Tokyo translucence: this new living and work space in Tokyo makes the most of a tight urban site and lyrically reinterprets Japanese tradition - AR House

Architectural Review, The, May, 2003 by Michael Webb

Over the past decade, Kengo Kuma has made brilliant use of clear glass, wooden slats, bamboo, precast concrete, and, most recently, plastic, to create membranes and grilles that dematerialize structure and achieve wondrous optical illusions. Last year, he won the Finnish Spirit of Nature Wood Architecture Award for a body of work that included the Great Bamboo Wall, which is the highlight of a recent upscale housing development outside Beijing. There, on a hilly site by the Great Wall of China, Kuma designed a giant cricket cage to catch summer breezes and commune with the landscape. The palisades of bamboo glimmer in the sunlight and cast bars of shadow across rooms and courtyards.

China offered Kuma a rare opportunity to spread his wings-- physically, as well as exploring a fresh approach to a traditional building material. In Tokyo, the challenge is to create an illusion of infinity within dense urban constraints. Space has to be carved out and carefully wrapped to create a luminous, inward-looking void, augmented by carefully framed views of the townscape. Rowland Kirishima, a leading fashion photographer, and his mother, writer Yoko Kirishima, commissioned a live-work space for themselves on a confined 151-square-metre lot; Kuma decided to break out of the massive concrete boxes that are customarily employed in Japan, and use plastic as the major building material. In doing so, he has reinvented the traditional Japanese house, with its post and beam structure and infill of translucent shoji screens.

Here, steel is employed for the lightweight structural frame, but concealed in the envelope of fibre. reinforced polyester wands, and cavity walls of fibreglass panels attached to plastic studs with transparent screws. Kuma prizes the organic properties of this synthetic material, likening it to human skin, and noting how the fibres within the resin give it the quality of handmade paper. A tall open-ended box projects from the translucent facade of the second floor, enclosing a balcony for the master bedroom on the street front, and framing the rooftop stair tower/storage room. The asymmetry of the open and enclosed volumes adds scale without overwhelming the modest neighbours. By day, the house reads as a geometrical abstraction; at night, glimpsed through the branches of a willow across the street, as a high-tech lantern.

The backyard is screened from neighbours by a fence of plastic wands, which are also employed for a step-up platform over a lightwell. Here, Kuma has reinvented the tea house, for this outdoor platform serves the same role as tatami mats in an enclosed structure, while allowing natural light to penetrate to the mother's basement apartment. As in the street facade, monumentality gives place to a springy, permeable enclosure, assuring privacy yet integrating the house with its surroundings.

The all-white ground-floor photo studio doubles as a living-dining room, and opens up to the forecourt and backyard through clear glass. White blinds pull down for privacy or as a backdrop. The concrete floor has radiant heating, and a suspended aluminium bar runs the length of the room supporting up and down lights. Built-in storage and an open kitchen extend along the north side of this room. A staircase runs up the south wall, linking basement to roof, and the translucent plastic grid treads diffuse light from above. A basement gallery houses the family's antique collection, and there is also a guest bedroom to the back of the master bedroom. The roof terrace serves as an outdoor studio and also as a place for entertaining.

The rigorous consistency of materials and detailing was hard to achieve, for Kuma was challenging his construction crew to do things they had never done before. His persistence paid off, adding a layer of sensuality to a structure that feels alive and responsive to the bodies passing though it.

Architect

Kengo Kuma & Associates, Tokyo

Project architect

Hiroshi Nakamura

Structural engineer and contractor

Kajima Design

Photographs

Mitsumasa Fujitsuka, Shinkenchlku-Sha