT Publishing, 1997).
6. Akira Asada and Arata Isozaki, “From Molar Metabolism to Molecular Metabolism,” in
Anyhow, ed. Cynthia Davidson (New York: MIT Press/Anyone Corporation, 1997), 64–65. See
also Akira Asada, “Beyond the Biomorphic,” in D: Columbia Documents of Architecture and
Theory, ed. Bernard Tschumi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 80–84.
7. The English translation is taken from Arata Isozaki, Unbuilt (Tokyo: Toto Publishing,
2001), 46.
139 8. Ibid., 260.

Revitalizing Metabolism
 6

140

After the Crash

Nature and
Artifice

Traditional Japanese culture is invariably described as being predi-

cated on a deep love of (and harmony with) nature, while contemporary
ecological destruction is seen as a Western-influenced aberration.
Undoubtedly, the Japanese take sensual pleasure in more or less
direct encounters with natural phenomena—evidenced in the prefer-
ence for eating raw (even live) food, the appreciation for the aesthetics
of weathered materials, or the lack of insulation in buildings. Likewise,
the effects of seasonal change—blossoms appearing, leaves chang-
ing color, the availability of particular foods—are celebrated. Yet the
Japanese attraction to nature is not so much a desire to experience it in a
natural state, so to speak, but to make it somehow filtered, enclosed,
domesticated, ritualized—naturalistic but never fully natural.The sen-
sitivity to nature evinced in traditional landscape design—condensed
courtyard gardens (tsuboniwa), picturesque stroll gardens (kaiyushiki),
abstracted stone gardens (karesansui), borrowed scenery (shakkei),
even bonsai and ikebana—may also be interpreted as originating in a
latent fear of nature in the wild. According toTokyo University Professor
Hidetoshi Ohno:

It is also commonly held that certain features of Japanese architecture,

such as engawa (verandas) and shoji (paper screens), as well as certain
construction materials that are used, express a closeness to nature. But
these commonplace assumptions are all belied by the apparent ease with
which Japanese develope rs destroy natural settings to build residential
complexes and the scarcity of parks in Japanese cities. One wonders
whether the Japanese are really so fond of nature after all. . . . “Nature” in
141 Japan is a product of culture. The medieval idea of taking refuge from the
 chaos of city life in the quiet of the mountain or the open plain belongs to
the educated classes influenced by Chinese philosophy through Zen.
And escaping the heat in cool mountain resorts is an idea shared only by
the intellectual bourgeoisie since the Meiji Restoration of 1868. What did
the forest of towering trees mean, then, for the majority of Japanese?
Most likely it was a site that inspired fear. . . . Even as modern technology
outstrips the power of nature, as long as this view of nature persists it is
hardly surprising that we feel no compunction in destroying the natural
landscape.1

The following essays look at some recent interpretations and

incorporations of nature in the Japanese built environment, whether
as analogous spatial compositions, stylized artifice, or actual living
things.

1. Hidetoshi Ohno, “The Landscape of Daily Life in Japan: Present and Future,” in Japan:
Towards Totalscape, ed. Moriko Kira and Mariko Terada (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers,
2001), 156–60.

142

After the Crash

Back to Nature

Since the mid-1990s, Terunobu Fujimori (1946–), Japan’s leading archi-

tectural historian and a professor at Tokyo University, has been design-
ing buildings that could be described—in the most positive sense—as
“naive architecture.” Traditional in their forms, conventional in their
spaces, they are nevertheless radical in their expression. Not content
with using raw, unprocessed materials and vernacular building tech-
niques, Fujimori has intentionally infested their exterior surfaces with
plant life. The results are shaggy and bristling, humorous and grotesque,
uncanny and vaguely obscene, and at times surreally beautiful.
Although nature is often used as a metaphor for generating
architectural form—organic shapes, zoomorphic structures, imbricated
and exfoliated surfaces—Fujimori’s designs have an archaic simplicity
in their rectilinear plans and pitched roofs. They remain legibly, iconically
buildings even as control of their surfaces is surrendered. This is a wet,
hairy architecture, ruffled by gusts of wind, shedding and sprouting with
the seasons.
Fujimori attempts to merge building and vegetation without either
losing its autonomy. He intends the relationships to be openly parasitic
rather than express a disingenuous “symbiosis,” in reference to Kisho
Kurokawa’s preferred term:

This concept seemed somewhat naive and untrue to me. Wouldn’t a relation-
ship of “parasitism” be more real? In the great natural world, small man-
made things are parasitic, whereas nature acts as a parasite on the large
man-made things of cities and architecture. I knew from experience that
such a scene was beautiful.1
143

Nature and Artifice

Terunobu Fujimori, sketches

opposite left:
Terunobu Fujimori, Grass House, Tokyo, 1995

opposite right:
Terunobu Fujimori, Leek House, Tokyo, 1997

144

After the Crash

 Fujimori goes well beyond planter boxes, ivy-covered walls, or
even modernist roof gardens—he points out that Le Corbusier’s sketches
contained far more greenery than the actual buildings—and his motives
are expressionistic, not ecological. There are no insulating earth berms
or vegetable gardens on the roofs. After visiting eco-villages in Germany
and elsewhere, Fujimori’s only response was that they are “insufficiently
beautiful.”
This is an architecture that weathers well—perhaps even improves
with age—and the invading greenery is symbolic of vitality, not decay.
Nature forms very specific elements within the compositions: stripes of
yellow dandelions grow from joints in stone wall-cladding (his own Grass
House, Tokyo, 1995), a grid of white leek flowers sprouts from a sloping
wooden roof (Leek House, Tokyo, 1997), a pine tree emerges from the peak
of a copper-clad pyramid (Pine Tree House, Fukuoka, 1997). Rather than
free proliferation, it is controlled infiltration, the quintessential Japanese
aesthetic of juxtaposing rigorous artifice with natural serendipity.
The roughness of his designs is in direct, deliberate opposition
to what Fujimori contends is a loss of texture and “flavor” in contempo-
rary architecture. Indeed, it often seems that recent developments in
construction technologies and materials, design methods and fashions,
converge on a single theme, that of smoothness: luminous, translucent
computer renderings, sensuous curves and immaculate boxes, continu-
ous surfaces and spaces, flat facades and diaphanous screens, connec-
tions as blends rather than articulations. Architecture is tending toward
the synthetic and the artificial; even when natural materials are used,
they are polished and refined to the point of being no more than symbolic
145 of their natural origins. (Fujimori feels no affinity with Peter Zumthor, for

Nature and Artifice

 example.) Internal climates are now completely controllable while nature
is something to be excluded, or contained in only the most carefully regu-
lated manner.
Fujimori’s reaction is as much playful perversity as it is thoughtful
critique. An enthusiastic, intuitive amateur architect, he is less demon-
strating a general theory than he is constructing a personal vision. The
specific attributes of his architecture are ultimately just side effects: he
says the real pleasure is not in the act of designing but of building (which
he generally does himself, together with students and friends).
Fujimori likens architectural criticism to sumo wrestling. He
equates victory with comprehension, with identifying both the flaws and
potentials of a particular design approach. Defeat is to be left speech-
less, overwhelmed by the power and beauty of a work of architecture,
or at least to be drained of any desire to criticize it. It is these defeats—
ineffable, transcendental experiences—that the critic secretly longs for,
like an aggressive atheist whose deepest desire is to be proven wrong.
Fujimori’s amateur status allows him the freedom to escape the sophisti-
cated artifice that architecture has become. The results are by no means
beyond criticism but to criticize them at all is to miss the point.

2001

1. Terunobu Fujimori, Y’Avant-Garde Architecture (Tokyo: Toto Shuppan, 1998), 28. The spell-
ing of Y’Avant is a pun on the Japanese word yaban, which could be translated as “barbaric”
or “savage.”
146

After the Crash

Strange Attractor
Yokohama International Port
Terminal

The Yokohama International Port Terminal (2002) is the first major work
by Foreign Office Architects (the London-based partnership of Alejandro
Zaera Polo and Farshid Moussavi), commissioned in 1995 as the result
of a major international competition. Precisely encapsulating the archi-
tectural ambitions of its historical moment, the terminal is the pivotal
project in a method of architectural design that had been increasing in
visibility and conviction for many years—although up until that point it
was a method confined to computer animations and portentous texts. A
biomimetic expressionism, it is located at the intersection of two distinct
design strategies: functionalism and morphogenesis. Both approaches
radically deemphasize the role of the architect as creative artist, and
both are predicated on notions of “flow.”
While functionalism is generally associated with the hierarchi-
cal, linear planning methods of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer,
the direct antecedents of the terminal may be found in the precise
form-follows-function of architects such as Hans Scharoun and, in
particular, Hugo Häring. A friend and colleague of Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe, Häring was also his ideological antithesis. Challenging the
arbitrarily imposed geometries of Mies’s “universal space,” Häring
generated building forms directly from diagrams of functional organi-
zation—in his terminology, a Bauwerk is the physical translation of an
abstract Organwerk. He tended to give priority to circulation spaces
and the movement of people—or of cows, as in his 1924 Gut Garkau
farm complex.1
This mode of functionalism sees architectural form as a negotia-
tion between two interacting sets of forces: programmatic (internal) and
147 contextual (external). The building envelope is, then, no more and no less

Nature and Artifice

148

After the Crash

Foreign Office Architects, Yokohama International
Port Terminal, Yokohama, 2002, geometry diagram

than the manifestation of a functional and ergonomic equilibrium held

within a complex field of geological, climatic, legal, and economic pres-
sures. At Yokohama, however, a third variable was introduced: the physi-
cal properties of the construction materials themselves. The conceptual
line that represents architecture as a liminal surface between program
and context is “thickened,” made active and reactive.
It is here that the project leaves pure functionalism (“As we started
developing the programs to occupy the spaces in Yokohama, the geom-
etry of the project would produce dysfunctional spaces.”2) and enters the
realm of morphogenesis. Rather than form being a direct manifestation
of function, the programmatic diagram was, in a sense, filtered through
the innate morphological tendencies and structural abilities of steel and
glass. This was not limited to the design stage: even as the building was
being assembled, discrepancies between intended and actual dimen-
sions were constantly relayed to the factories so the shapes of compo-
nents yet to be fabricated could be recalibrated.
Rather than consciously designed, much of the final architectural
form is ostensibly emergent, a materialization of the patterns generated
by superimposing these three sets of forces. The project is “grown” or
“bred” via a process of cumulative data analysis and parametric selec-
tion, saturating the construction materials with raw contextual and
functional information—analogous to the way an embryo’s development
is the result of a particular genetic code interacting with a chemical
environment that limits its possible extension and elaboration. The origi-
nating creative act is superseded by the revelation of universal, ongoing
processes, and the resulting static form is considered to be a temporary
149 localization of an eternal, immanent flux.

