When I was a young student, just starting to learn about architecture I am quite certain I had a lot of mistaken ideas about what architecture could be and what it was for.  Over time experience has given me a better understanding.  Learning to understand the role of landscape however was a much more difficult process.  Not because it is that much harder to learn about, only that in most architecture offices (or at least the ones that i worked at) landscape was reduced to the bit of land left over after the building has been put up.  That was certainly the approach of my first office here in Japan, which might be surprising considering the mythical connection with nature that Japanese culture is supposed to give its citizens.

My university in Canada tried to teach me better, but it was moving to Tokyo that  was the real cure.  Dealing with the intense urban landscape forced us to be very careful with how we treat the ground and the way we manage the landscape spaces in our projects. Of course it also helps that Koen was taught architecture by one of the best landscape architects in the world, Adriaan Geuze.

In the Yoyogi house the landscape is as important as the building.  This project is no different.  The decks on the upper levels are what make the house a special place.  But what of the ground floor?  In previous posts I have talked about how dark it will be on the ground floor, and how much of the space available will be needed for cars to turn around.  That is true, but does not mean the ground floor needs to look like a parking lot, nor that the entrance to the home needs to look anything less than inviting.

Our solution to the ground floor landscape design is to create a hard surface landscape.  This is partly to keep costs down, but also to enhance the impression of a large open space.  The site is about 140m2, but the first floor only takes up about 40m2, and so we wanted to show off as much of the remaining 100m2 leftover.

Space in this city is luxury, and being able to feel that kind of open-ness is not common at all.

first sketch plan for site

preparing the site to pour concrete on ground floor

preparing the site to pour concrete

The base and the grade beam that tie the angled steel column to the house will be made into a small hill

laying out formwork to accommodate the curving entrance path

pump truck ready 
to pour concrete deep into the site.  It is always amazing that the crew are able to get these large vehicles right up to the site without damaging the tress on the street

waiting for the concrete truck to arrive

concrete is poured

spaces for cars are marked with circular stamps in the concrete

next is the path leading from the street to the house, to be filled with stones.

I love the crate the stones came in.  Usually construction materials come in neat hygienic boxes, like french fries shipped to a mcdonalds, but not these.  These are robust!

The final image is intended to be something like this.  We should see in the next few days how close we can get.

Building in tokyo is a hard thing.  In the 1970′s Kazuo Shinohara led a movement that included adherents such as Tadao Ando  and Toyo Ito which even suggested it was impossible to deal with the city in any way and that the correct decision was to retreat from it and to create an interior world that would not be disturbed by urban life going on outside poetically fortified walls.

Given the business of the city it is easy to appreciate that point of view, and certainly some beautiful and interesting buildings were made as a result.  I guess it even led Ando on the path to become the Pritzker prize winning architect that he is.  And yet it also seems to be an approach that misses opportunities.  Our work in a way is based on an experimental point of view that challenges the premise that Shinohara and Ando have followed for so long.  We think it is possible to get a lot more form urban sites than poetic  interior spaces, and we are working on showing exactly what that might mean.

In the Yoyogi House we opened the house to its surroundings, extending the street into its heart where it was transformed into a garden and then a wood deck.  The open-ness makes the home feel much larger than its 80m2 would lead one to expect.  And it creates a wonderful interior space where the owner has planted strawberries and tulips and is able to enjoy the seasons not only by noticing the rain or the snow, but by seeing the changes in the plants growing in her garden.

yoyogi house

With Minami Azabu house the clients wanted something different, and the site is in any case an entirely different type, so we took things in a different direction.

the site

Needing open room on the ground level, to turn a car on the small site, the possibility of pulling the street into a landscape did not seem right here.  The shape of the site also imposed strict legal constraints on the volume of the home, meaning it would be hard to create open space without giving up large amounts of floor area.  So instead we took a simplistic direction.  We chose to divide the home into three functional parts, and stacked them…

Still wanting to make a comfortable landscape we created a large hard surfaced open space on the ground, and placed green spaces on the upper levels.  As I explained in earlier posts this makes a lot of sense for other reasons too – in a site as crowded by homes as this one, a garden on the ground level would be very dark.

3f diagram

While the first two floors are relatively closed off from the site, the third floor opens up on three sides to decks and to a stairway that takes us up to the roof.

roof diagram

As diagrams these are quite nice, but making them work in the building itself was a bit of a challenge.  For legal reasons we could not make the floor heights very high on each floor or we would quickly go over the 10 meter limit,and for the same reason we needed to make the depth of the floors as small as possible.  Normally that is very easy, but in this case we wanted to create a cavity space in the floors.  On the third floor that gave us room to run pipes for the kitchen and the washroom, and at the point where the inside meets the outside it made it possible to have a good waterproofing detail without having to step up or down to go onto the deck.

section through deck

The way to make this all work out was to reverse the beams, lifting them up into the cavity space.  The floor remained shallow and the decks were flush with the interior floor.

