Jijinsai = Ground-breaking ceremony.

There can be no better way to start construction than with a ceremony to wish the endeavor good luck.

It is surreal to be asking for good luck from the spirits in a parking lot, with the temporary shrine set over a numbered space, and a truck parked to one side, but the god-spirits of Japan are not elitist that way.   And the ceremony itself is great.  A kind of reverse catharsis – not clearing the tension but building it up.

Actually now that I think on it, it is fascinating that houses and parking lots sit perfectly content side-by-side.  That is not even an artifact of urban life, nor something that is limited to Tokyo, but a possibility for any site anywhere in Japan.  I have written about it in academic papers, but never made the connection with our architectural work.  It is a symbol of the amount of flexibility and freedom available to us here as architects and planners.  It also makes for an interesting set of photographs.

Tokyo is famous for being in constant motion, always in flux, perpetually unbuilt.

Somehow it doesn’t feel that way when it comes time to actually design here.  To be fair, there is no certainty about what kind of building will be your neighbour in the next five years, that is perfectly true.  But Tokyo is not a frontier city, with large fields beckoning  to be built up with new communities -  instead most new communities (and houses) are built on infill land, cobbled together over years, or grabbed up when it becomes available.

For architects there are all kinds of implications, especially since there is no master plan shaping Tokyo at all and the location of homes and businesses is very nearly a random thing.  But perhaps the most overlooked reality is that each project is a bit like discovering a different city.  Just when we think we have gotten ahold of things, we find something new.

The site for this home is no exception.

It sits like a mushroom terminating a long and winding road.  The property itself shares half of the road with a neighbour, so that only 2 meters (about 6 feet) of the tarmac actually touches the site.  Just large enough for a car to squeeze through.  That is, after sliding under two trees, which form a green bridge of sorts across the gap between houses.  This is a rather nice effect actually, and one we hope we can keep intact even though there will be construction trucks of some size passing through.

The site itself is hemmed in on 4 sides by buildings, but we are lucky that the property to the West is currently occupied by a wedding chapel and well planted with trees.  Setback regulations designed to ensure solar access also work well for us, and the faux-brick building to the south steps back sharply, allowing an abundance of light to enter the site.

Looking further afield, a park and green space is, for Tokyo, rather abundant.  All in all, a nice place to build a house.

In an unofficial poll amongst a group of architects on the content of this blog I was asked to show a bit of process in our work.

The problem is that while it is a great idea, in the end so much of the process that drives architectural design is filled with stillborn images and half-complete models that finding a nice way to present it in a way that makes any sense at all is a bit of a challenge.  All those fantastic animations from BIG and OMA make it seem so easy, as if they went from A to Z in a straight line (this is one of my favorites).  The reality, for us at least, is a host of zig-zagging branches that more often than not simply stop.  I have piles of sketchbooks and decrepit models to prove it.

So for the sake of our own sanity, and out of simple recognition that we don’t have the time to make the detritus of our normal messy methods into anything presentable, we instead will simplify by showing a few sketches and models and try to explain the basic concept in a bit more detail than normal.

In the meantime, I will start in the middle, with a group of sketches for the project that marked the point where we had finally worked out the main ideas of the design.  A stack of images and models came before this and after as well, but at the end the house is going to look more or less like this.

entrance to the site

kitchen and stairs to roof deck

aerial sketch used to illustrate revised structure after original version hit roadblock

The why, where, and when of the house are topics I will leave for the future.

we have been busy as hens in a fox house for the past few months and blogging has always somehow ended up as the last thing on the to-do list.  Part of the busy-ness is that I was asked to do two lecture courses on planning and architecture at Waseda University last fall and as I now know from experience, speaking for 6 hours a week takes about 20 hours a week of preparation.  The course is over though and it is now break time so here I am again.   Luckily we will return to the blog with a new building that is just about to begin construction, which was really the point of this blog to begin with.  More of that in future posts.

In other news we are still finding the Yoyogi house is attractive to publications, which is a bit of a surprise, if a nice one.  It will be featured in C3 magazine in near future, and was included in the Korean version of Detail magazine last September.  If interested in the latter you can download by clicking on the cover image below (15.7Mb)

More about the new building under way in future posts.