Nature and Artifice

We must call on things and let them unfold their
own forms. It goes against our nature to impose
forms on them, to determine them from without,
to force upon them laws of any kind, to dictate to
them. —Hugo Häring

Although this biological analogy is at the level of method rather

than shape, the terminal resonates with natural imagery, both organic
and inorganic: crystals and coral, sand dunes and crustaceans, magma
and glaciers, entrails and orifices, tree bark and reptile skin. Approach-
ing from downtown Yokohama, you hardly glimpse the harbor before the
terminal swells from the road ahead like a surfacing whale—or perhaps
more like the fluid turbulence that would be modeled by the meeting of
whale and water.
The swollen and stretched shapes of the finished building are the
outcome of allowing the initial design schema to react to even the tiniest
irregularities and fluctuations in external conditions. Where a conven-
tional method of architectural design might attempt to abstract a degree
of formal clarity from conflicting programmatic and contextual givens
or adapt them to a predetermined geometry, the terminal only increased
in formal complexity as the architects relentlessly incorporated every
new piece of data—a suspension of aesthetic judgment enabled by the
nonlinear processing power of computers. Indeed, the design process
seems to have become essentially technical facilitation: gathering the
salient data, defining the relevant parameters, establishing the most
effective algorithms, then letting a computer determine the optimum
building form. It is perhaps a contemporary realization of Häring’s func-
tionalist ideal, as exemplified by his description of Gut Garkau: “Thus
the form (Gestalt) of this building has been discovered as the result of
a search dedicated to the achievement of the form which expresses the
claims of performance fulfillment in the simplest, most direct manner.”3
Although the implication is that any other sufficiently dedicated
150 architect would have arrived at an identical solution, a shift from direct to

After the Crash

Yokohama International Port Terminal, roof plan

parametric design is never a total loss of control. A parametric method

has no ultimate optimal result, but entails the selection of one provision-
ally stable state amongst many, and is ultimately based on aesthetic and
ideological choices. It is easy enough to identify the architects’ personal
biases: social (“Public facilities at the end of the pier and the terminal
entrance nearer to the root, as a way of weaving the paths of the citizens
and the passengers.”4), formal (“The element that was going to serve as
the material substrate was the surface of the ground, [so] we started to
bifurcate and fold this primitive plane.”5), structural (“During the com-
petition, we often looked at books on origami.”6), metaphorical (“At the
same time we made our diagrams, we had books of Hokusai’s work float-
ing around the office.”7).
Even so, if the central argument of the project is programmatic
precision, what would be lost by “straightening it out”? A glance through
the drawings suggests it could become an orthogonal plan and struc-
ture without losing much functional efficiency. But the real question is
whether or not the terminal provides a new paradigm for thinking and
making architecture. Sloping, interwoven floor planes have been a fash-
ionable form-making technique since the early 1990s, triggered by two
unbuilt OMA projects: the premiated Jussieu Library competition entry
and the Yokohama Urban Design Forum proposal (both 1992)—the latter
just happens to have been intended for a waterfront site located directly
in view of the terminal. Zaera Polo and Moussavi were in fact working
at OMA in 1992 prior to forming their own office, yet despite the formal
similarities, the terminal is fundamentally distinct from the earlier OMA
projects. There is no Cartesian armature of columns and beams, as in
151 OMA’s Jussieu Library: at Yokohama, the warped planes themselves are

Nature and Artifice

Yokohama International Port Terminal, roof deck

the load-bearing structure. While OMA’s intervention at Yokohama casu-

ally draped indeterminate, unprogrammed surfaces throughout an exist-
ing urban complex, the forms of Zaera Polo and Moussavi’s project are
presented as resulting from absolute, deterministic control.
The most radical distinguishing feature of the terminal is that it
has actually been built—a consummate example of the way radical archi-
tectural concepts that remain on paper in the West are eventually realized
in Japan. Even this does not make it entirely unique: UNStudio’s project
for the redevelopment of Arnhem Station in the Netherlands (1996–2007)
also uses a functionalist rhetoric of flow and a similar formal language of
distorted surfaces. However, there is no apparent interest in the physical
behavior of the materials; the planes are treated as infinitely flexible “rub-
ber sheets”—smooth computer renderings that become equally smooth
concrete. It is no coincidence that both projects are transport terminals.
In our secular, globalized world, such facilities have begun to compete
with the private art museum or wealthy person’s villa as the locus of
innovative architectural design. When relying on the morphology of the
program to generate formal and spatial interest, the inherent complexity
of infrastructural projects becomes vital, in every sense.
Despite this emphasis on process and ideology, all that ever
really matters is the thing itself. The terminal must ultimately be judged
as a unique intervention in a specific place. Travel by boat seems anach-
ronistic at the opening of the twenty-first century, and certainly the
sixty international sailings per year will never induce the level of activ-
ity found in contemporary airports and train stations—the estimated
maximum number of passengers in the facility at any one time is 1,700.
152 But this is only incidentally a ferry terminal. Located adjacent to an

After the Crash

 existing waterfront park, on axis with a major sports stadium, a short
walk from Yokohama’s Chinatown, with a customs lobby that may be
instantaneously transformed into an events hall and roof terraces
accessible twenty-four hours a day, there is every reason to believe it
will become a vital and integral part of the city’s civic life and spaces. To
enumerate the people visiting the building is beside the point: it is expe-
rienced as an extension and intensification of a wider landscape. At any
given time and in any weather, there are always more people here than on
any other section of the waterfront.
For visitors on foot, the terminal comprises a three-dimensional
network of interwoven paths, the exterior merging with the interior in
an abstraction of a natural environment of hills and caves. Incorporating
a public garden in the ferry terminal was part of the competition brief,
so making the entire structure a stylized, artificial landscape was an
entirely appropriate response. The reputed “harmony with nature” of
Japanese tradition is, in many respects, a sophisticated attempt to filter,
frame, and tame its danger and unpredictability. In Japan, nature tends to
be seen as a menacing menagerie of earthquakes, fires, floods, typhoons,
and tsunamis. The defensive repertoire is both symbolic and practical:
crafting bonsai trees and ritualizing seasonal change, or damming rivers
and concreting over wetlands. Japan’s many port cities tend to discour-
age public access to their waterfronts, occupying them with warehouses
and factories. They are not regarded as desirable locations—the Japanese
would rather place luxury apartments on the hills than the harbor. To
relink city and sea is in itself an important urban and social gesture.
In its sensuous web of pathways, the terminal joins a particular
153 lineage of traditional Japanese garden design—the picturesque stroll

Nature and Artifice

 garden as a meticulously composed promenade containing miniature rep-
licas of famous scenic landscapes. The terminal traces altogether more
mysterious topographies. It evokes morphogenetic fields and strange
attractors (the complex patterns toward which chaotic dynamical sys-
tems evolve over time) shimmering and pullulating in the multidimen-
sional “phase space” that physicists and mathematicians use to define
solid reality: shapes alien yet familiar, perhaps even—literally—lifelike.

2002

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Hugo Häring, “Wege Zur Form,” Die Form 1
(October 1925): 5. English translation taken from Peter Blundell Jones, “Hugo Häring and
the Theory of Organ-Like Building,” in Hans Scharoun (London: Phaidon, 1995), 96.
1. For a fuller discussion, see Colin St. John Wilson, The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture
(London: Academy Editions, 1995).
2. Foreign Office Architects, “FOA Code Remix 2000,” 2G 16 (2000): 129.
3. Hugo Häring, “Funktionelles Bauen: Gut Garkau, Das Viehhaus,” Die Form 1 (October
1925): 16–17. English translation taken from Blundell Jones, “Hugo Häring and the Theory of
Organ-Like Building,” in the endnotes, 230.
4. “Zaera Polo and Moussavi: A Comprehensive Fax Interview,” Kenchiku Bunka 50, no. 584
(June 1995): 82.
5. Ibid., 83.
6. Ibid., 82.
7. Foreign Office Architects, “FOA Code Remix 2000,” 126.

