Role Model

In Tokyo last April, I bought a small A5 book crammed with apartment project plans, sections and photographs, many of which were not very large. It was just the kind of thing I like but because it was so dense with information I only got around to opening it a couple of weeks ago. Turning the pages and stopping occasionally to study a plan or section, I realized that the book wasn’t a collection of one hundred Tokyo apartment projects by different practices but a collection of 100 Tokyo apartment projects by the same architect. Now this is special. Misfit Architect #43: Akio Yachida (谷内田章夫) didn’t quite work as the title for this post even though Akio Yachida is similar to misfit architects such as Kenjij Hirose and Kazuhiko Namba (misfit architects #31 and #32 respectively) in focusing on adapting and perfecting a single building type or system, but he’s also like Misfit Architect #38: The Unknown Architect in having little appetite for publicity. There is a Japanese wikipedia page but zero online presence in English apart from images of one project on OfHouses. I don’t think Akio Yachida should be a misfit architect simply because he’s talented, unknown outside Japan and little known within Japan, but he deserves more than a career case study because those architects usually have some glaring inconsistency. Ultimately, he’s an architect who has sustained a practice for 30 years by developing a new architectural product suited to its time and place, and by letting it develop over time. I think this is all an architect needs to be so I’ve titled this post Role Model to let architectural students know that there are other role model options out there. I’m belatedly inspired and now have a very clear idea of the kind of architect I wanted to be.

Born in 1951, Akio Yachida is about 74. In 1978, he and two graduate friends, Michiro Kinoshita, and Tsune Kitayama, formed a practice called Workshop. They went their own ways in 1994 but one project circa 1988 was to have an enormous influence on what Akio Yachida was to do later. It was a small hotel called Fueba Privé in the ski resort of Fueba in Niigata, Japan [新潟県南魚沼郡苗場プリヴェ]. The hotel is now known as Sundance Resort Fueba [ンダンスリゾート苗場] or Club Wyndham Sundance Resort Naeba. It’s here on Booking.com. Those panels either side of the windows have a touch of Shin Takamatsu about them. Kirin Plaza was 1987.

Each room has a mezzanine overlooking a two-story space with a huge circular window overlooking the slopes. As Yachida says, “The spaces weren’t everyday spaces”. It also looks like the middle two rooms are raised by half a level, almost certainly to make the breakfast room below half a storey higher. I’m also fairly certain Kenchiku Bunka [建築文化 (Architecture Culture)] magazine has plans in their March 1989 issue (Vol.44, No.509, pp.89-96) but it’s not that easy to find. Yachida established Aerial Associates in 1995 and the atrium spaces and vertical offsetting of most of the 100 projects in the book derive from this Fueba project. Another 14 projects were in progress in 2022 when the book was published.

Early on, Yachida states that the inspiration for the double height space was Le Corbusier’s Citrohan House of 1920 and the first Unité is also mentioned for the quality of its double height space yet not for the gloominess of its access corridor or the layout stupidity of its rotationally inverted units.

The year 1995 was a couple of years into Japan’s “lost decade” that was actually two decades, turned out to be a good time to establish an architectural practice because falling land prices and falling interest rates prompted many owners of small plots to develop them for rental properties. These plots weren’t in popular locations but were generally within a 10-minute walk from a train or metro station that was a 10-30 minute ride to a major station such as Shinjuku, Shibuya or Meguro. The double height space was an architectural device to add value to rental apartments in those locations but, in addition to how grand or theatrical they may look or feel, they also ensure better daylight penetration, better ventilation and better acoustics. Yachida sees them as necessary to create a balance between the needs of the occupants, the contractor and the management. All rental accommodation is a moneymaking machine for someone but, by giving the occupants something more than they perhaps expected and can’t find in other rental offerings, these apartments aspire to be more than that.

Yachida identifies several different types of the spatial- and value-added apartments. The first type is a two-level apartment with a double-height space. Project number nine, Fujigatani Apartments is a good example. No further explanation is needed.

I’m ordering these projects in terms of complexity rather than in chronological order for two reasons. The first is that the projects don’t always increase in complexity or continuously become more innovative. Later projects are sometimes simpler or simple refinements of earlier ones. Project number 04, ALTO B for example is more innovative than Project number 09 above. Here, the double-height space is on one side of the apartment and the single-height spaces of paired apartments are stacked. Yachida calls this type the “flat” type because of the continuous floor level. They are handsome spaces. Yachida’s reason for the choice of unfinished concrete for the interior wall finish s that resistance to damage and deterioration is important with rental apartments.

