Ch. 5, pp.195–200
From having read and translated this much, I’ve come to the conclusion that architects should read more, and not just about other architects and whatever they have to say. I can understand why this book has never been translated into any other language or is even that well known in Japan. Its thoughts are too universal and too difficult to refute. It’s troublesome. It criticizes architects, the things they design, institutional design, the system of housing provision and, in this installment, the purpose of housing provision. I used to think that the early 20th century Modernist project was all about a country wanting to house its workforce out of some sense of humanism and never saw it as a government merely wanting to ensure their workforce was productive by being healthy, nearby, and able to procreate and thus replace itself. There was nothing altruistic about this.
• • •
2. Chickens laying eggs on model farms
Places for sexual activity isolated from the childrens’ rooms
“In much the same way as a shelf has might have a width and depth but are nevertheless stacked in rows in storehouses and warehouses, the purpose of the population is to be productive in the sense of producing children and to be productive at work. And when it becomes night the shelves are closed.” “This municipal housing is constructed as a facility to rationally produce children but the occupants of municipal housing do not realize that, particularly their being placed on shelves, so that their own society is that of reproductive animals with as little agency to change their situation as chickens laying eggs on a model farm.” (Lagon, The Giant Mistake [?], p.34-35) This was European housing post WWII. Public housing was no more than facilities for the rationalization of procreating.
The situation for public housing in Japan after WWII was exactly the same. “From the point of view of living, the dwelling’s obstructions to the lives of the husband and wife were not just parents and their children under the same roof as under the former family system, but it was impossible for an individual to have a private life, there was as vague acknowledgment of the private lives of husband and wife and, at best, there was a recognition of the existence of the family lives of small families as there had been before. “The first thing to be restrained was the private lives of husband and wife” (Nishiyama, U? [卯三], Tomorrow’s Houses, p.22-23)
I was trying to find out how Nishayama’s first name was pronounced and it led me to Hyunjing CHO’s paper “Smallness” in Japanese Houses:
From Postwar to “Post-postwar” Architecture” (https://s-space.snu.ac.kr/bitstream/10371/162617/1/01_CHO%20Hyunjung.pdf) which is interesting in itself. Nishiyama’s proper name is Nishiyama Uzō (1911-94) and the correct name of the book is House of the Future: A Story of Dwelling Style, (Korekara no sumai: jū yōshiki no hanashi, 1947).
“Nishiyama was a leftist architect who became interested in improving the living conditions of the poor and laborers in the early 1940s. As a criterion for a modern minimal housing unit that could serve as a national dwelling model, Nishiyama promoted the principle of separating eating and sleeping facilities. In House of the Future, published after the war, he outlined ten tenets for the
homes of “New Japan,” proposing to build “houses that could eschew outdated concepts and adapt to the needs of the people of a civilized nation.”
CHO, Hyunjing, Smallness” in Japanese Houses: From Postwar to “Post-postwar” Architecture”, p6
At the time, these were brave things to say, but they would have been in the hearts and thoughts of many Japanese. The freedom of sexual activity (sexual relations) came to symbolize freedom itself. Nishiyama was involved in the post-war design of municipal housing and in his book that he published soon after the end of the war, he argued that freedom for sexual activity was something that should be designed into the planning of dwellings. He called for the separation of the activities of sleeping and eating and especially for isolated bedrooms. He contrived his layouts and circulation so that the place for sexual activity was isolated, and so that the parents and children bedrooms were mutually separated. This type of designer thinking was to later become standard for Japanese municipal housing, and came to be known as the 2DK.
This kind of thinking was spot on, and the units found favour with the younger generation because the concrete walls meant little worry about being overheard. Popularity soared as people could have sex without worrying about being heard and as a result, the birthrate in public housing rose accordingly. (Hara Takeshi, Conversations with Riken Yamamoto: Municipal Housing Estates and Japan’s New Way of Living, p.93)
This seems a good time to mention Japan’s history of “Love Hotels” frequented not only by the opportunistic and roomless but by married couples wanting to have sex out of earshot from not only children but parents and parents-in-law as well. It’s a fact of life in multi-generational households.
The master bedroom was what all this privacy was for and the term privacy came to mean the privacy for sexual activity, and architects designed houses for the purpose of ensuring this privacy. (Figs. 2, 3) Even though architects thought about privacy, they were not able to discover housing that enabled some role over and above the bearing and raising of children.