154

After the Crash

Borrowed Scenery
Walking in the Footsteps of
Laurie Anderson

At the most abstract level, the task for the artist and for the architect is
essentially the same: to specify a frame. The artist’s frame may be entirely
concrete or entirely abstract (ranging from an ornately gilded rectangle
to a spoken instruction) but always defines its content as art, whether a
new creation or a found object. The architect, by contrast, frames spaces
and their relationships by means of architectonic elements (walls and
windows), but there are some—Cedric Price, Bernard Tschumi—more
interested in enabling spatial configurations and patterns of activity
with an absolute minimum of physical intervention, or even eliminating
the building altogether. This approach to architecture as fundamentally
an art of organization but not necessarily of construction—an attempt
to dilute architecture’s physical presence while simultaneously expand-
ing its palette to include intangible, temporal elements—intersects with
those genres of art that encompass inhabitable spaces, multimedia, per-
formance, and responsive environments.
For several decades now, Laurie Anderson’s body of work has
been an ongoing challenge to the artistic frame, its permissible contents,
and the definition of art itself. Omnivorously incorporating the materi-
als and memes of contemporary life and modern technology into a bri-
colage of images, sounds, movements, and spaces, her work reframes
and juxtaposes aspects of the world to reveal unexpected affiliations and
resonances, humor and beauty. Although she was only present in person
for a two-day series of concerts, Anderson’s semipermanent contribu-
tion to Expo 2005 (Aichi, Japan, March 25–September 25) is a large-scale,
outdoor project entitled Walk. It comprises a series of installations along
a path she has chosen, winding through a 7-hectare (17-acre) Japanese
155 garden on the Expo grounds. Visitors are given a map sketched by

Nature and Artifice

I’m finding that the sky and weather and animals
have a new fascination to me. If you’d asked about
nature or the outdoors five years ago, I would’ve just
thought, “That’s pathetic!” I was more interested in
situations and solutions, and technology. Now I’m
going in another direction. What direction is it?
Well, I’m improvising. —Laurie Anderson

Anderson indicating the route to be taken and the events that will unfold
along the way. This is performance art by proxy: a loose script for the
audience to follow as they move through an existing landscape that has
been edited and enhanced by the artist.
The traditional Japanese stroll garden is itself already a fully
designed environment. Its apparent spontaneity is actually a con-
trived amplification of nature, every scene considered and composed.
Anderson has superimposed her own narrative on this backdrop, pro-
viding sounds and images that subtly control the movements and view-
points of people walking through it. Signs along the path indicate when to
pause and use the MP3 player provided for visitors to listen to each of the
six musical pieces she has composed for the garden—nature-themed
ambient soundscapes of instruments and voices, recorded in three-
dimensional binaural sound. Each person is also given a small sound-
receiver made of bamboo called an “Aimulet,” a new technology that
uses spherical solar cells to pick up sounds converted into infrared
radiation, audible only when the device is held to the ear and oriented
toward the sound source. There are two Aimulet sites in the garden, both
of which broadcast multiple, simultaneous soundtracks: one gives greet-
ings in several languages (Chinese, Japanese, French, English), the other
overlapping pieces of music.
Most of Anderson’s interventions in the garden are similarly reliant
on being in very specific positions: at the Tiger-in-the-Trees, for exam-
ple, dispersed line fragments coalesce into the image of a tiger at only
one particular viewing angle; the Turtle Bridge is embedded with weight
sensors that trigger prerecorded gong sounds according to where peo-
156 ple stand. Whether between different sensory experiences—physical

After the Crash

 movements with corresponding sounds and images—or between lan-
guages, translation and its potential ambiguity is a theme that reappears
throughout Anderson’s work. In the Wordfall installation, located in a
small pavilion in the garden, Japanese script slides down an LED panel
into a pool of water, at which point a concealed video projector instan-
taneously replaces it with an English translation that floats away and
vanishes.1
Walk is far more than the sum total of these installations. Existing
in a synergistic relationship with the garden itself, and the wider envi-
ronment of climatic and seasonal change, Anderson’s project is analo-
gous with shakkei (borrowed scenery), a Japanese landscape gardening
technique that involves incorporating elements of the surrounding
landscape within a local composition, framing aspects of the world out-
side direct control. Anderson has, here, extracted and distilled a path
from an existing territory, and just like shakkei, its success is dependent
on being able to control the viewer’s location and sightlines.
Indeed, Walk may be participatory, but it is not interactive in the
trivial sense of much media art: Anderson has often stated her pref-
erence for artworks that are complete, fully specified according to an
artist’s intentions. Even without her present to enact the performance
and tell the story—though the MP3 player soundtrack does occasionally
provide her beautifully modulated voice and impeccable phrasing—the
visitor still has clear instructions to follow.
There is a feeling of relief and calm in the work, partly due to a lack
of the usual wry comments, surreal anecdotes, and disquieting observa-
tions, and partly due to the obvious pleasure Anderson takes in the beauty
157 of the garden itself. Unconfined by studio or stage, the work is somehow

Nature and Artifice

previous page:
Laurie Anderson with Hideo Itoh / AIST Labs,
Aimulet, Aichi Expo 2005

below:
Laurie Anderson, Tiger-in-the-Trees, Aichi Expo
2005

opposite:
Laurie Anderson, Wordfall, Aichi Expo 2005

158

After the Crash

 architectural, defining an environment and the activities it contains with
the lightest of touches. The specific interventions are just a way of get-
ting us to slow down and pay closer attention as we walk through the
garden, to enjoy the details, to take our time, and to experience it all—as
she likes to say—in the present tense.

2005

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from an interview with Laurie Anderson at “Robots
and Thought: The 25th Anniversary Celebration of the Robotics Institute,” Carnegie Mellon
University, Pennsylvania, October 11 to 14, 2004.
1. An interest in the translation of the Japanese language crops up throughout her work: “You
know, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as the Japanese language. I mean, they don’t even
know how to write. They just draw pictures of these little characters, and when they talk, they
just make sounds that more or less synch up with their lips,” she says in “Language is a Virus”
(United States I–IV, WEA, 1983). A year later, she released a song called “Kokoku” (Mister
Heartbreak, WEA, 1984), in which half the lyrics are Japanese, and in live performances was
accompanied by animations explaining the pictographic origins of kanji characters.

159

Nature and Artifice

 7

160

After the Crash

Urban Views

Western interest in the Japanese built environment tends to revolve

around two opposed poles: the extreme sophistication of individual
works of architecture and the extreme incoherence of their urban con-
text. Their sole shared feature is the seeming freedom with which they
are created. In the case of buildings, this can lead to wondrous or per-
verse experiments in space and form, material and detail, function and
experience. In the case of cities, it can lead to an unmitigated mess.
For Kazuo Shinohara, that is a productive dichotomy:

No other city has the diversity of buildings that comprise its streets, or the
disorder of decorative surface colors and forms on their facades. Chaos
is the only appropriate word to describe it. But I do not unconditionally
dismiss this as chaos. In essence, chaos contains a portent of ruin. Yet
in so many places of this vast village of a city before us, the streets are
full of vitality. Tokyo has now become one of the most exciting cities in
the world....In the design of a single building, the method of expressing
anarchy as the theme can be established as an architectural logic.1

This delirious image of Tokyo was fixed in the global imagina-

tion by the 1991 Visions of Japan exhibition held at London’s Victoria
and Albert Museum. Curator Arata Isozaki divided the installation into
three thematic spaces: Kitsch (designed by Kazuhiro Ishii), Cliché
(designed by Osamu Ishiyama), and Simulation (designed by Toyo Ito).
It was the third theme (later retitled Dreams) that has had ongoing
influence. Little more than constantly changing images of the city pro-
jected on acrylic surfaces, it implied a volatile, intense metropolitan
161 condition powered by extraordinary creative and financial energy:
 Visitors were showered by the floating video images and soaked with the
sounds. Their bodies floated on the river of the acrylic floor and swayed as
if they were seasick. The Crown Prince of Japan, who opened the Show,
said he wished he had had a cup or two of sake before he came so that
he could feel the space more vividly. Prince Charles, on the other hand,
asked me whatever was expected after these images. When I answered
that there might be nothing, he asked if I was an optimist. I said that of
course I was.2

The exhibition was held just as Japan’s economic bubble was in the
process of bursting; however accurate this vision might once have
been, it was already becoming out of date. These final essays discuss
the state of the city since then: the density of downtown, the banality
of the “bedroom” suburbs, and a personal note on my adopted home,
Kyoto.

1. Kazuo Shinohara, “Kenchiku e” [Toward Architecture], Japan Architect 56 no. 9

(September 1981): 140–41. Author’s translation.
2. Toyo Ito, “Architecture in a Simulated City,” in Anywhere, ed. Cynthia Davidson (New
York: Rizzoli/Anyone Corporation, 1992), 192.