Project no, 18: LIAISON is a refinement of this approach. And another handsome room.

Project 47 ALBA is one quarter double-height that alternates position on alternate floors but, as there are two types of plan, the double-height space is always above the living area. It’s similar to Project number 04 above, but with less double-height space. This project is from 2006 and increased construction costs are most likely responsible for the reduction in the “unusable” volume that double-height spaces are. Note also that all of these apartments so far have spaces that are marked as bedrooms but that are really just sleeping areas.

Putting a sleeping “loft” above the entrance corridor, bathroom and kitchen is not a new idea. It is common in cabins and tiny houses. Having a lower ceiling height for spaces that are either sleeping spaces or only intermittently used was much explored in Constructivist housing proposals such as the Type F apartment that had a one and a half floor height space for the living area.

That is what happened next in this Tokyo apartment series but not with equal consequences for all projects at the same time. First, the double height space shrank to a 1.5 height space as with Project 93: ZOOM ROPPONGI (2016). The sleeping area becomes a sleeping shelf. Because of their tradition of futons on tatami, Japanese people may have been already predisposed towards multi-purpose sleeping spaces but it is not true that all Japanese people enjoy the ritual of layout out their futon in the evening and putting it away in the morning like the main character in Perfect Days. I can see the market appeal of a place to leave the bedding out and out of sight.

The leftmost image above is of a wide apartment and the two at the right are of a narrow apartment. You might think this is a mini-Marseilles and perhaps it is, but everything we see at the entrance end of this room is what makes this room into a space that can be lived in. It’s a bathroom, kitchen and sleeping area compressed into as small a space as possible. Project number 63: IPSE Nakanobu (2008) is a variation entered via the kitchen and stairs up to a raised bathroom and a ladder up to a loft area the size of a futon. The gain here is that small storage space beneath the bathroom.

However Project number 41: Tuft (2005) is more sophisticated with its entry at half level where the bathroom and a ladder up to the loft are. There is still the same space beneath the bathroom to be used to store whatever but the gain here is that the kitchen and even that small storage space can have windows opening onto the corridor at a height well above people’s heads. That space beneath the bathroom might even be an alternative place to sleep.

Yachida is building a library of apartment plans and sections that can be combined in many different ways according to client, site and market requirements.

Project no. 84: SVELTO has only slight external variation but a complicated section with six different apartment types, two of which have a full-height stair. Curiously, or perhaps to make better use of the landings, adjacent units types C and D are entered from different floors.

Perhaps in the future the cost of constructing habitable volume will be so high that all apartments will be single level with a maximum ceiling height of 2.1 meters but, if Yachida had to design only single level apartments in the future then he is more than capable. Project no. 65: D is one of the exceptions in this book as it has only single level apartments two per floor. Given the extraordinary shape of the site, the shape of the building probably couldn’t have been anything else but how that shape is used on the inside is masterful. You’ll have noticed how small the external elevator lobbies are in the buildings above and this one is no different. Elevator lobbies with one elevator and a staircase are difficult to incorporate into compositions that are basically symmetrical. The usual solution is to use the elevator and stair to divide the building into two halves and to have an entrance door either side of the landing but I don’t think there was the site depth to do that here. The typical floor plan is completely symmetrical except for the positions of the entrance doors that are determined by the position of the elevator and stairs. Minor differences in the thickness of stairs and elevator walls produce slight variations in the kitchen layouts. Yet, the living area has two distinct zones, the farthest of which is most likely to be the sleeping area. It has a closet. The bathroom has a window. Spatially it’s an exception but overall it’s typical in that, wherever you look, you can see evidence that somebody has thought how it could be better.

The beginning of the book contains a brief history of Yachida’s work and his various typologies and at the end is a section documenting his thoughts on configurations, access, finishes and other aspects that are important when designing buildings for multiple occupancy. It’s all good and shows how involved Yachida is with what he does. The book is in Japanese but you don’t have to be able to read Japanese to it. All you need to do is enjoy reading the intelligent and intriguing plans and sections.

As a final thought. I really don’t know if Akio Yachida is a career case study or a misfit architect. Perhaps he’s just an architect doing his job with interest, dedication and competence even though it shouldn’t be somehow heroic for an architect to do their job well. I’m very glad he is doing what he is and I’m glad architects such as him still exist, even if we’re never going to know about them. There are already another 15 projects that weren’t completed when this book was published. I’m looking forward to the next hundred. My wish is for a book of the first 200, collecting all this intelligence, knowledge and artistry in the one place, to inform and inspire. A4.

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Revisited this week:

• 1927: The Competition
• 1928: The Types Study