The Household and Community (1/2)
I’ve been posting these Riken Yamamoto “The Space of Power vs. The Power of Space” posts more or less regularly since Mach last year so I thought it’d be a good idea to summarize everything so far just in case anybody comes across the blog and is wondering what’s going on. My summary quickly grew so I split it into two. The first part is about what Yamamoto thought, wrote and did about it, while the second is mainly my thoughts on that.
As we know, Riken Yamamoto was the 2024 Pritzker Prize Laureate and the statement put out by the jury when they made the announcement included the following words.
“Yamamoto reconsidered boundaries between public and private realms as societal opportunities, committing to the belief that all spaces may enrich and serve the consideration of an entire community, and not just those who occupy them.”
2024 Pritzker Prize Jury (https://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/riken-yamamoto#laureate-page-2586)
Every word of this is true but community is a word that means different things to different people. Yamamoto uses the word to include all of them, but also to describe people’s relationship to the world in which they live and share with everyone else. He explained these and many other thoughts in the 2015 book that I have been unofficially translating, along with various commentary, in quasi-regular installments on this blog since the end of March last year. I’m about three-quarters through.
The book itself is a paperback of a size and style you’ll often see people reading on trains. It was published ten years ago and has never been translated into English. The following is one page from the first chapter where Yamamoto is discussing Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Ancient Greek cities. He’s particularly interested in the space Arendt terms the “no-man’s land”.
Yamamoto calls it a threshold – actually, he calls it a 閾 (しきい, shiki-i) but we understand this word as threshold anyway. This space that, in Ancient Greece, was called the andiron, is the part of the house that people (men) would gather to talk politics and other matters of interest to the community and, in turn, the state. It belongs to neither the public realm nor the private realm. It can be thought of as part of the private realm that extends into the public realm even though it is part of the public realm that extents into the area of the private house. Importantly, and unlike the threshold as we understand it, it is not a transition space because visitors will not transit it. And nor is it a buffer even though this threshold space physically both separates and connects the public and private realms. It’s a space people use to mediate between their public and private lives. It connects them to the world outside, and it connects the world outside to them. This is all there is to understand. Yamamoto uses the remainder of the book to expand on this. It’s very simple really. Perhaps this is why the book was never thought worthy of translation. We think we already know this.
From 1973, Yamamoto and fellow Japanese architects Hiroashi Hara and, later, Akira Fujii took students to survey vernacular settlements around the world, surveying over 500 settlements in fifty countries over forty years. There’s probably never been architectural fieldwork like it in the world. From left below, are a house in the Iraqi island village of Al-Chibayish, two Indian houses from the village of Junapani, a traditional Japanese house and a traditional Spanish one. All have a threshold space having the same function. They are all pre-industrial society examples. Houses in the English speaking countries had similar thresholds in the form of the parlour, the front room and the porch.
Yamamoto identifies the Industrial Revolution and worker housing as when the threshold began disappearing from our dwellings. The 1855 French industrial city of Mulhouse was a precursor of today’s suburban detached houses with one family per household and individual entrances. Instead of a threshold there was direct entry to the private realm. Outside, the pseudo-public realm was managed by the company. Isolating persons and having them live standard lives in standardized housing was thought to lead to more uniform and hence higher-quality industrial goods. This was housing for people as robots. Separating households was meant to ensure a more stable and pliable workforce and, for the first time, we have the notion that privacy is essential for the conducting of domestic life. Privacy for the private realm means meant isolating the household from the public realm but if this isn’t collateral damage, it’s malicious intent at work.
The Industrial Revolution wore on and the same lack of threshold was built into English worker housing and then carried over into supposedly progressive housing developments such as The Smithson’s 1955 Park Hill project. The access corridor is managed space and the units and people living inside them are invisible to the “street” except for the narrow frosted glass sidelights next to the front doors that the occupants never even pass, In the middle photograph, notice how nobody is crossing the decoratively tiled threshold. In English, the word threshold indicates a boundary line between the private realm and the public realm. It doesn’t indicate a space. The former custom of the groom carrying the bridge across the threshold indicates leaving the public realm and enter the private realm where they will procreate and replenish the labor force (as a primal form of renewable energy).
Whether it’s the unbuilt manifesto shown in the image on the left below, or the as-built and marketed reality on the right, the access corridor in Mies Van der Rohe’s 1949-1951 Lake Shore Drive, is treated as if it were a hotel corridor leading to rooms occupied for short periods by interchangeable people with no ties to any greater community. The efficient isolation of the Industrial Age carried over into Capitalist Era.