162

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Fitting In
Small Sites in Urban Japan

All the well-known characteristics of the Japanese city—rapid cycles

of demolition and reconstruction, a lack of open public spaces, extreme
density, bizarre and experimental architecture, chaos, and so on—can
largely be attributed to a single factor: small sites. Land-ownership (and
land-use) patterns form a fine-grained mosaic in both the city core and
the steadily expanding periphery. Urban Japan is like a sprawling pointil-
list carpet, each spot able to change without regard for its neighbors,
yet at the same time unable to exert any influence beyond its immediate
boundary.
This fragmented urban structure has its origins in the idiosyn-
crasies of historical city design and is perpetuated by both cultural
traditions and anomalies in the current planning laws. The medieval
jiguchisen (urban frontage tax) law levied a property tax calculated based
on the width of the street boundary rather than the total site area. This
had two notable effects on urban form: a predominance of long, thin lots
known as unagi no nedoko (eel’s nests) and an absence of chamfered
corners at major street intersections. This surely contributed to the fact
that squares, plazas, agoras, piazzas—an entire set of urban types—
never emerged in the Japanese city. Though the nagaya (rowhouses) and
machiya (townhouses), which made up the bulk of the historical urban
fabric, have mostly disappeared, the lot divisions remain.
Agricultural land still persists in larger blocks (these were tradition-
ally passed on intact to the eldest son, together with the family name—
younger sons were given different surnames), even though many estates
were subdivided during the post–World War II occupation of Japan as the
landowning aristocracy was coerced by the U.S. administration into sell-
163 ing and redistributing property amongst their multiple tenants. Plenty of

Urban Views
 open farmland still exists outside the cities, but even the house lots on
the urban fringe are typically small: farmers today tend to sell off their
land slowly and in tiny increments, hoping to drive up prices.
It is the difficulty of assembling big blocks of land that keeps the
city in such an incoherent state. While the government does have the
right to relocate people for the sake of urban development projects, it is
almost never exercised. A significant proportion of development in Japan
is private—albeit usually instigated and coordinated by local govern-
ments—through a system called “land readjustment.”1 Neighbors com-
bine disparate scraps of land, developing and reselling them as regular,
orthogonal lots. While private developers are required by law to provide
roads, parks, sewerage lines, and other infrastructure, there is one cru-
cial loophole in the regulations: sites less than 0.1 hectare (0.25 acre) in
size need not acquire planning permissions. Local governments have
no control over the subdivision and sale of small lots, allowing—even
encouraging—the city to haphazardly expand without basic infrastruc-
tural services. A 98 percent property-tax rebate for agricultural land use
means that large amounts of farmland are retained in areas undergoing
urbanization, further disrupting any attempt at coherent development.
This is not just an issue for the urban fringe. The core of Tokyo
comprises twenty-three wards that reportedly still contain 1,800 hectares
(4,448 acres) of agricultural land—rice paddies and persimmon orchards
between office buildings and expressways.2 More than simply polycen-
tric, urban Japan could be described as entirely peripheral. Tokyo is then
just a particularly intense zone of the 450-kilometer (280-mile) strip that
stretches to Osaka in a colloidal, quasiurban condition of intermingled
164 residential, industrial, and agricultural particles.

After the Crash

Building envelope diagrams, from Kenchiku Shinsei
Memo, a guidebook to the Japanese Building
Standards Law published annually by Shin Nippon
Houki Shuppan

Perhaps the central paradox of Japanese architecture is that a

cityscape of such incredible heterogeneity is produced by an apparently
conformist society. The tiny lots and constant replacement of building
stock act to reduce architecture’s wider social and urban responsibilities,
vindicating the most perverse and indulgent designs. Often the only con-
cession to context is an equivalent sense of fragmentation and imper-
manence. There are almost no legal aesthetic controls, with exceptions
mainly in the vicinity of important temples—often no more than absurd
tiled roofs on otherwise modern buildings. There is generally no require-
ment for yard space between building and site boundary, although the
irregular patterns of redevelopment (and the danger of earthquakes)
make party walls almost unknown; meter-wide (3.3 feet) gaps are usually
left between adjacent buildings.
Buildings are subject to a set of volumetric controls known as
shasen seigen (diagonal line regulations). A shasen is effectively a plane
rather than a line, and there are three types: from the north boundary
(kitagawa shasen), from adjacent roads (douro shasen), and from adjoin-
ing sites (rinchi shasen), which collectively define the sloping planes of a
building envelope, truncated by the maximum allowable building height
(zettai takasa no seigen). The intention is not aesthetic appeal but the
prevention of buildings that block their neighbors’ sunlight and air (one
source asserts that the primary motivation is to allow all citizens to hang
their laundry in direct sunlight for part of each day).3 Smaller elements
such as balustrades and billboards are permitted to project through
the shasen, as are penthouse towers of no more than an eighth of the
building footprint. For taller buildings, the shasen are supplemented by
165 additional volumetric controls known as sun-shadow regulations (nichiei

Urban Views
left:
Kazuo Shinohara, House under High Voltage Lines,
Tokyo, 1981, diagram

right:
Typical building forms in the Japanese city

kisei). These restrict the precise amount of shadow a building may cast
outside its site over the course of a day (the winter solstice, to be precise)
and often require additional, irregular chunks to be removed from the
volume.
The limits for total site coverage (kenpei ritsu) and total floor area
(youseki ritsu) are both set as percentages of the site area. In commercially
zoned districts, it is usually impossible to achieve the full allowable floor
area within the volumetric constraints, so maximization of the floor area
inevitably requires maximization of the building volume. Private houses
are less noticeably affected by shasen because in residentially zoned
districts the floor-area ratios are relatively low, so maximum floor area
can be achieved without entirely filling the building envelope. A house
that does swell to occupy the allowable volume will likely exceed the
allowable floor area—a common solution is to include internal voids or
exterior courtyards.
The ubiquitous wedge-shaped buildings of the Tokyo skyline are
the result of maximizing rentable floor area within the shasen and other
regulations. Unsurprisingly, they are reminiscent of the evocative render-
ings by New York architect and illustrator Hugh Ferriss in his 1929 book,
The Metropolis of Tomorrow,4 which depicts the effects of the pioneer-
ing 1916 New York City Zoning Resolution on architectural form. In fact,
the Japanese Building Standards Law, in which all these regulations are
contained, is very similar to the New York City Zoning Resolution—the
Japanese system was enacted in 1950, but is based on studies of Western
cities that go back more than a century. New York’s Zoning Resolution
used sloping setbacks known as “sky exposure planes” to force building
166 profiles to step back horizontally as they rose vertically in order to guar-

After the Crash

 antee a degree of sunlight and air to the lower levels of the buildings and
to the streets. As Ferriss notes:

[This] was based on purely practical considerations. . . .The law as a whole

was directed to securing an increase in public safety, convenience, efficiency
and health. From the viewpoint of Design, it is interesting to recall that the
Zoning movement having its genesis in just such considerations as have
been mentioned was not at all inspired by concern for its possible effects
on Architectural Design. . . . It must be understood that the mass thus delin-
eated is not an architect’s design; it is simply a form which results from legal
specifications.5

By defining maximum volumes within a context that implicitly

demands maximization, the law had direct and immediate effects on the
aesthetics of architectural form. As required by their clients, the archi-
tects of early-twentieth-century New York did indeed try to achieve maxi-
mum usable floor area while staying in compliance with the code, but in
practice they built ziggurats that only approximated the angled setbacks
depicted by Ferriss—the end points of their stepped profiles traced the
invisible sky exposure planes. Unlike in early-twentieth-century New York,
ziggurats are rare in Tokyo; the Japanese preference is to precisely follow
the shasen. Although the code might be expected to cumulatively sculpt
a group of buildings on a given city block into a coherent overall profile,
anomalies in the code can result in adjacent buildings appearing to be
subject to differing sets of constraints. In many cases, visually bizarre
building forms in Japan are no more, and no less, than built diagrams of
167 precise applications of the code. These are buildings that emerge without

Urban Views
 design, so to speak, simply through an uncritical expediency: form that
follows function and complies with the building code.
In recent years this has inspired a type of critical architectural
design that paradoxically adopts strategies of acquiescence rather than
resistance. A precedent for such responses to the city by the younger
generation of Japanese architects can be found in the work of Kazuo
Shinohara. Despite his extolling of the architectural freedom provided
by Tokyo, his House under High-Voltage Lines (1981) was designed as a
direct manifestation of—and obedient submission to—one of the city’s
many constraints on architectural form: a regulation stipulating the
minimum distance a building must maintain from overhead power lines.
This effectively defines an invisible cylinder along the axis of each cable,
within which it is illegal to build. Shinohara extended the house right up
to the allowable range of the nearby power cables, thereby deforming
the roof profile—and hence the interior spaces—in accordance with the
code-defined envelope.
As architectural historian Hidenobu Jinnai has pointed out, Tokyo
was never subject to the kind of restructuring operations involved in the
transformation of major European cities from medieval towns into nascent
modern metropolises (Vienna’s Ringstraße, Barcelona’s Diagonal, and
Paris’s boulevards being amongst the most spectacular).6 Tokyo’s nonhi-
erarchical, atomized structure was ideally suited for reprogramming as
a modern industrial capital. The visual disorder of the contemporary city-
scape is a reflection of urban Japan’s capacity to absorb constant small-
scale reorganization and the near-impossibility of large-scale restructuring.

168 2000

After the Crash

Yasutaka Yoshimura, example of a “super legal
building” diagram

Postscript
Over the last couple of years, Tokyo architect Yasutaka Yoshimura has been working with
students to identify some of the more absurd effects of the Japanese building codes.
Reversing Ferriss’s method of extrapolating hypothetical building forms from a given set
of rules, Yoshimura takes existing buildings and attempts to derive the particular aspects
of the code that generated them. He calls the more intriguing examples “super legal build-
ings,” and the results have been catalogued in a book of the same name.7 Interestingly,
Yoshimura worked with MVRDV in Rotterdam for several years, and there is clearly an
influence from the latter’s “datascape” methodology. Foreign architects with commissions
in Tokyo have also engaged the code in a productive way, as in Herzog & de Meuron’s bril-
liant Prada Aoyama Epicenter. According to Jacques Herzog:

We then started in earnest, checking out just how much leeway we had within the
zoning laws. We discovered rather complex virtual machinery, which literally shaped
the permitted building volume. . . . In early versions, we tried to move away from the
zoning shape, but returned to it later when we discovered that we really needed every
square meter of the given volume. As it turned out, it made a stronger impact than
that of a fantasy shape.8

1. Andre Sorensen, “Land Readjustment, Urban Planning and Urban Sprawl in the Tokyo
Metropolitan Area,” Urban Studies 36, no. 13 (December 1999): 2333–60.
2. Hiroshi Mori, “Land Conversion at the Urban Fringe: A Comparative Study of Japan,
Britain and the Netherlands,” Urban Studies 35, no. 9 (August 1998): 1541–58.
3. Kenichi Nakamura, “Townscape of Tokyo: The Influence of the Building Code and of
Culture,” Arquitectura 294 (1992): 82–87.
4.. Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929; repr. New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1986).
5. Ibid., 72–74.
6. Hidenobu Jinnai, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, trans. Kimiko Nishimura (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995).
7. Yasutaka Yoshimura, Chougouhou Kenchiku Zukan [Super Legal Building Illustrated
Guidebook] (Tokyo: Shokokusha, 2006).
8. Germano Celant, ed., Prada Aoyama Tokyo: Herzog & de Meuron (Milan: Fondazione Prada,
169 2003), 81.