It was amusing thinking of Glass House as a kind of love hotel. The Guest House always was. I know Glass House is already available for parties, events and photoshoots. (This is separate from the annual summer party.) But now the thought’s been put in my mind, I think Glass House would make a great airb’n’b. Perhaps it is already. Yup. An overnight stay costs $30,000 that includes dinner for as many as 12 and breakfast for as many as two. The big mistake many of us make is to think of Glass House as a house. It is many things. It is a love hotel. It is a parody of a house, as Johnson well knew because he watched television, worked at a desk and slept in other more suitable accommodations on his estate. [c.f. Glass and Other Houses] The description that always suited it the best was ‘reception room’ but it was more like a ‘front parlour’ in that visitors never saw the private supporting parts. It’s not surprising that the house has become a 100% reception room – as have the gallery and pavilion for that matter.
Houses destroyed after 27 years
Protecting privacy means protecting freedom. “The freedom of the population is something within their private lives, and this is something that must not be violated. Let this simple and naive state of affairs be a force for no one to defend against violence itself.”（Arendt, On Revolution, p.391) This was said by Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767–1794), one of the Jacobin revolutionaries and a supporter of Robespierre. For him, freedom lay within personal freedom. This thinking is still amongst us today when we say that maintaining privacy is a symbol of freedom, and this freedom is symbolized by our houses.
The role of houses designed for the procreation of children ends when those children enter society (that is, the society of economic production). There is no need for such houses to exist any more. The average life of a house in today’s Japan is only 27 years, despite them having sufficient durability for many more. Many houses are demolished at the end of a lifespan of 27 years on average. (National Bureau of Transportation and Housing, The Situation of Current Housing Policy, 5 July, 2011 Social Loan Book Development Council Documents [?].) As it stands, houses are rebuilt every generational cycle. Upon the death of the parents (and generational change), the continuation of the house simply ceases. The twenty-seven cycle of demolition means that not only the life of the house ends but along with it comes the erasure of the place of memories that the former generation had forged with the people and the society surrounding them. The demolition of those houses also destroys and sense of continuity of the urban environment. After the loss of one’s neighbors and the demolition of the house come unknown people and their house. Alternatively, the land could become part of a parcel of land a developer will use to build a block of condominiums. These things happen everyday to our residential land. Nobody gives any thought to the external appearance. What we would be looking at would be the memories of the people that lived there but those are now gone. The space of society changes the external appearance. Nobody pays any attention to the continuity of external appearance. This is the space of society. Its meaning is that of a symbol of public independence. The memories of the people living at that place are cut off and consumed as money. This is the space of society.
The external appearance was changed at amazing speed, along with its memories. “There was no remembering anything of the person before, or the person who came after, or the person who came after them.” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p.325) This is the space of society. This is the space we live in.
We have been robbed of the will to make the things of the world, along with the will to hand them over to the future (as our labor force [as in capacity for] has been exploited and our only certainty for the future is to make children for it. However, the space in which that certainty is remembered can be gone in an instant. People are not remembered once they have departed. The persons who live in a one-house-per-household house are sealed in their privacy and lose their sense of place. This is equivalent to them having lost all traces of having existed. This situation is like that of slaves who were afraid of dying without leaving any trace of having existed. Isolated public phenomena are the slave-ification of labourers. This is our society today. In contemporary society, isolated public phenomena are multiplying at an increasingly fast rate. And architecture has become something that offers these goods at reduced rates. Architectural designers concentrate on designing dwellings and then destroying them in a generational cycle. They are the designers of urban spaces that take this generational cycle as its premise.
Some of my translated sentences could have been smoother but I think there’s enough to get the gist of it. I wasn’t expecting baby-making (for the future workforce) to be the connection between privacy and housing but in the 20th century we saw time and time again that governments were concerned with birthrates because of the link to economic production and national wealth. If robots and algorithms are supposed to be replacing us all sooner or later and making the world all the better, then why do governments insist on seeing future prosperity in terms of rising birthrates and population increases? Replacing manual workers by robots and replacing desk workers by AI should in principle lead to a surfeit in the available labour force. The government of Japan is fretting about its lowering birthrate and is inventing robots to take care of the increased elderly population. Supplementing its workforce by immigration is (increasingly, and with increasing fervor) not being seen as a solution. And nor is improving the space of society to make people more willing to bring children into it.
These are all problems well beyond the scope of me and this blog, but I’m grateful to Yamamoto for doing up these dots. The final sentences about the transience of architecture are easy to see. The Futurist stance (and thus the Modernist, and every stance since) on eternal newness gave architecture the ability to continually discard its memories and reinvent itself endlessly, even to the extent of eating its own memories and regurgitating them as a representation of newness.
• • •
2025/01/05 Ch. 5, pp. 195-200
2024/12/22 Ch. 5, pp. 187-195
2024/12/08 Ch. 4, pp. 179-186
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
2024/08/25 Ch. 3, pp.135-1
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
• • •
Revisited this week:
Share this:
