Filipe Magalhães: The limbo in which we, fala, operate - between the lack of interest of the client and the excess of ambition and enthusiasm on our side - is very similar to the situation Itsuko Hasegawa was confronted with, while designing her first houses in the 70s.
YOU PUBLISHED THE DRAWINGS AND PHOTOS OF THE HOUSE IN KAKIO IN YOUR RECENT BOOK ON JAPANESE HOUSES. FROM ALL THE BUILDINGS YOU ANALYSED, WHAT MADE YOU MAKE THIS CHOICE?
It is a house built with very little resources. It’s a banal construction of a boring brief. It’s a discrete, cheap, suburban house. However, the discrepancy between what we could call a very unappealing exterior and a phenomenal interior composition - not in a tectonic sense, but in a spatial and symbolic sense, is surprising. It is almost as if Itsuko designed a house that disappears from the outside on purpose, in order to protect the treasure that hides within.
It has two and a half levels - a social level, a so-called private level, and an attic level. The social level has some program in one corner and a big L - shaped living room in the other corner. The same structure applies to the private level, with some bedrooms in the first corner and a big master bedroom in the second corner.
My reading, however, tells me that the conventional understanding of this house - a social part, a private part, a bedroom, a living room, a space for family members, a space for guests - all these words that we usually use to define the daily life of a house, turn out to be completely irrelevant and insufficient to grasp the real quality present.
If you take all the furniture away from the plans, you end up with a house based on two games - a game between the main and the secondary spaces on each level, and a game between the outside rectangular shape and the inside curved shape, which create important differences and interdependence in the L-shaped rooms on each level. You discover a play of angles, surfaces and light that make sense, independent of any use. It is remarkable that there are no material or structural special effects: there are just walls, windows, ceilings, and floors. Everything is out of white painted plywood. In this sense, it is the work of a master, whereby she truly understood the tools and limitations present and used them only to her advantage. All this is just fantastic.
IN THE TEXT ITSUKO HASEGAWA WROTE ABOUT THE HOUSES SHE BUILT IN THE 70’ („MY WORK OF THE SEVENTIES” IN SD 04/85) SHE SURPRISINGLY UNDERLINES HER INTEREST IN „THE CONCERNS OF LIVING RATHER THAN ABSTRACT METHODS OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION”. THE HOUSE IN KAKIO, AS YOU STARTED TO EXPLAIN, IS DEFINITELY NOT ONLY ABOUT THE „CONCERNS OF LIVING”.
This entire generation wrote a lot about the mundane conditions in which they had to operate. Although they were strongly influenced by the ideas of Shinohara, they had to work in the shadow of the Metabolist movement and the emerging prefab house industry. Both praised standardised, repetitive dwellings, produced in huge quantities. The group Itsuko Hasegawa belonged to, were the grunge kids, the ones that had only tiny houses to deal with. They struggled a lot for what they believed was right and with the dilemma: „should we even try to be artists or should we be service providers” was very present in all of them.
Their ambitions, sensibilities and intellectual preparation were inspired by Shinohara’s „house as a work of art”, but their clients were very often not at all interested in architecture, had limited budgets, and tight schedules.
Itsuko Hasegawa worked for Shinohara at the university and knew his clients, who usually came from the higher layers of the society. She was living in both worlds - the elite, and the ordinary reality of a young architect in Japan. She was very conscious of the schizophrenic situation many of her colleagues had to find an answer to. To remain in practice, they were forced to rethink the strategies learned from Shinohara, as his school and methods turned out to be impossible to apply in the majority of cases.
Everything that came to happen in Itsuko Hasegawa’s career was triggered by this contradiction. What she quickly accepted was that maybe her vocabulary, her language, could not be as pure as Shinohara’s. Maybe she could not be as aggressive as he was. She had to create a certain balance, invent games and systems in order to achieve her goals as an author.
