Ch. 4, pp. 174-179

At the end of the previous post I said the reason I think there are so many Japanese Pritzker Prize winners is that I don’t believe Japanese architects were ever that enamored and so hamstrung by the Western classical tradition to begin with. Japanese architects did modernism as well as anyone in the 1930s. In the 1950s and 60s, it was clear what The International Style was about. Minoru Yamada had a project featured in Johnson and Hitchcock’s 1932 self-promotional booklet. The two of them wrote of Yamada’s building, “A straightforward building without much refinement. The rounded edges blur the effect of volume”, whatever that was supposed to mean. It didn’t hurt their careers.

It didn’t hurt Mamoru Yamada’s either. In addition to the 1929 building above, he is known for designing the Tokyo Central Telegraph Office (1925), the Osaka Central Telegraph Office (1927), the Nagasawa Water Purification Plant (1959), Nihon Budokan (1964), and Kyoto Tower (1964).

In the 1970s, Japanese architects were wildly inventive and never sidetracked by post-modern classicism. Circa 1980, it was only Isozaki left toying with western references (or what we liked the think of them as) and Ando with Japanese ones (or what we liked to think of them as).

Not really caring about the Western classical tradition will of course generate architecture of intruiging novelty and wonder (to us) no matter if or how it is intended to be understood and experienced in Japan. Terunobu Fujimori and Riken Yamamoto are both following their own interests, Fujimori independently of Japanese architecture traditional or otherwise, and Yamamoto independently of the more recent conventions of Western architecture.

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Mass supply of standardized housing kills regionality

There was the mass supply of housing. The availabiltity of public funds saw the successive establishment of public housing entities. Enterprises founded around labour unions include the 1918 GAGFAH established with the Federation of Employees as the mother organization, and the GEHAG established by the German Federation of General Workers in 1924.” (T. Kodama and others, European and American Housing Policy, pp.106-107) Bruno Taut (1880–1938) was special advisor to GEHAG (special public housing association). Over the period 1924–33 when Taut was in Japan, some 12,00 units of housing were constructed. This would not have been possible if the housing had not been regulated and standardized. Regulation and standardization were the preoccupations of the architects of the time. It was a societal (national) requirement. For the first generation after WWI, what type of housing and how to supply it “was a national project linked to the formation of an economically configured society.” The housing strategy was regulated and standardized as part of the national strategy. It was not the case that the standardized housing simply became standardized architecture, but that the people who lived in them because standardized as well. Standardization bring with it the loss of regional identity. For example, “along with GAGFAH establishing many regional offices was the intentional erasure of regionality that large-scale corporations bring.” (ibid., pp.108-109)

This image is one such housing proposal by an architect of the time. (Fig. 4) The urban landscape of regulated and standardized housing blocks vanishing into infinity is surreal. Persons living in these buildings are faceless persons such as those appearing in a painting by Giorgio de Chirico. The place has been abstracted and so have the people. The housing blocks are repeated. Individual units and the housing blocks themselves are endlessly reproduced. It is an architecture that is based on social requirements and faithfully responds to those social requirements. There is an aesthetic to be found in the abstraction itself.

“Suppose replication techniques do not have any impact on the work of art, then it means only the characteristics of “now” and “here” remain, as if the work of art has been de-boned.” [I’m not confident of this translation. I’m thinking Benjamin means only the essential parts remain.] (Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Reprocution Techniques, p.13) With the thinking of Muthesius as the starting point, the architects of the twentieth century quickly lost their awareness of the “here” and “now”. Architecture that could be replicated came to urban environments no matter where they were, and without any relationship to the urban environment. The awareness of a relationship with the existing urban environment was not present in architects attempting to make regulated and abstracted architecture.

6. The System of One House per Family

Happiness within four walls

So then, what kind of people are these people that live in housing that is regulated, standardized, and replicated?

The occupants of the workers housing at Mulhouse were laborers managed by industrial capitalists, and the housing was constructed for the workers at those factories. The discovery of managed space and the management method known as “One House Per Family” were discovered to be extremely effective ways of managing the workforce. This managed space was expanded to the national level. The method made houses closed in order to ensure family privacy. Space was configured so it had to relationship to the space outside. This was the One House Per Family system.

Until then, “the house” had existed in the public realm. As has already been written, “the house” itself had the role of mediating the mutual relationships between the private realm and the public realm. (Refer to Ch. 1, Fig. 4) The spatial configuration was such that one part of the space within the house could be the private and intimate space of the house for the family alone. It was a system where there was no threshold space (or no-mans’ land). This intimate space was for the cyclic processes of living. It was a space for birth and learning, as well as a space for protecting those life processes. Below is a diagram of that space.

