Just a house

Hiroshi Sugimoto's reconstructed Chashitsu teahouse.

Japan seems to be a place where housing, the very notion of "the house", is being constantly questioned, rediscussed and reinvented.  The historical ephemerality of Japan's architecture is widely known. It is partly due to the use of wood as construction material (with good resistance against earthquakes but always endangered by fire), and partly to traditional customs, exemplified by this passage of the Book of Tea by Okakura Kazuko:

"The tea-room [...] is not intended for posterity and is therefore ephemeral. The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. [...] Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days. The rebuilding, every twenty years, of Ise Temple, the supreme shrine of the Sun-Goddess, is an example of one of these ancient rites which still obtain at the present day. The observance of these customs was only possible with some form of construction as that furnished by our system of wooden architecture, easily pulled down, easily built up." (Okakura 1906 (2001):40) 

During my current stay in Tokyo I had the chance to visit the HOUSE VISION exhibition. In the homepage the organizers declare no less that "if you would like to see the future of Japan please come". The aim of the exhibition is to give a hint about possible outcomes of a coupling between technology firms and building industry, showing seven 1:1 scale houses/pavilions, designed by internationally renowned Japanese architects, in partnership with different firms. Kengo Kuma designed the exhibition site (in Odaiba) and the show featured, among others, architects Toyo Ito, Sou Fujimoto, Riken Yamamoto, Shigeru Ban, photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, and firms like Honda, Lixil, Toto. The architects' creativity and the the firms technology were supposed to match, in order to achieve new standards and new modes of living. This resulted, e.g., in Fujimoto's blurring boundary between interior and exterior space (the street), introducing small, personal vehicles in the house or in Ito's will to have undefined and multi-functional spaces.

Even though the house of the future is a trite idea (think about the Smithsons' House of the Future), it is remarkable that this exhibition generally focused on low-profile, down-to-earth ideas, far away from the metabolic frenzy of the '60s and '70s in Japan.

Fujimoto's pavilion.

Ito's house.

Japan's land use, especially the land use of Tokyo, is characterized by small, usually narrow parcels, belonging to different owners. This is an additional reason why small, single, residential buildings incarnate the essence of Japanese architecture. The private house is, therefore, a fundamental typology in every architect's work. Even though some clear trends in contemporary Japanese housing can be highlighted, like the blurring of interior and exterior spaces (e.g. Tezuka Architects), the sublimation of walls into membranes (e.g. SANAA) and the integration of greenery and natural elements (e.g. Junya Ishigami), there remain heretic, anti-modern characters like Terunobu Fujimori, complementing the kaleidoscopic nature of the Japanese "house".

Terunobu Fujimori's house in Kokubunji, Tokyo.

References:
Okakura, K. (1906) The Book of Tea (2001) Dreamsmyth, USA

More pics

Plattenbaumuseum

Renovated Plattenbauten: extra metal-frame balconies in light-blue, existing ones with new blue glass-bricks.

If you can stand a bit of Ostalgie and have a Sunday off, the Plattenbaumuseum in Berlin Hellersdorf is worth the visit: in Hellersdorf, part of GDR, between 1976 and 1986 were built roughly 42.000 prefabricated concrete-slab apartments (Plattenbau), the majority of which consisting of WBS-70 typology. This type was characterized by a modular raster or 6 x 6 mt., a depth of 12 mt., floor height of 2.80 mt. usually rising till the 5th, 6th or 11th floor. A building with 30 apartments could be built in 4 weeks, 18 hours per apartment. In a WBS-70 could live a couple with one or two children, or a couple with no children who needed an extra working-room.

General WBS-70 plan.

Kitchen: note the all-present wallpaper.

Bedroom.

The company in charge of the renovation wanted to show how the original situation was, compared to the "new" apartments: in fact you can also visit the very next renovated apartment and see the difference. Getting rid of a partition wall and of wallpaper, reducing the rooms from three to two, adding an extra balcony, external insulation and increased care of the green spaces are quite easy moves. What unfortunately is harder to change is the absence of mixes functions in the neighborhood, and the relative distance from the city center (at least the perceived one) and from the Ring that runs across Berlin. One has anyhow to say that an underground station lies quite close to the blocks.

Two apartments at ground floor share the garden.

Ongoing renovation: note the external insulation being "attached" and the effort with colors.

New entrance with shed. Again the color-attempt.

An example of Plattenbau-description that escapes (n)ostalgia is "Platte mit Aussicht", a film-documentary on the Dresden-Gorbitz quartier.

Gorbitz - MyVideo

More and high-quality pics here.

Housing Problems - London 1935

In 1935 Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey, John Taylor and Ruby Grierson filmed Housing Problems, sponsored by the British Commercial Gas Association, an attempt to tackle the problem of slums in the outskirts of East London, seen both from the perspective of experts of planning and architecture (from whom we hear only the voice) and slum-inhabitants, exposed to the camera via direct interviews.