Urban Views
Pretty Vacant
The Photographs of Takashi
Homma

For the Western imagination, there are two Japans. One is fast and
dense, rain-soaked and neon-lit, a teeming, artificial chaos. The other
is silent and serene, sensual and inscrutable, intimately related to the
cycles of nature. Photographic studies of Japan tend to concentrate on
one or another of these themes or, more commonly, their juxtaposition:
modernity and tradition, frenzy and calm, bullet trains and geisha. The
reality is generally far more mundane, but such extreme contrasts do
exist. The silent Japan is often found embedded within the chaotic Japan.
Encountering it is both shock and relief—like the sudden loss of the
soundtrack during a violent movie. The aesthetic incongruities are never
acknowledged. Extraneous elements are treated as visual static, filtered
and ignored: the average Japanese seems to have a photographer’s eye
for isolating beauty amongst confusion, for appreciating a single cherry
blossom surrounded by asphalt.
This lack of concern for visual homogeneity—harmony—may
dominate imagery of urban Japan, but it is not the whole story. The
majority of Tokyo’s workers are now housed in the “bed towns” that began
appearing around the city in the 1970s, spreading from the city out across
the surrounding Kanto Plain or placed on platforms of reclaimed land in
Tokyo Bay. Clean, landscaped streets of houses laid out as if by mouse-
click, well-behaved families without visible ethnic diversity, genteel and
generic, these artificial, anonymous environments are the subject of a
series of photographs by Takashi Homma (1962­–), exhibited and published
under the title Tokyo Suburbia.
Homma was raised in such a context, and this work began as
personal research, an investigation—and perhaps validation—of a
170 subject untouched by other photographers. As with most photographs

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Takashi Homma, cover of Tokyo Suburbia.
Reproduced by permission from Takashi Homma,
Tokyo Suburbia, ed. Naoya Sasaki and Kyoko Wada
(Kyoto: Korinsha Press, 1998)

171

Urban Views
A trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experi-
ences: the color variations in the fluorescent
lighting of an office building just before sunset,
the subtleties of the slightly different whites of an
illuminated sign at night....This pervasive lack of
urgency acts like a potent drug; it induces a hallu-
cination of the normal. —Rem Koolhaas

documenting the human environment, the intent is somewhere between

aesthetic composition and social commentary. A photographer is
expected to reveal the usually unseen: exotic places, unexpected
perspectives, hidden or forbidden views, tragedy and comedy, unrepeatable
moments of intense emotion. Yet with a subject as innocuous as Tokyo’s
suburbia, the cumulative vision can be one of absolute neutrality.
Celebration or critique? Infatuation or irony? These images seem to be
neither, simply documentation without commentary. But if that is the
case, then we are forced into the paradoxical assumption that Homma
considers these scenes, if not actually beautiful, at least interesting.
Homma’s photographs are distinguished by a casualness about
what is included within the frame, or an unconventional approach to
hierarchy and focus. There is none of the expected cropping of unwanted
elements to tighten the composition. On the edges of every image there
are intrusions: fences, dirt, construction materials, random elements
that obscure any intended theme. Even the portrait images contain too
much information, too wide a field of view. The “subject” is devalorized—
the teenager carrying shopping bags or the child playing video games,
staring disinterestedly at a camera that refuses to make them fully
central, assigning their figures little more compositional importance than
the background trees or game machines. Every element in the frame is
treated with equal interest or disinterest, an approach that does not dif-
ferentiate between landscapes, portraits, or any topic at all. Yet Homma
does occasionally crop images in the studio, indicating both a concern
for specific compositional details and an emphasis on result rather than
process—he considers, for example, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pride in
172 never cropping an image “photographic narcissism.”

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 Photography is the art form closest to an unmediated
representation of reality: the framing of a found object/scene, analogous
to a Duchamp-ian readymade. The readymade has an obvious polemical
intent, an implicit critique of notions of creativity and authorship. Yet
there is a secondary effect: given that the found object has been
“framed” by the will of an artist, the viewer is obliged to examine it as
a formal artistic composition. Beyond the apparent frivolity, there is
another unironic message that everything—that is, every thing—has
potential aesthetic properties. In this sense, a good point of reference
for these photographs is John Cage’s composition 4'33”. Scored as
silence, it requires the listener to pay close attention to a random slice
of environmental noise. Homma does, of course, decide where to point
the camera, but he works with a similar indifference—he likes to say he
could have pressed the shutter five minutes earlier or later.
In subject matter, Homma’s work is a welcome alternative to
the relentless portrayal of urban Japan as unmitigated chaos. While
foreign visitors invariably search out those moments of congestion
and confusion that validate their preconceptions, collecting endless
photographs of the same few locations in central Tokyo, it is often the
Japanese who are the most active promoters of clichéd images of their
cities, well-aware of the exotic appeal of urban complexity to the West.
Kazuo Shinohara’s thematizing of Tokyo’s “chaos” and “anarchy” may be
convincing, but in too many other instances it is an easy gimmick: Japan
eagerly perpetuating its imposed stereotypes. Even the most disturbing
photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki (perhaps Japan’s most famous living
photographer), supposedly contradicting the stereotypical regimentation
173 of Japanese society through an unflinchingly documentation of the grime

Urban Views
Takashi Homma, interior spreads from Tokyo
Suburbia

and sleaze that necessarily underpins the visible order, may be seen as
an all-too-easy shock tactic. Homma avoids the extreme contrasts for
something more subtle, and often more sinister (Japanese sociologists
have identified these suburban environments as the incubator of many
contemporary social problems). Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow-Wow—
a friend of Homma’s—notes that his Tokyo Suburbia photos

refuse the facile juxtaposition of new and old, Asian and the modern typical
of Japanese landscape photographs of the city. They steer clear of backlit
evening skylines of office buildings. . . . In the search for new ways of seeing
and reading, these landscape photographs offer a new opportunity for dis-
covering and redefining communication. Even attempts to discover estab-
lished schema to better understand the suburban Tokyo landscape are forced
by its overwhelming lack of control to quickly repair the constant overflow
from the schema. Whether the suburban Tokyo environment produces the
discrepancy between the object and the established schema or whether the
suburban Tokyo landscape can only be found by recognizing the discrepancy
between the established schema and object, these suburban Tokyo landscape
photographs follow one hypothesis. Each photograph is a different attempt to
shoot and study the relationship between the hypothesis and an ever-chang-
ing reality. This photobook is the trace of this feedback loop. It is the tireless
training of the photographer’s eye.1

Takashi Homma’s photographs show us another Japan, focusing

on those elements of reality whose very ubiquity causes them to be
subconsciously eliminated from view. It is the gentle surprise of the
174 ordinary: Japan in all its everyday banality, brightly lit, accurately

After the Crash

 focused, well balanced, contrast- and color-corrected, without drama or
dynamism—practically unframed.

2000

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” in S,M,L,XL,
ed. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1995), 1250–51, an essay that
has its origins in an aborted study of Tokyo.
1. Momoyo Kaijima, “Ways of Looking at the Suburban Landscape,” an essay from a loose,
unpaginated leaflet contained in Takashi Homma, Tokyo Suburbia, ed. Naoya Sasaki and
Kyoko Wada (Kyoto: Korinsha Press, 1998).

175

Urban Views
Letter from Kyoto

There’s heavy snow over much of Japan as I write—4 meters (13 feet)
deep in some regions. As usual, Kyoto has just a thin layer, which will
no doubt be gone by this evening. Yet while it lasts, the city is full of peo-
ple with cameras (amateur photography is practically a national sport),
out to capture the charm of snow-shrouded pagodas and gardens. The
best shots will end up on postcards and in guidebooks, presenting pic-
turesque impressions of the ancient capital in winter that aren’t exactly
false, but certainly aren’t typical either. This is just another example of
ongoing (and somewhat desperate) attempts to perpetuate the image of
a beautiful historical city by selectively framing it to conceal the loss, if
not willful destruction, of so much of its architectural heritage.
Ironically, it was out of respect for this heritage that Kyoto was
mostly spared from U.S. bombing during World War II. It was in fact the
atomic bomb Target Committee’s first choice, until Secretary of War
Henry L. Stimson decreed Kyoto to be the “one city that they must not
bomb without my permission.”1 Over the following decades, much of the
traditional urban fabric has been demolished anyway. Harsh inheritance
taxes, inflated land prices, developer pressure (often Yakuza assisted),
and the nation’s overwhelming desire to modernize (i.e., Westernize) have
eviscerated the city center. Visitors quickly learn that Kyoto is not an
Oriental version of its sister cities Florence, Prague, or Paris; rather than
a conserved historic core surrounded by a growing modern periphery, the
past survives mainly in a ragged belt of temples and gardens around
the city edge. Traditional Kyoto has dissolved from the inside out, like a
photographic negative of the European city, and downtown looks much
like any place else in contemporary urban Japan. The surviving frag-
176 ments of history must be searched out.

