Pilgrimage

Pasadena Heights is a 1974 project by Kiyonori Kikutake. It’s near the Japanese city of Mishima which is twinned with Pasadena in California. You may have read about Pasadena Heights on this blog before because the first time I wrote about it was in 2015 but over the years there have been various mentions plus the occasional spin-off project.^{1 2 3}

23 Feb. 2015: The Building Is Not Trying To Be A Mountain
24 Mar. 2015: Honorary Architecture Misfit: Kiyonori Kikutake
04 Mar. 2016: The Mat Building
03 Dec. 2016: Modest Megastructures
13 Sep. 2020: The Rooftop
27 Sep. 2020: The Terrace
13 Dec. 2020: The Dispersed House
26 Jun. 2022: Pasadena Heights v3.0
15 Jan. 2023: Sky Rectangle

Fifty two years on, the building continues to fascinate me, at least as much as it did in 1975 when I first learned of it from Japan Architect, the English version of 新建築. I’ve been missing the sense of wonder and amazement I felt at the time when I realized that buildings could be like this, and excited that somebody could think of it and make it happen. It was time to visit.

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Before setting out on any pilgrimage, it’s always prudent to check that the destination still exists. This is important when the destination is a concrete building built more than fifty years ago, and especially important when it’s in Japan – a country that tends to be nonchalant about its modern architecture heritage.

The city of Mishima (三島, lit. “three islands”) is a 45 minute high-speed train ride from Tokyo. The ticket costs about ¥4,000 (US$25). From Mishima Station, Pasadena Heights is maybe 4 km away which would normally be an hour’s walk but, as it’ll be midsummer, I think I’ll bus or taxi it. This GoogleEarth Streetview shows the original off-form concrete has been patched and painted white. This is encouraging.

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I took the high-speed to Atami (which is the seaside spa town that the parents in Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story were shunted off to.) On the recommendation of AppleMaps, I then took a local train one stop to Kannami instead of two to Mishima.

It was a 37-minute, 3.5 kilometer walk so I decided to walk as I had a sunhat and a large bottle of the isotonic drink Pocari Sweat. Besides, it was a pilgrimage and it didn’t seem right to just rock up in a taxi. The route AppleMaps led me was very picturesque in places. I was glad I chose to walk.

When on an architectural pilgrimage, the first glimpse of the object of your pilgrimage is always a special one. I was hoping to see Pasadena Heights for the first time across a valley but I wasn’t disappointed to see it closer than I imagined, even though it was still uphill.

I was approaching from the top of the hillside and knew I would arrive at the level of the upper car park. There was no grand entrance, just a ramp leading to the access paths on each floor, and to the right some stairs leading down to underside access to the units. I needlessly worried I might not be able to access the building because of security cameras and access gates.

I went down first. Not once did I ever imagine the inclined ground would now be covered with creeping grasses or ivy. It remains, as ever, nothing more than a breezeway and an alternate way of entering the units. The master bedroom has a window on one side and a balcony on the other but that second bedroom has only the one window facing this space. There’s no way around this but, without this space, there’d be neither secondary entrance nor window opportunity. I still don’t know why Pasadena Heights was raised above the ground like this. It’s not creating or saving farmland, as Kurokawa might have claimed. It’s cool beneath the building but it’s not a space one would want to hang out in. The impression is of the service entries that are common in Japanese residential architecture and would have been more common in the mid-1970s but, ultimately, the reason may be nothing more than than it made the foundation work easier and reduced the risk of waterproofing problems. In any case, access and cross ventilation are better off for it and, to a very minor extent, illumination.

Two years earlier in 1972 there was definitely something in the air as Kisho Kurokawa had produced his Capsule Village (left, below) with terraced units contained in a space-frame above a slope and, in the same year, Kiyonori Kikutake proposed his Stratiform Structure System (right, below) that contained housing plots in two space-frames leaning against each other on flat land.

I never understood why Kikutake chose to include Mt. Fuji in the collage for Stratiform System but the city of Mishima not far from Pasadena Heights is famous for its views of Mt. Fuji. if you look at the location of Pasadena Heights on the slope with Mt. Fuji behind it, then it suddenly makes sense. This collage links the premise of Kurokawa’s Capsule Village with the site for the future Pasadena Heights, even if the relative proximity of Mt. Fuji is exaggerated. On a clear day in Autumn, a simple drone shot could verify this.