The Changing City - mid 1960s

Though oversimplifying reality and popular in attempt, this short film from the mid-1960s gives you an interesting hint of the debate about suburbia and the city in general in USA at that time, catalyzed
in New-York on one side by the journalist and activist Jane Jacobs and on the other by the urban planner Robert Moses: avoiding the risk of drawing a caricature of them as antagonists, it is nonetheless possible to say that Jacobs, especially with her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", 1961, addressed a sharp critique to the most rigid elements and aspects in terms of urban planning and architecture of Modernism, which Moses happened to represent. This film touches in 15 minutes the questions of sprawl and suburbia, car-dependency, social boredom; urban renewal and investment, decay of city-centers, governance.

Bearing in mind the contemporary tendency and easiness in pointing out the failures of Modernism, one of the main urban and housing modernist catastrophes, contemporary to Jacobs, was the 1954 housing project Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis, Missouri, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, best-known for the Twin Towers in New-York. The following is a description by Robert Hughes, quoting architecture historian Charles Jencks, claming the demolition of Pruitt Igoe (1972-74) to be the death of Modernism.



Like tragically September 11 and the Twin Towers, Pruitt Igoe became widely popular on screen, as you can see from Kooyanisqatsi, film documentary by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass.



Related posts:
Urban renewal: 1955 vs. 2006

Living in a productive landscape

View to fields

I post a recent project that I proposed together with Matteo Pietrantonio for our final crit this year: the site is a suburban village east from London, Rainham; moving from the wonderful book by Carolyn Steel Hungry City about the relationship between the city of London and food, and from André Viljoen's Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes we started developing our proposal.

 Suburban agriculture, London, 1945, featured in A. Viljoen's "CPUL's"

London Bridge agriculture, 1945, from Viljoen's CPUL's

The project addresses the theme of living in a suburban area, designing a new housing development in a brownfield, mixing row-houses of three different typologies with gardens and allotments, apartment buildings, light-industrial activities and small retail. A reclamation of polluted soil and of the green and water area along the creek is needed.

Urban agriculture could modulate various lifestyles, seen as a hobby, a nice way for retired people to spend their time, a mean of domestic economy, an educational tool, an opportunity for fresh food supply, with an overall attempt towards sustainability: shaks and rain-water-collection are provided for each garden, and by designing a local covered market and a botanical school the project tries to propel a sense of community for the new residential area.

Along the central pedestian “spine”, connecting the school with the market, a rickshaw transportation service is proposed; the nearby industrial area could serve as CHP provider for the new development, and PV panels are located in the residual space between two railway lines and on the rooftops of apartment and public buildings. Interviews with local people were a starting point for the design.


Dwellings:450
Inhabitants:1300

Wax model with and without intervention

If in 1940's urban agriculture was related to dig for victory, nowadays it has more to do with pleasure and hobby, especially in relation to the many retired people who live in Rainham.

Model of Rainham's (sub)urban fabric

Existing situation

General view: solar panels (pink), light-industrial activities (blue), school and market (red)

Masterplan

Close-up

Section through pedestrian "spine": water collection

"Urban" view: various typologies at ground floor

View to local market

Here high quality pictures

Beginenhof

I am coming again to Middle-Age; I know I have an obsession, so please forgive me.

I found here in Berlin, the social model of Beginenhof or Béguinage, reloaded: quoting from Wikipedia, "...a Béguinage is a collection of small buildings used by Beguines, which were several lay sisterhoods of the Roman Catholic Church, founded in the 13th century in the Low Countries, of religious women who sought to serve God without retiring from the world. A "Begijnhof" (as the Dutch name is) or Béguinage comprises a courtyard surrounded by small dwellings. It is often encircled by a wall and secluded from the town proper by one or two gates. Poor and elderly beguines were housed here by benefactors.

Leuven-Groot-Begijnhof, via Wikipedia. By Snowdog

"Béguinages are to be found in an area roughly corresponding with present-day Northern and North-Eastern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Western and North-Western Germany.

Their success, according to the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, was due to a surplus of women occasioned by violence, war, military and semi-military operations, which took the lives of many men. Great numbers of women had no option but to unite and collectively secure the aid of rich benefactors.

Starting from the data depicting in Berlin 600.000 women living alone, the 74-years-old sociologist Jutta Kamper proposed in 2000 Beginenhof, a social concept hosting only gentle-sex inhabitants: eight years later (with real-estate support by Kondor Wessels, the only men in this story) this community could settle in Kreuzberg, Berlin, in a building designed by architect Barbara Brakenhoff; apartments between 55 and 105 sq.m. at 2.200 €/sq.m. were conceived to differentiate following the desires of every owner. Here women are supposed to have their own social life, and whenever they want, to participate to the many activities arranged by the community, which spans from 30 to 70-years-old residents. The main rule is that men can stay at Beginenhof only temporarily or as flatmates, and each flat has to be owned by a woman.
Would be interesting to find out how the project will develop.