After the Crash

Kyoto from above

At least that was my experience upon coming here from New

Zealand in 1992, newly graduated and with a job offer from local mae-
stro Shin Takamatsu. I arrived at his office nervous and naive, gripping a
Japanese phrasebook and talking like Tarzan. Although I had been lured
by the intricate machinelike detailing of his tiny projects in Kyoto, I
immediately found myself put in sole charge of the competition for new
government facilities in Berlin—urban-scale design in a European con-
text that was almost as alien to me as Japan was.
It was the beginning of a year without sleep, exhausting yet exhila-
rating. Returning to New Zealand afterward was anticlimactic, to say the
least. I soon moved on to the Netherlands and a position at OMA, where,
in a bizarre reversal of my time with Takamatsu, I was teamed with two
Japanese staff for the Saitama Arena competition, which involved design-
ing intricate mechanical details for a reconfigurable floating auditorium
in Japan. After a few months in Rotterdam, we relocated to a temporary
project office in Tokyo. My destiny seemed inescapable—OMA lost the
competition, and I left for a postgraduate position at Kyoto University.
From the beginning of my studies, I was also spending time at
the nascent practice of Katsu Umebayashi, a former colleague from my
period with Takamatsu. He was then working solo out of a spare room
in his house (with frequent cheerful interruptions from his kids) on the
design of the Organ building, which was to become his own office. This
was the genesis of FOBA, where I stayed for the following decade.
Working with FOBA was in part an exploration of the potentials
and obligations of being an architect in Kyoto. Given the damage already
done, preservation here is less an issue of maintaining the forms and
177 materials of traditional buildings than of respecting the organization

Urban Views
Kyoto is a city that has been cut off from the
modern age….Kyoto is topographically isolated
as well, being a pure inner space surrounded
by mountains. Estrangement from the modern
age has bred narcissism in the ancient city and
former capital. —Masao Furuyama

178

After the Crash

Gion street scene

and scale of the old city. From above, Kyoto has an intelligible and dis-
crete shape, which makes it all-but unique among Japanese cities. Built
from scratch as the Imperial capital, it uses an orthogonal grid based
on a Chinese urban-planning model and is enclosed on three sides by
mountain ranges upon which it is illegal to build. To walk in Kyoto is to
encounter a low-rise web of narrow alleys and courtyard gardens, with
a green mountainside at the end of every major street axis. The grounds
of the old Imperial Palace are now used as a public park, and in good
weather the Kamo River bisecting the city is lined with children playing,
barbecue parties, even people fishing.
Whatever their aesthetic, new buildings should, at the very least,
be kept low to maintain views of the enclosing mountains. Many of the
traditional gardens here use shakkei (borrowed scenery), screening the
immediate surroundings with fences or hedges and incorporating distant
elements, such as mountains, into their compositions. At Entsuji Temple
(originally built in the seventeenth century as part of a villa for retired
Emperor Go-Mizunoo), one of the best surviving examples, the view is
currently under threat from planned housing developments. The temple
recently removed its ban on photography in the hope that if more people
see what is at stake, popular support might lead to cancellation of the
developments.
With or without their views, the temples and shrines themselves
will no doubt endure, fixed in place by geomancy and maintained out of
custom (if not actual faith), but the future of the traditional houses is
far less secure. Made of fragile, impermanent materials—wood, paper,
bamboo, clay—they have long been seen as uncomfortable and primi-
179 tive. Particularly in the postwar decades, traditional homes were widely

Urban Views
left:
Entsuji Temple, Kyoto, seventeenth century

right:
Nikken Sekkei, Kyoto State Guest House, Kyoto, 2005

considered undesirable relics of a feudal, impoverished past, and enthu-

siastically demolished to be replaced with Western-style houses. As their
numbers have diminished, so have the skills and materials necessary for
their maintenance, which has caused them to become correspondingly
more expensive and unattainable. Over the last century, Kyoto’s pool of
traditional carpenters, gardeners, and artisans has become increasingly
smaller, older, and underutilized.
From 1994 to 2005, however, many of them were occupied with the
construction of a single project: the Kyoto State Guest House, located
within the grounds of the Imperial Palace. Comprising an asymmetric
ring of linked pavilions around a landscaped pond, the design is a faithful
reproduction of sukiya architecture, a style that has its origins in the tradi-
tional teahouse. Well, not quite faithful: the clay walls and timber ceilings
of the guesthouse conceal reinforced concrete, and there is bulletproof
double-glazing behind many of the sliding paper screens. Purists will no
doubt complain about the compromised authenticity, but the majority of
these modifications are invisible. However, one nontraditional aspect of the
building is subtly disturbing: the scale of the spaces and their fittings has
been enlarged, presumably in anticipation of tall foreigners (not to mention
the increasing height of the average Japanese). Although historical propor-
tions have been maintained—higher ceilings adjoin correspondingly deeper
eaves, for example—the intimacy and subtlety that should be entailed by
sukiya architecture here verges on the grandiose. Even so, the construction
of this building has allowed Kyoto’s elderly artisans to instruct a new gen-
eration of apprentices in the materials and techniques of tradition.
In recent years there has been a turnaround in public opinion with
180 regard to historical architecture. The surviving traditional houses are

After the Crash

 being renovated and converted into cafes and galleries, and occasionally
maintained as residences—although the biggest market for the latter is
nostalgic foreigners prepared to put up with ancient plumbing and lack
of insulation.
Many of the best-preserved buildings are clustered in Gion, the
traditional entertainment district made famous by the book and film
Memoirs of a Geisha. There is also some interesting contemporary archi-
tecture here, such as the Sfera building (2003), renovated by Swedish
architects CKR into an elegant gallery, design shop, and cafe, all con-
tained within a skin of perforated metal panels. Down the same street
is Asphodel (2004) by FOBA, a contemporary art gallery that is also an
annex to one of the city’s most famous geisha teahouses.
Elsewhere, architects have successfully incorporated existing tra-
ditional structures into modern compositions, such as in the Kamigyo
Daycare Center (1999) by Toshi Kawai. Examples of modern interventions
in historical sites include two gallery spaces literally embedded in the
grounds of Buddhist temples: one by Takashi Yamaguchi at Reigenkoji
Temple and the other by Shin Takamatsu at Higashi Honganji Temple. In
both cases, all that can be seen are glazed skylights in the gravel.
Kyoto also has a surprising number of Western-style buildings dat-
ing from the early twentieth century, many of which are now considered
part of the local heritage, such as Goichi Takeda’s Kyoto City Hall (1927)
and Kingo Tatsuno’s Daiichi-Kangyo Bank (1906). The Richard Rogers
Partnership recently converted the 1926 NTT telephone company build-
ing into a shopping center called Shin-Puh-Kan, using a typical British
high-tech aesthetic to make a successful enclosed public plaza and per-
181 formance stage.

Urban Views
 Hiroyuki Wakabayashi, a local industrial designer turned architect,
devised the new Mainichi Newspaper Headquarters (1999), which also
contains his own office, as a machinelike cylinder looming over a main
street. Similar to Shin Takamatsu’s early work, Wakabayashi’s architec-
ture displays a decorative manner of detailing that is arguably as much
part of Kyoto’s heritage as the cultivated minimalism of Katsura Imperial
Villa (seventeenth century) or the stone garden at Ryoanji Temple (fif-
teenth century). Takamatsu himself has commented that, although the
Japanese have always been skilled at a refined “aesthetic of poverty,”
the vulgarity of much of contemporary Japan is due to an inability to deal
with the nation’s postwar wealth. He implies that his own work might be
considered an attempt to formulate an “aesthetic of prosperity,” drawing
on the visual language of electronics and robotics that defines so much
of contemporary Japan.
Kiyokazu Arai, a SCI-Arc graduate and a key member of the Los
Angeles–based practice Morphosis for over a decade, has a similar sen-
sibility.2 Arai is now head of the architecture department at Kyoto Seika
University. He has been adding a series of similarly ornate machinelike
buildings to the campus, such as the Jizaikan (2000), a new home for the
manga (cartoon and animation) faculty.
Kyoto also contains contemporary reinterpretations of a more
minimalist stream of traditional Japanese design, such as Waro Kishi’s
elegant Wakuden restaurant (1995), and Tadao Ando’s Times’ complex
(Times’ I was completed in 1984, Times’ II was completed in 1991). The
latter is skillfully integrated with the adjacent water and streets, built
of bare concrete blocks in sympathy with the traditional preference
182 for unadorned, natural materials. Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama’s Chapel Aktis

After the Crash

left:
Shin Takamatsu, Higashi Honganji Reception Hall,
Kyoto, 1998

right:
Waro Kishi, Wakuden restaurant, Kyoto, 1995

(2005) is a smooth zinc-clad volume used for Christian wedding services

(intended for Japanese couples wanting to be photographed miming a
Western white wedding rather than for actual Christian services). FOBA’s
Skip house (2001) is a reinterpretation of the traditional townhouse, an
attempt to condense the paths and gardens of the old city into the scale
of a single building while providing a roofscape that allows an immediate
relationship with the mountains.
The Skip house is located on the north side of the city in the
Kitayama district, which was developed during the 1980s as an exclusive
shopping area—dotted with innovative architecture containing expen-
sive boutiques. When the economic bubble burst, leaving many shops
empty and developers bankrupt, buildings only a few years old were
demolished or extensively remodeled. Shin Takamatsu’s Syntax building
(1990), a local showpiece, was razed in 2005. The area is now more of a
cultural zone, containing Arata Isozaki’s Kyoto Concert Hall (1995) and
Ando’s Garden of Fine Art (1994), both of which adjoin the Kyoto Botanic
Gardens. Ando’s project includes enormous reproductions of famous his-
torical artworks from the West and East, displayed without any sense of
irony or fear of kitsch. Like many of Japan’s apparent enigmas, there is no
deeper meaning: what you see is what you get.
Except when it isn’t. The culture of contemporary Japan is deeply
contradictory, sometimes infuriatingly so. In my early years here, I often
felt like a young child again: illiterate, incompetent, unwittingly obnox-
ious. Being unable to read the writing everywhere was like having blind
spots in my vision. I found analogous blind spots in the culture itself,
in the intimidating complexity and subtlety of every social interaction.
183 As time passed, this exotic blur has gradually pulled into focus, yet