Pasadena Heights was completed 1974 and its lack of metabolist posturing is probably why it’s been largely ignored. It may be up in the air because, like both of the proposals above, it simplifies foundations even if it does so by the very non-innovative means of concrete columns in a grid tracking site contours. It accepts gravity, rather than denying it through visually exciting cantilevers that so excited Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and, not all that much later, Tange, Isozaki, Kurokawa, Koolhaas … Another likely reason why it never became part of “architectural discourse” is that it doesn’t fit into our image of the Metabolist canon because it hints at no possibility for future change whether real or represented. If anything, it’s the contents that are changeable, not the enclosures. Either or both of these reasons are sufficient for it to be ignored by the history we want to hear.

I think it’s important to understand what Pasadena Heights is not. It’s not some curvy slab of stacked narrow and deep units with deck access at the rear and balconies at the front. There’s private access from below but the main access is from the decks directly overlooked by the corner-angle windows of the kitchens and separated from the access path by a void on one side and the roof of the living room of the unit below on the other. This roof space is what Riken Yamamoto would call a threshold. It’s where the private realm extends into the public realm.

But here I want to describe the building as it is now, and given that fifty three years have passed, the building looks much the same. Some things have obviously changed but some things are still the same as they ever were. I still think it’s a wonderful layout and, importantly and possibly uniquely, with respect to the greater building in which it exists. The two are inseparable from the other as much as the building is from the slope. I can’t think of any other building that has achieved this because we think unit layouts exist in isolatIon from others above and below and from the topography it all rests on. I’ve never understood why. Pasadena Heights set an impossibly high standard for high-density development – which is all about units/site area. Even if this project had been built in Tokyo on some site with an 8°-10° slope, it would not be there today. One thing that I’d always seen but now noticed for the first time is how little awareness there is of the individual units. It’s actually very Metabolist in that respect.

Pasadena Heights seems to be all access paths and threshold spaces but, if you look at the axonometric drawing above, it’s because the units only begin from the edge of the access path above. They extend three times as far back and are mostly top lit from the void in front of the bathroom of the unit above. This is something that can only be done with terraces on a low incline. Stacking units vertically would require lightwells, causing problems for internal overlooking, and removing the alternate means of entry/egress. If Pasadena Heights looks devoid of people, it’s because most of them are inside and behind the line of those kitchen windows. We really only get to see what happens in those threshold spaces. Let’s have a closer look.

There was all the variation you’d expect after half a century of occupation. There were differing degrees of customization and differing degrees of enclosure. One common customization was to have a gate separating the threshold from the inner courtyard. Two occupants on the uppermost level had enclosed up to the access path. Another common customization was to change the fixed round bathroom window for a rectangular operable one. This, to me, is the real essence of Metabolism and design for change over time and, on the whole, Pasadena Heights wears it well. It could be that informal, boundary‑limited user‑customization is how built environments actually survive across decades and centuries. About 10% of the units were either vacant, abandoned or in some stage of refurbishment. There were signs of decay but there were also signs of regeneration. If the word metabolism is to have any real metaphorical meaning when applied to buildings, this is probably what it looks like.

The most unloved units tend to be those where the void above the inner courtyard is compromised by the access stairs or the access corridor cutting across it. I said hello to two neighbors setting out on their bicycles, another person hanging up laundry, an elderly lady sitting in the front yard and some young guy heading out, dressed and kitted for a day at the beach. I couldn’t get any sense of the demographic or who would want to live here or why. I passed no shops between there and the station. A property search revealed no units currently on the market. [Completion date: June 1974. Area: 68.3m². Address: 静岡県田方郡函南町上沢956-1. Approx. 37 minutes walk from station.]

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Just seeing that map reminded me of that 37-minute 3.5-km walk from the station and why I set out on this pilgrimage in the first place. Encouraged by the white paint on that GoogleEarth image, I wanted to believe I would be stepping back into 1974 – the year I began studying architecture. For me, the future was going to be concrete, ingenious layouts and new proposals for living. I don’t think we’ll ever see a building like this again. What I thought was a pilgrimage in return for all that this building has made me think about over the years, turned out to be nothing more and nothing less than like meeting an old friend after decades apart. There were the obvious signs of time having passed but I was just glad to see it still there and still doing what it always did without nostalgia for the past or apology for the present. I think I relate to this building too much.

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1. https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2016/03/04/the-mat-building/ ↩︎
2. https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2020/09/13/the-rooftop/ ↩︎
3. https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2022/06/26/pasadena-heights-v3-0/ ↩︎