Kitagata Garden City - social housing project - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, April, 2001 by Phoebe Chow

This ambitious development is intended to suggest new paradigms for Japanese social housing. At its heart is a generous and animated public space that unifies the various housing blocks and enriches the quality of life.

Historically, social housing in Japan has languished far behind that of its closest economic rivals, a source of much national chagrin and soul-searching. In the postwar period, when Japan's cities were being rebuilt, the most pressing task was the provision of basic housing in enormous quantities. Successive governments have largely been concerned with the number, rather than the quality of dwellings built, as this was regarded as an index of the success of economic policies. For many years, this kind of housing was referred to as 'rabbit hutches' for obvious reasons. Site planning was based on the configuration of rows of middle-rise slabs, designed to provide a bare minimum of sunlight to each unit. The exorbitant cost of land in urban areas only exacerbated the problem, with land often more costly than the buildings occupying it.

Today, social housing in Japan must address the major challenge of evolving new types of economic and planning policies that break with the dismal cycle of the past. Moreover, ways must be found to create communal urban space capable of mitigating the drabness and dreariness of most public housing developments. Soaring land values have ensured that the kind of public space common in Western cities simply does not exist and in view of this consistent and wilful neglect of the public realm, apparently modest gestures assume an increased resonance and importance.

One recent exemplary scheme that brings together and explores these issues is the Kitagata Public Housing Project in Gifu Prefecture, just north of Nagoya in the central part of Japan. Initiated by Arata Isozaki, the prototypical project aims to address the problems of public space and housing in a multi-layered way, and provide politicians, developers and architects with possible paradigms for future development. The initiative was supported by the governor of Gifu Prefecture, Taju Kajiwara, who originally trained as an engineer and has a strong interest in architecture.

An all-woman group of architects and designers was invited to participate, comprising Akiko Takahashi and Kazuyo Sejima from Japan, Christine Hawley from England, and Elizabeth Diller from the USA. Each was commissioned to design an apartment block and the American landscape architect Martha Schwartz was asked to produce proposals for the surrounding public spaces. Isozaki acted as overall masterplanner for the scheme.

The task was straightforward but far from simple: to design a set of apartments that could serve as an alternative to the reductivist postwar system blocks common to most towns and cities. There was also a twist: the blocks had to be designed without reference to a specific plot, even though the site was known.

Reflecting their diverse cultural backgrounds, each of the four architects proposed very different sorts of solutions. Inspired by the transformation of New York loft spaces into residential apartments, Elizabeth Diller employs flexible room dividers to demarcate and open up space. Christine Hawley's block of duplex apartments creates a sense of volume and continuity, despite the inherently tight specifications of the brief. The proposals of the two Japanese architects are each based on typical vernacular dwellings in common use before the postwar standardization of housing. Akiko Takahashi explores the form of a subdivided square, found in Japanese farmhouses. Kazuyo Sejima's plan is based on a linear sequence of rooms along a corridor, resembling an iniwa, the garden passage elaborated in traditional town houses. These intriguing individual buildings will be discussed in more detail in a future issue.

Here, the focus is on the exterior public space element of the project, which unites and consummates the disparate quartet of blocks. Schwartz provides, in effect, a fifth building, a huge, habitable, outdoor room studded with incident and diversity. The blocks enclose and define an irregularly-shaped central garden space. This space is used by many different kinds of residents, reflecting the social mixture of the housing blocks, from young families to the elderly. Before its present incarnation as housing, the site was used for rice production, its landscape characterized by a network of sunken fields, raised terraces and dykes to contain the flooded rice paddies. The strong geometric figure of these enclosures provides a metaphor for the creation of a series of sunken garden rooms or enclaves. The entire linear spine of the garden is raised by the height of one storey (around 2.5m), lifting the garden off the ground plane and giving apartments at first floor level a direct visual connection to the landsca pe. (There is no living accommodation at ground level, as all the blocks sit on pilotis, with space for car parking in between.)