substructure on 3f deck

installing

finished

We used similar details with all of the exterior decks, including the roof, which has three separate finish systems including a green roof system from Tajima roofing, a concrete block system, and a wooden deck.  Each of these has a different substructure and different requirements, so we needed to be very careful to get them to all mesh together on site.  In the end, we were able to resolve the inevitable problems that emerged on site, and the crew put the roof together perfectly.

root guard

soil containers

soil container

the soil container is built with gaps in its face to allow water to move through it.  Before filling these big sand boxes with soil the crew put in a permeable sheet to keep the soil in place as well as a layer of plastic trays that look more or less like large egg crates.  These are used to hold a little bit of the water in the soil while allowing for drainage underneath.  It is a very clever system that makes a green roof possible even on a wooden house.

installing concrete blocks

putting in soil ( a lightweight mix made by the roofing company), and railing installed on the roof

putting in soil on the third floor deck

the same deck with concrete tiles added

When it is all put together it makes for a rather nice series of outdoor spaces that extend the interior rooms out into the city, and creates a large outdoor room on the roof

two of the decks meeting on the third floor

roof deck, nearly complete

It continues to amaze me that the Yoyogi house somehow has maintained traction over the last year and continues to be published in journals.  Recently it was in the Korean version of Details magazine, and this month it came out once again in a Korean publication, this one called C3.

The folks at C3 work fast.  We gave them the information only a few weeks ago and already we have two copies on the desk.

A beautiful magazine too.  Considering the speed they produced it I am seriously impressed.  They either don’t sleep or are just that professional.  Probably the truth is a bit of both.

This journal is actually mostly interesting for us because it is the first time we are the focus of analysis by a writer.

Usually we provide the text and it is slipped into the magazine without much change along with the images, but this time the editors added an essay that explains why the project is included in the journal to begin with.  I know it is not really a big deal, but it is a kind of new threshold for us so I hope you will forgive me if I copy the relevant text here.

The article is called Urban How: Infill and is written by Marco Atzori.  It is fairly long, but the relevant bit for us goes like this:

“…And thus internal space or space related to the private realm becomes, in all analyzed cases so far, an element of deep and attentive investigation capable of explicitly highlighting in depth the cultural implications related to social relations that are developed in the contemporary society where the residence is a space of protection from the collectivity.  The private and intimate dimension, expresses today as never before the struggle towards getting physically farther, seeking distance, constructing, as it occurs in the presented projects, a self-referential and isolated space: a space for defense.

Even when the building seeks a spatial continuity with its surrounding space, such as in the case of the Yoyogi House of  frontofficetokyo, still, the private realm is evidently expressed as a protected universe, separated from a context that is construed as a spatially and socially aggressive one.  Is the contemporary residence more than ever a place for individual protection from society and the city?

The Yoyogi House is an example to be examined attentively, as its compositional structure produces a spiral sequence that is based on a filtering landscape, a garden on an inclined plane that is posed in a visual relation to the inside with a series of wide glass planes that open up to the same garden.  The focal point is concentrated on the internal courtyard which although it physically creates continuity with its surrounding, it simultaneously pushes away the residents from the city, and identifies a self sufficient universe that sets spatial and temporal perceptions away from the reality that surrounds it.  Ans thus it is a protective space that does not necessitate physical separation to assert the distinction between private and public, but simply through courtyard spatial solutions (the inclined plane), asserts hierarchy and distinction between the domain of the intimate and the collective.  Just like the other buildings, the main facade does not seek any relation with the outside.  The permeability of the inside is opposed with the hardness of the urban facade, expressed in both the use of materials and the limitation of openings, reduced to a single horizontal and continuous window conceived as an engrave on the facade.  Unlike the other residences, the front side does not have a primary role; it does not highlight itself as a single unit amidst the urban structure, but through a sophisticated choice, it inserts itself as an additional piece inside the dense and chaotic panorama of the metropolis.”

I won’t say we agree with every point, but it is an interesting comment. What is particularly cool is that we are not required to interpret our own work this time.  That is an unexpected kind of freedom.

If interested in the entire article you can download it here (9.65Mb).

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.

the last few months we have been busy with lectures and travel, and otherwise things are just….happening.

Recenty we have been lucky enough to be invited to lecture at universities in Canada and Israel, and have been active writing papers for academic journals. I will post some of these in the future, once I figure out how to make them blog-friendly.

Somehow the Yoyogi house still seems to be interesting to people as well. Two weeks ago I gave a tour to a group of archi-cyclists, which was a great experience. Organised by a fellow who runs what I can only call an old-time “cultural salon” here in Tokyo, the theme of the tour was buildings by Dutch architects. Since we are half Dutch we were put on the list along with offices including MVRDV and others, which is awesome company.

The house also was published online at arch-daily, which is great considering the quality of work that usually appears on that site. Because its digital, we get to read the feedback of readers, which is sometimes odd, but fun to read nonetheless.

Finally, on the PR front, Terri Peters wrote a very flattering article on our office that was published in Clear Magazine this month.

Other things also in the works, so looks like we will have lots more to write about here in the next months.