Even though she wrote about her doubts on the possibility of a house being a work of art, in Kakio she dodged the bullets, walked between the drops of rain, and found a way to do exactly that, almost pornographically making a house a work of art - without even boasting about it.
WHAT WAS HER ARTISTIC GOAL?
Itsuko Hasegawa never calls the L-shaped spaces bedroom and living room. Instead, she calls them „main room one” and „main room two.” This tells us a lot, because the rooms in the service block, all have names like kitchen, bathroom, washroom, or bedroom. L-rooms remain „main rooms”. It suggests that a house is not about specific uses. It is about space.
Secondary rooms are there for pragmatic reasons and eventually help to frame what is important. The only published picture of the service block is the staircase - a fundamental device to force you to go through a compressed space, and makes you almost forget the experience you had at ground floor before accessing the second L-shaped space on the first floor.
The ground floor L-shape room is divided in two. There’s a side with a dining table, facing the kitchen and the other which is always empty, both in photos and publications. You assume it to be the entrance space, a space to pass through, a kind of „washing room” where you get ready for what the house is going to reveal to you. In the corner, Itsuko Hasegawa designed a few pieces of fixed furniture. We have a classic triad - entrance, living, dining. All these functions are related to what happens in the service block and have a reasonable surface.
In a normal house, the living room is the biggest space. In this house, the upstairs master bedroom is almost the same area. Both in photos and drawings, the first floor L-shaped space is furnished with only two single beds, orientated on one side of the room. The rest of the room is just empty. At the end of each side of the L-shape, there is a desk, as if this space was meant for both sleeping and working. There is no other furniture. It is a kind of subversive twin of the room below. The floor is very dark, but all the walls are white. The doors have flush white frames ready to fully melt into the white wall surface. The plastic appeal of the natural light, that comes from windows not immediately visible, appears from the side, and hits the pitched ceiling, casting a shadow on the curve, is outstanding.
At ground floor, she had a very clear intention regarding what we can call a traditionalist perspective on program in the social space of a house.
Upstairs instead, there is clearly too much area for a standard bedroom, so the room automatically becomes something else. Thanks to this disproportion and peculiarity Itsuko Hasegawa demonstrates that function it is not the main motivation in her design, but something of another nature, something symbolic.
YOU USE THE WORD „SYMBOLIC” IN REGARD TO SPACE. WHAT DO YOU REFER TO?
I think the symbolic aspect has to do with rationality. A truly symbolic space or element puts you in a position to wonder why it is there, and why like this? It has an appeal of something out of ordinary, not easy to classify, a bit strange. It makes you interpret, think and discuss beyond the functional or technical descriptions.
As far as I am concerned, the way of thinking about functions in the classical sense, in which we think of a house in terms of an entrance hall, a living room, a bedroom, etc. is a very outdated perspective. In our practice we are looking for arrangements in which it is impossible to discern clear pragmatic answers. We introduce vague, abstract notions in order to find an anchor that will trigger some sort of inspired discussion - like the one we are having today.
What the Japanese references showed us during our research, was exactly the importance of blurring the boundaries between the real and the unreal in the sense of giving an alternative, deconstructing the stereotypes about how to live in a house. We want to be part of this family and look for the „thing” that we don’t know how to define very well. We call it a symbolic, or semiotic quality of space and elements.
WHAT DO YOU THINK PUSHED JAPANESE ARCHITECTS TO BECOME EXTRAORDINARILY SENSITIVE TO THIS QUALITY?
We can speculate on that. Japanese language has several symbols to define what we describe with one word. They have several symbols to define white, background etc. Understanding an empty white background from an European perspective is pretty clear, in Japan they would want to clarify how empty, which white, etc. The same thing applies to a column. We have words like column, post, pillar - a few definitions that pretty much refer to the same thing. The Japanese have numerous definitions for what a column means, depending on its position. If it’s in the centre of a structure, it has a specific name, if it’s on the perimeter, it has another If it is in what we could call a low-class building, it has a certain sense, if it is an important symbolic building, like a temple, it has another. It is deeply rooted in Japanese culture to be specific about the meaning of each word and as a consequence of each object.