The private realm is cut-off from the public realm. Housing became hotels for transient, non-specific and interchangeable people. This hotel configuration translated well to the concept of co-housing and there was even a subscription model allowing persons to arbitrarily check in and out of “co-housing” developments around the world. Such extensions of less connection to and increased isolation from the public realm gained traction until pandemic travel restrictions and lockdowns dampened corporate enthusiasm for them.
In one chapter, Yamamoto is particularly critical of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Bureau of Housing Provision that for decades has consistently worked to provide standardized housing with little connection to the access corridor (that at least is deck access in many cases). In the 1950s, the masonry wall between the parents’ room and the children’s room was the big innovation in an improved design for a two-bedroom apartment. Japanese cities still have plenty of love hotels.
This privacy to replenish the labour force wasn’t limited to French Industrial Worker towns or Japanese municipal housing. In their 1963 book Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism, Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander evaluated houses in terms of 1) the degree to which they were separated from the world, and 2) and the degree of thought given to the kids not walking in on the parents having sex. Unless we understand this interest of theirs in terms of enabling the workforce, their obsession with this is more than a bit creepy. The codes implicit in industrial era ideal worker housing were still present and far more explicit in capitalist era ideal worker housing.
Yamamoto asks in his book and answers in his projects what to do about a housing paradigm where housing has no threshold and exists to detach people from the world in which they live. His 1991 Hotakubo Housing attempts to create a social unit larger than that of the house. 110 units are arranged around a central courtyard that can only be accessed by passing through one of the units. The living rooms of all units protrude into the communal central space and are directly linked by stairs to it. The living rooms therefore function\ as thresholds for the people within this community.
His 2010 Pangyo Housing complex is a development of 100 households. Below the living and an above the bedrooms in these three-storey are rooms accessed by a shared deck. These rooms are fully glazed and have no fixed use other than as entrance hallways. These are the threshold spaces.
His 2004 Jian Wai SOHO, in Beijing for SOHO China is high rise mixed use with a large, windowed waiting area and a wide and well-lit residential corridor. Let’s not get nostalgic for the artificially ventilated and illuminated access corridors of 20th century residential towers. How the large spaces (one sixth of the unit area) just inside the entrances would be used is difficult to image for a residential unit but not for an office where it would make an ideal reception. This is Yamamoto’s Lesson #2 from the medieaval city where living behind a shopfront was the norm. (Those shops were called bodega and boutiques.)
This is Yamamoto’s 2003 Canal Court Codan, in Tokyo. The layout can be arbitrarily adjusted to be used fully or partially as an office or dwelling. Instead of an opaque door with a peephole is a large glazed threshold opening off the access corridor.
These examples use an office space or a space that could be used as an office space to recreate the traditional function of a threshold in a post-industrial society. Although people still in ite friends and visitors to where they live, this is not the only or even the primary way by which a relationship with the world is maintained. Yamamoto’s 2001 Ban Building has no threshold space for visitors but places kitchens and bathrooms on the outer wall as a way to enable people outside and people inside to see each other. Particularly at night, the patterns of kitchen and bathroom lights turning on an office shows that people live here. It is more important that a daytime space such as a kitchen have a view of the street than a bedroom or living room that does not need that distraction. The concept of the “active band” was first floated by French architect Yves Lyon in 1987.) [c.f. The Active Band]
This next project, the 2008 Dragon Lily’s House, is a built manifesto of a diagram that appears early in the book when it discusses the Ancient Greek houses having part of the house belonging to the public sphere. In this case, the kitchen at the corner of the house facing an intersection, has a fully glazed wall. The relationship should be clear from the five photographs below. In the bottom right image, children can be seen sitting on the low white bench along the sidewalk. I’ve put the previous project and this one last because they both have visually public spaces into which the public is not expected to enter. The threshold is no longer a physical one for guests and visitors to enter but a visual one to be shared from both sides. The kitchen is used to indicate to the people in the public realm that the dwelling is occupied, and to the people in the private realm that they are part of society. The grassed area is meant to be understood as a void not to be crossed.
These last two projects are the most transferable to how we live today and restoring these relationships should not be too difficult. However, let’s not forget that Riken Yamamoto was a renowned architect prior to his Pritzker Prize and that his clients trusted his judgment when it came to deciding what housing needed to be provided with. However, nobody else seems to be in a hurry to do the same. These ideas have gained little or no traction and so we might conclude there is no client or user demand for housing with a threshold whether physical or visual. It seems we are too enamored with the isolation of our privacy. Either that or Yamamoto’s ideas are an unwanted antidote to housing designed to sustain the labour force and human isolation and (thus) political compliance in our neoliberal societies.
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