Figure 5 shows housing where those intimate relationships that are the family, are separated from the outside. The houses have no relationship with the outside, and that outside is not public space but simply space that is managed. The house exists within managed space. Persons living in such spaces learn to value privacy above everything else, and believe that happiness exists within that intimate space. They and their families are enclosed by four walls, and believe that happiness is them having their wardrobes and their beds, their tables and chairs, their dogs and cats and vases.” (The Human Condition, p.78) [GM: This last quote was closed but never opened so I’m just translating it as is.]

The nature of the One House Per Family system

This One House per Family system has the following characteristics.

1. The One Family Per House system (with the standarization and unification of housing and the standarization and unification of families.)
2. Individual houses were designed to be extremely closed (to ensure privacy)
3. Adjacent houses were designed to not interfere with each other (to the exclusion of community)
4. Families living in those houses had high levels of autonomy and independence (in that they were also houses logically organized so that the labour of housework (for the sake of those cyclic processes of living) was the role of the woman.
5. Those houses maintained the family as the basic unit of labour (for the cyclic processes of living), inasmuch as they were the units for procreation and raising of children.
6. It was housing for wage labourers.

As written in Chapter 3 of this book, systems of housing in cities prior to the Industrial Revolution were completely different. Until then, the house was the place of production. They were places into which people were invited. The public realm spilled over into the house which was not solely comprised of the private realm because there was no other space into which people could be invited. However, the advent of isolated houses meant the isolation of the family. The style of architecture for the mass production of these isolated houses was for architects and entirely new theme. It was the birth of the method for replicating isolated houses that were unitized, regulated, standardized and repeated.

Regulating and standardizing has absolutely no relationship with the urban environment made by that architecture. It is possible to make the same architecture no matter what the environment. It was way of designing that was fundamentally different from the pre-19th century way of designing in accordance with the characteristics and history of a place or in accordance with user characteristics.

Uniform and axial layouts, repetition of exactly the same units, and the patterns made from them all became elements of a new aesthetic. As Arendt notes that “the attitude of the craftsperson appears in variations of the pattern of the produced item” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p.479), the aesthetic of the modern movement is that of the pattern itself. Twentieth century architects that discarded the characteristics and history of place, were stuck within the framework of the patterns they themselves made. (ibid., p.455)

I’ve nothing else to say. If you’ve been following this far then you know Yamamoto’s stance. I recently learned that a frog will jump out of a pot of water when it gets too hot, but we seem to accept and value this thing we call privacy even if it what it really amounts to is being isolated from the people around us in order to make us easier to manage and better members of the workforce. I know of buildings and projects in which Yamamoto has attempted to provide alternatives to this and many were built prior to 2015 when this book was published. Of those, many would have been published online but this is the problem with online content. It’s just content to be appreciated as content and not as food for thought or a source of good ideas that might be worth applying again and again.

• • • 

2024/11/03 Ch. 4, pp. 175-179
2024/11/03 Ch. 4, pp. 169-175
2024/10/20 Ch. 4, pp.163-168
2024/10/06 Ch. 4, pp.159-163
2024/09/29 Ch. 4, pp.156-159
2024/09/08 Ch. 4, pp.152–155
2024/09/08 Ch. 4, pp.146–151
2024/08/25 Ch. 3, pp.135–143
2024/08/18 Ch. 3, pp.128–135
2024/08/11 Ch. 3, pp.120–128
2024/07/21 Ch. 3, pp.115-120
2024/07/21 Ch. 3, pp.108-114
2024/07/14 Ch. 3, pp.101-107
2024/06/30 Ch. 2, pp.92-100
2024/06/23 Ch. 2, pp.87-92
2024/06/16 Ch. 2, pp.78-87
2024/06/02 Ch. 2, pp.69-78
2024/05/05 Ch. 2, pp.66-70
2024/05/05 Ch. 2, pp.58-66
2024/05/05 Ch. 1, pp.46-55
2024/04/28 Ch. 1, pp.35-46
2024/04/21 Ch. 1, pp.23-35
2024/04/07 Ch. 1, pp.18-23
2024/03/31 Ch. 1, pp.14-18
2024/03/24 The Space of Power vs. The Power of Space: Preface pp. 7-11

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Revisited this week:

• The Things Historians Do
• The Demise of The Idea
• The Beauty of Everyday Things