However, what I believe to be the most important factor is that in this period architects not only intimately arrived at certain conclusions, but also theorised tremendously about their own work. All of these architects wrote and depicted what they were doing in texts published in several magazines. Shinkenchiku in the 80’ had a circulation of one hundred thousand prints every month. The general population was receiving theory from Mayumi Miyawaki, Kazunari Sakamoto and Itsuko Hasegawa among others at regular intervals. An ordinary citizen would probably read one of these texts once in a while. There was a huge diffusion of information that was not just photographic. Architectural theory was reaching everyone.
To a large extent, I think, the cliche of contemporary Japanese architecture, comes from the fact that this does not happen anymore. Last time Toyo Ito wrote a relevant text was probably 30 years ago. The current generation of star architects in Japan have moved in a very different direction. Even if you mention the research of Atelier Bow Wow, it is very different from what happened in Itsuko’s times. Nowadays, architects like Bow Wow are more interested in the urban scale than in the theory of architectural space making.
Japanese Architecture in the 70’s and 80’s was a moment created by economic and social issues which were then supported by an insanely intense publication frenzy, that in turn allowed a whole generation of architects to stop, think, experiment, read, communicate with each other and consequently, reach the masses. Miyawaki wrote a beautiful text, concluding, that all this effort was aimed at changing the world. There was a combat spirit and a mission. Their enemies at some point stopped being the Metabolists and started to be prefab houses. Similarly, to the impressionists who had to fight photography, architects had to find the energy to fight back, as something was trying to replace them.
The period in which the house we are discussing was built was a period when everything was happening very fast. The price of land was increasing drastically. Some of these houses lasted just a couple of years because the ever-increasing price of land meant they could be replaced right away. The architects knew that their houses were not meant to last. All this allowed Japanese clients to be a bit more flexible and allow more unconventional layouts. In Europe we built for a lifetime. They built for a decade. This makes a huge difference.
It’s very interesting to look at this phenomenon at a macro scale. The publications were really a game changer. Today, the prefab housing that still exists in Japan is deeply influenced by the design these architects theorised 40 years ago. Neither Casabella nor Domus managed to do that in Europe. All of these Japanese publications were contributing to this in Japan.
COMING BACK TO THE HOUSE IN KAKIO, WHAT DO YOU THINK WAS NOT POSSIBLE TO TRANSMIT IN PRESS?
There’s something that the publications of the house never managed to do, which was to explore the acoustic aspect of the house. If you imagine that you just entered, and there are five people having a dinner where the table is drawn, you don’t see them, but you hear them. And if you assume it’s a dinner time, you probably don’t have the natural light coming from the sides, you have some sort of artificial light near the table. You’re going to see the shadows of these people spread all over this white curved surface. In the publications the photos are never inhabited, they are staged and do not show the dynamic components of these spaces.
This is also an interesting point of discussion between Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura. Many years ago, at the school in Porto, they were debating if a house in front of the sea, should have a small window or a big window. They disagreed. Souto de Moura felt you should see the whole sea from the room. Siza instead said, no, you should make it small so that people are motivated to go to see the sea. It needs to become something you have to make an effort for.
I would say this Japanese generation agreed with Siza, thinking in terms of hints that attract and provoke you to make you move. I think the play of shadows and the social behaviour inside this house would have a profound effect, very different from what we see published.
WOULD YOU CALL THE HOUSE IN KAKIO A WHITE HOUSE OR A BLACK HOUSE?
I wouldn’t call it either. I think the white here is just circumstantial. It’s not a polemic white like the second style houses of Shinohara. It’s not an abstract white. More than anything else, it’s a means to an end. If you look at it in a timeline, the house in Kakio is built between the end of the second style of Shinohara and the beginning of the third style. I think this white is a white that just liberates something to happen, like in Tanikawa house, where the white makes the tree shaped columns and the sloped earth floor the protagonists of the space.