Urban Views
left:
Kiyokazu Arai, Kyoto Seika University manga faculty,
Kyoto, 2000

right:
Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama + Amorphe, Chapel Aktis,
Kyoto, 2005

simultaneously faded into ordinariness. Total clarity coincides with total

invisibility as each initially mystifying aspect of the culture merges into
the background of daily life. The more I understand, the less I feel able to
explain. Even so, it never becomes completely normal. The culture shock
subsides but remains as constant background static, giving a slight ten-
sion to the most trivial daily event.
As a place to live, Kyoto strikes a perfect balance been history
and modernity, city and nature. The city center is a twenty-minute walk
from our home, as are the surrounding mountains. The art and design
community here is relentlessly innovative and always has been. This city
has provided the setting for the invention of so much of what we consider
to be quintessential Japanese culture. Kyoto-ites are proud of their near
mythical past, the source of an insular world that sometimes appears
elegant and refined to the point of absurdity. At worst, it is a ritualized
pretentiousness that equates superficiality with profundity, but at best, it
is an astonishing stylistic amalgam of architecture, design, craft, litera-
ture, theater, fashion, and cuisine that continues to influence the entire
world. The Kyoto Protocol, indeed.
Much of it remains off-limits to outsiders, of course. However long
I stay here, I’ll always remain a guest. No problem—Japan is unfailingly
polite to guests, provided they don’t make a mess.

2006

184

After the Crash

 The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Masao Furuyama, “The Melancholy of a Former
Capital,” Japan Architect 11 (1993): 107.
1. June 1, 1945, diary entry, Henry Lewis Stimson Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale
University Library, New Haven, Connecticut, HR-51, roll 9.
2. Arai was crucial to the development of the Morphosis formal language during the early
years, when Thom Mayne was still in partnership with Michael Rotondi. In an interview with
Yoshio Futagawa, Mayne said, “Anybody who was familiar with the office during the ’80s
was well aware that Kazu Arai developed into my third partner....I’m not sure, in the end,
who had more effect on who.” From GA Document Extra 09: Morphosis, ed. Yukio Futagawa
(Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1997), 29.

185

Urban Views
More Lines
Ari Seligmann

Resonating with this book’s underlying intention to trace genealogies

and tendencies across recent developments in Japanese architecture,
this afterword identifies some of the lines that lead to and themes that
weave through the texts. A brief historiography, which highlights a hand-
ful of canonical English language books, sets out contours of an intellec-
tual landscape of foreign observations of Japan’s urban environments.
By connecting the dots through evolving discourses and across this com-
pilation, additional figures and readings emerge.
Accounts of Japanese architecture in English began to appear
at the end of the nineteenth century after the reopening of Japan, in
conjunction with the drive to modernize the country. The zoologist
Edward Morse was a groundbreaking interpreter who provided carefully
documented and detailed descriptions of domestic architecture in his
Japanese Homes and their Surroundings (Ticknor and Co., 1885). Though
written at a time when Japan was compulsively looking to the West for
role models, Morse highlighted lessons that Japanese domestic arrange-
ments might offer the rest of the world. Similarly, Ralph Adams Cram’s
Impressions of Japanese Architecture and the Allied Arts (Baker & Taylor
Co., 1905) enthusiastically celebrated local achievements in the face of
the Western influences that were reshaping Japanese cities, and also
proposed architectural principles for consideration. These early authors
provided exotic accounts for external audiences and enhanced the inter-
nal appreciation of indigenous developments.
A subsequent wave of publications emerged immediately prior
to World War II, documenting and valorizing historical Japanese architec-
ture as a role model for modernist architecture. BrunoTaut’s Fundamentals
of Japanese Architecture (Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai [The Society for
 International Cultural Relations], 1936) and his ethnographic travelogue
The Houses and People of Japan (Sanseido Co., 1937) exemplify this
approach. Enamored with their modularity and simplicity of expression,
Taut helped canonize Kyoto’s Katsura Imperial Villa (built in the seven-
teenth century) and Ise Shrine (reconstructed at approximately twenty-
year intervals since the seventh century) as potential prototypes for
modern architecture.
This interpretive framing of Japanese architecture continued after
World War II, propelled by a MoMA exhibition and Arthur Drexler’s accom-
panying catalog, The Architecture of Japan (1955), in which he asserts:

The relevance of Japan’s architectural tradition to contemporary Western

building is well known. Modern Western practice, with its general use of the
steel skeleton frame, has developed effects known to Japanese architecture
at least since the eighth century. . . . Open interiors and plain surfaces, as in
the work of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, are other ideas characteris-
tic of Japan which we have been developing in our own way.1

William Alex’s historical survey Japanese Architecture (George

Braziller, 1963) was a spin-off from the MoMA show that reinforces
archetypal aspects of Japanese architecture. Similarly, Norman Carver’s
Form and Space in Japanese Architecture (Shokokusha, 1955) provided
a primarily pictorial essay intended to offer “insight into abstract ideas
which impelled traditional Japanese architecture and their implications
for modern architecture.”2 Werner Blaser’s Structure and Form in Japan:
Architectural Reflections (Wittenborn, 1963) echoes Carver by stressing
sensibility, flexibility, and integration. Generally, these authors admired
Japanese architecture but instrumentalized it to advance modern archi-
tecture.
Udo Kultermann’s New Japanese Architecture (Praeger, 1960)
shifted the focus from historical to contemporary work. Though pref-
aced with a historical exegesis, Kultermann presented a range of build-
ing types and introduced contemporaneous practitioners, broadening
the prevailing interests in modular wood construction by introducing
concrete postwar projects that both extended Corbusian legacies and
identified regional variations of modernism in Japan. Subsequent pub-
lications such as Robin Boyd’s New Directions in Japanese Architecture
187 (George Braziller, 1968) and Egon Tempel’s New Japanese Architecture
 (Praeger, 1969) reiterated Kultermann’s approach. Yet none of these
authors were specialists. In J. M. Richards’s travelogue, An Architectural
Journey in Japan (Architectural Press, 1963), Japan was merely one des-
tination on his surveys of world architecture.3 Unlike Morse and Taut, who
spent extended periods in Japan, these authors were primarily architec-
tural tourists reporting and promoting recent trends.
Another explosion of global coverage occurred in the 1980s.
Japanese architecture attracted interest not only as an exemplary re-
gional modernism but also as a wellspring of provocative alternatives,
fed by the smooth flow of funds that inflated the bubble economy. This
period also saw the increased recognition of area specialists on Japanese
architecture and a broader diversity of approaches that echoed the plu-
rality of postmodernism.
With The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture (Kodansha,
1987) David B. Stewart pioneered historical accounts of the development
of modern architecture in Japan, tracing its introduction, interpreta-
tion, and evolution from the end of the nineteenth century until the late
1970s. He bridged gaps between the Western-inspired architecture
rejected by Cram and the regional modernism celebrated by Kultermann.
Following in Stewart’s footsteps, Botond Bognar’s Togo Murano (Rizzoli,
1996) monograph and Jonathan Reynolds’s rigorous study Maekawa
Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture (University
of California Press, 2001) document evolving strands of modernism
through the careers of leading figures.
Bognar’s Contemporary Japanese Architecture (Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1985) continued the legacy of celebrating current work but syn-
thesized several approaches. Bognar prefaced his account with a brief
narrative of development from prehistory to postmodernism that built
on Günter Nitschke’s seminal work from the 1960s onward, much of it
anthologized in From Shinto to Ando: Studies in Architectural Anthropol-
ogy in Japan (Academy Editions, 1991). Bognar’s text thickens the branches
of the genealogy proposed by Michael Ross in Beyond Metabolism, The
New Japanese Architecture (McGraw Hill Book Company, 1978) but relies
on Chris Fawcett to expand Ross’s survey beyond metabolism. Fawcett’s
The New Japanese House (Harper & Row, 1980), which furthered the
discourse by challenging clichés of domestic design that had been ossi-
fying from Morse onward, introduced the emerging generation of post-
188 metabolists that Bognar was to further promote. While his subsequent

After the Crash

 publications are equally synthetic endeavors, Bognar continues to
assiduously track the trends of Japanese architecture.4
Tom Daniell joins this long line of pundits, sharing their reverent
appreciation and critical drive to grasp the strange familiarities,
unsettling incongruities, and fascinating potentials of the Japanese built
environment. However, this publication introduces a new genre of observa-
tions on Japan, presenting the architectural equivalent of Donald Richie’s
A Lateral View (Japan Times, 1987). Immersed in the practice of architec-
ture and daily routines in Japan, Daniell writes from the perspective of
a participant-observer. While resonating with his predecessors, he ana-
lyzes and articulates contemporary conditions through vivid vignettes.
Following postwar modernisms and postmetabolist pluralism, this col-
lection designates a subsequent period of architectural production as
“post-bubble,” portraying scenes of both effervescence and stillness.
In terms of themes, Daniell is standing on the shoulders of giants,
all of whom are oriented by recurring tropes. However, this compilation
attempts to look in different directions and to broaden perspectives. A
common strategy employed throughout the essays is to define positions
at the edges of peripheral vision and describe the rich panorama that
emerges in between. His considerations span the limits of dichotomies,
such as chaos-pragmatics, nature-artifice, expression-simplicity, and
visceral-versus-ephemeral minimalism. While the texts offer new insights,
the traditional-modern dichotomy and notions of ephemerality that pre-
occupied many of the author’s predecessors often reappear.
The coordination of traditions and modernity continues to fas-
cinate observers of Japan but often manifests in the incessant forging
of links between historical and contemporary developments. The writer
John Morris Dixon typifies this approach:

my reaction to any new work in Japan is inevitably conditioned by these

exemplars from the past. I look for signs of that peculiarly Japanese austerity,
those subtle shifts in repetitious patterns, those contrasts of rich incident
with sublime blankness. It is easy to find these beloved characteristics in
much of the current Japanese work.5