I think the white in Kakio and the dark carpet on the floor are necessary, so that you understand the light effects coming from two windows and the double height light source on the ground floor.
IN JAPAN, OFTEN YOU HAVE A WINDOW THAT DOESN’T HAVE A VIEW, IT GIVES ONLY A LITTLE BIT OF LIGHT BECAUSE THE LOTS ARE SO TIGHT. WHAT DO YOU THINK MIGHT BE AN ARGUMENT TO DESTROY THE COMMON STEREOTYPE OF A WINDOW AND CONCEIVE IT AS SOMETHING OTHER THAN A DEVICE TO PURELY LOOK OUT OF?
There’s a lot of theory about urban chaos of Japan and the relationship between architecture and the city written by different architects from the Metabolists to Sou Fujimoto. All of these generations were dealing with the very dense, metabolic urban condition and most often they designed windows just because the building needed to have them for light and ventilation, not because of whatever the window was going to reveal.
A window is one of the few elements that links a specific house to its specific place. The architects of this generation didn’t want it.
The photos of the windows in the house in Kakio, show them burned - the outside becomes just white. It’s another way of speaking about the autonomy of a house theorised by Shinohara - the house has no site, it does not belong to the context, it can be anywhere. If a window doesn’t give you a view it certainly helps to speak about this intention.
In house in Kakio the windows cut in the curved wall are facing the window in the outside wall, that gives some natural light to the main room in the groundfloor. However, I don’t think that Itsuko Hasegawa cared if the angle allowed a person to see through both windows at the same time. That’s not the topic at all.
All of the windows are squares, perfectly framed. They are more like paintings on the wall rather than actual anchors to the context that surrounds the house.
IS THERE ANY WAY IN WHICH YOU WOULD USE THIS HOUSE DIFFERENTLY? DO YOU HAVE SOME KIND OF DREAM OF HOW YOU WOULD MAKE THIS HOUSE YOUR OWN?
I wouldn’t put my bed in any of the main spaces. I would probably place it in the service part, and I could imagine the top level to be the space where I work, and the bottom level the space where I relate with other people, for example. Two main rooms could be for instance a room for the summertime and the room for the winter or a space to read and a space to work or to listen to music. I think the L-shaped rooms are too intense to just sleep in them. I think they have qualities and characteristics that extrapolate them to another level, a symbolic one. I could imagine them to be completely empty and just to walk through them once in a while. They have the fissure space quality of Shinohara’s second style houses, where you put a chair and it’s enough.
To me, the biggest provocations in this house are those two mattresses in the photos and plans. By putting the two beds there, I think, Itsuko Hasegawa is poking the „service provider versus artist” dilemma. She’s saying - “this is what I had to do: look how far I went to achieve what I wanted”.
IS THERE SOMETHING THAT REMAINS FOR YOU A MISTERY IN THE HOUSE IN KAKIO?
At the time when house in Kakio was built, Shinohara was working on Uehara House and Tanikawa House. He played with structure, symbolic structure. Itsuko Hasegawa also made houses that used structure to create spaces, for example, the house in Yaizu 2 - the structure is the house and vice versa. However, House in Kakio is one where the structure is pretty much disguised. You don’t know where the beams or columns are, except for one very specific moment, you can only see in one photo from the attic space - there is a column that appears and touches the roof in the point of convergence of all the surfaces. It doesn’t show up in the other levels. There’s no writing, nothing that refers to it. Itsuko Hasegawa published one specific photo of it in an international publication. She decided for some reason to reveal to the outside world that almost unperceiveble moment where the column appears. In the time when the positioning of structure and the expression of structure was so relevant, she reveals it only in the least important, and most difficult to access space. It leaves me wondering, what was she thinking about.
18.09.2021