Similarly, in addition to noting contrasts and ruptures, this com-

pilation repeatedly draws historical connections—whether positioning
189 Horyuji Temple and miya style in contrast to Ise Shrine and sukiya style

More Lines
 in discussions of Kansai-kan, or considering the Yokohama International
Port Terminal as a reinterpretation of the stroll garden, or noting how the
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa reflects long
established spatial organizations.
As with most studies of Japan, a concern with transience also
suffuses these essays. However, ephemerality is treated in a nuanced
manner, with religious-philosophical worldviews, natural disasters,
modernization efforts, rampant commercialism, and economic cycles
proposed as some of the factors that generate an inherently unstable
urban landscape. While acknowledging the flux, Daniell rightly rejects
hackneyed characterizations of chaotic Japanese cities. He interrogates
those portrayals that reinforce perceptions of chaos and introduces
alternative images. Drawing on lived experiences, he elucidates the
conventions, codes, laws, and land-use patterns that mold the built
environment.
Many of the essays highlight instabilities in the Japanese urban
environment that present innumerable challenges and potentials for archi-
tecture. The reconciliation of pristine architectural projects with messy
urbanism is a key line of inquiry throughout, and he identifies strategies
for negotiation—such as “retreating,” “reflecting,” or “blending”—that
offer valuable lessons. While the texts tend to focus on individual works,
they often contain hints of larger urban repercussions. Daniell paints an
image of Japanese urbanism as a fluctuating pointillist carpet, but col-
lectively, these essays gather fragments into a mosaic of contemporary
Japan, reflecting the multiple forces that shape architecture and urban-
ism in discourse and practice.
The texts accomplish more than merely demonstrating “amaz-
ing architecture from Japan” or “learning from the Japanese city.”6 The
montage of scenes contained in this volume bracket a decade of uneven
developments and set the stage for the continued evolution of Japanese
architecture. Japan has weathered many cycles of crash and recovery—
post-war, post-quake, post-modern, post-bubble, and so on—but these
essays are far from postmortem analyses. They identify vitality and the
promise of more to come.

190

After the Crash

 Ari Seligmann is a critic specializing in developments of international and Japanese archi-
tecture, as well as a designer with experience in the United States and Japan. He completed
a dissertation, Architectural Publicity in the Age of Globalization (2008), at the University of
California, Los Angeles, and is currently an adjunct professor at Woodbury University in
Burbank, California.

1. Arthur Drexler, The Architecture of Japan (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 6.
2. Norman F. Carver Jr., Form and Space in Japanese Architecture, 2nd ed. (Kalamazoo, MI:
Documan Press, 1993), 6.
3. The following are additional surveys of international architecture by these authors: Udo
Kultermann, Architecture of Today, a Survey of New Building Throughout the World (London:
A. Zwemmer, 1958); Udo Kultermann, New Architecture in Africa (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1963). Robin Boyd, The New Architecture (Victoria: Longmans, 1963) on Australian
architecture. Egon Tempel’s New Finnish Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1968); J. M.
Richards, Modern Architecture in Finland (London: Finnish Travel Information Centre, 1964);
J. M. Richards, A Guide to Finnish Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1966).
4. For example, Bognar’s The New Japanese Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1990) incorpo-
rates essays by several authors. In general, publishing on Japanese architecture is a bit like
the field of pop music, littered with one-hit wonders and few repeat performances. Bognar
is one of the few gaining authority through multiple book publications.
5. John Morris Dixon, “Introduction: Japanese Avant-garde Architects,” in The New
Japanese Architecture, Botond Bognar (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 10.
6. See Hiroshi Watanabe, Amazing Architecture from Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1991)
and Barrie Shelton, Learning from the Japanese City (London: E&FN Spon, 1999).

191

More Lines
 Source Credits
The texts in this book are protected by copyright. The original versions appeared
in the following publications:

“Less Than Zero: Minimalism and Beyond.” ERA21, December 2005, 43–45. Originally published as “Méne než
nic: Minimalismus a období po nem v soucasné japonské architekture.”
“Re: Contextualism.” In Minihäuser in Japan, edited by Hannes Rössler, 17. Salzburg: Verlag Anton Pustet,
2000. Originally published as “Re: Kontextualismus.”
“Kazunari Sakamoto: Keeping the Faith.” In Kazunari Sakamoto: Houses, edited by the Deutscher Werkbund,
56–59. Munich: Birkhäuser, 2004. Originally published as “Das Vertrauen Bewahren.”
“The Visceral and the Ephemeral.” Archis, March 1999, 8–24. Originally published as “Het Introverte en het
Efemere: Abstractie in de hedendaagse Japanse architectuur.”
“Kazuhiro Ishii: Meta-architecture.” Archis, November 2000, 58–63. Originally published as “Kazuhiro Ishii:
Meta-architectuur.”
“The Refraction House.” Domus 835 (March 2001): 136–45. Originally published as “La Casa Danza.”
“Two Degrees of Separation.” De Architect, December 2000, 30–33. Originally published as “Hakama in Kyoto
van Jun Tamaki.”
“The Hu-tong House.” Domus 862 (September 2003): 90–99. Originally published as “La Casa dell’Artista.”
“Pushing the Envelope.” Mark, April 2007, 166–73.
“Brand Recognition: The FOB Homes System.” In Home Front: New Developments in Housing, edited by Lucy
Bullivant, Architectural Design 73, no. 4  (July/August 2003): 82–89. Originally published as “Architects as
‘Housemakers’ in Japan.”
“Reflecting Modern Life.” In Housing is Back, edited by Peter Ebner, 150–53. Vienna: Springer Verlag, 2006.
“Living Dangerously.” Mark, September 2006, 112–21.
“The Sendai Mediatheque.” De Architect, March 2001, 38–45. Originally published as “Icoon van een Nieuwe
Generatie Publieke Architectuur.”
“The Glass Library.” Domus 858 (April 2003): 94–105. Originally published as “La Biblioteca di Vetro.”
“Immaculate Conception: The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art.” Archis, December 2004, 92–97.
“Balancing Act: MVRDV in Japan.” Archis, November 2003, 76–89.
“Organ: Metabolism without Megastructure.” Archis, December 1996, 11–12. Originally published as “Een
Uitgekleed Expressionisme: Het ORGAN-gebouw van Katsu Umebayashi.”
“Kisho Kurokawa in Malaysia.” Archis, June 1997, 62–67. Originally published as “Kisho Kurokawa in Maleisië.”
“Mirage City: Another Utopia.” Archis, February 1998, 55–60. Originally published as “Een Ander Utopia:
Mirage City van Arata Isozaki.”
“Back to Nature.” Archis, July 2001, 33–34.
“Strange Attractor: Yokohama International Port Terminal.” Archis, October 2002, 105–9.
“Borrowed Scenery: Walking in the Footsteps of Laurie Anderson.” Volume no. 2 (June 2005): 46–50.
“Fitting In: Small Sites in Urban Japan.” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 328 (June 2000): 80–83. Originally
published as “Japon: Les petits espaces, défi de l’architecture urbaine.”
“Pretty Vacant: The Photographs of Takashi Homma.” Archis, May 2000, 36–41. Originally published as “Tameli-
jk Leeg: De foto’s van Takashi Homma.”
“Letter from Kyoto.” Mark, June 2006, 198–207.

Image Credits
All images © Thomas Daniell unless otherwise noted.
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art 103r, 104; Arata Isozaki & Associates 132, 135; Architectural
Body Research Foundation 83, 84, 87; Atelier Bow-Wow 16–17, 29; FOBA 70, 72–74, 118; Foreign Office
Architects 148, 151; Raphael Azevedo Franca 81; Terunobu Fujimori 144, 145; Sou Fujimoto 24tr; Fumio
Toki & Associates 99, 100; Hiroyuki Hirai 61; Takashi Homma 171, 174, 175; Junya Ishigami 22; Jun Aoki &
Associates 40, 42l, 44; Cheryl Kaplan 158, 159; Kazuhiro Ishii Architect & Associates 47, 48; Kazuyo Sejima
& Associates 24tl, 77, 78; Kisho Kurokawa Architect & Associates 124; MVRDV and Super-OS 107, 111, 112;
Nacasa & Partners 66, 96; NTT InterCommunication Center 139; Tomio Ohashi 114, 126, 129; Christian R.
Orton 140, 177, 181l, 182, 185; Kazunari Sakamoto 32–34; SANAA 24bl, 38, 39; Shin Nippon Houki Shuppan
164; Kazuo Shinohara 18, 167l; Yoshio Shiratori 55, 56; Kei Sugino 59; Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama 65r; Tamaki
Architectural Atelier 58; Toshiaki Ishida Associates 42r, 43; Toyo Ito & Associates 25, 26, 93, 94; Yoshiharu
Tsukamoto 30; Waro Kishi + K Associates 62; Makoto Yokomizo 24br; Yasutaka Yoshimura 168; Ikumi
192 Yoshizawa 64, 65l

After the Crash