Charlie Krawczel Interior Design
B.S. ITDS, 4th Year
The evolution of Japanese architecture and its transparency to nature The relationship between a building and the surrounding environment has been heavily studied in Japan throughout the centuries. In a small island country where land is limited, an emphasis on a connection with nature has and will continue to evolve. Traditional Japanese buildings such as homes and temples are oriented toward views of an exterior or courtyard garden. Here, the separation between what is considered outside and inside is blurred and can even been transparent at times. Today, modern architecture builds upon this concept of transparency, with a strong tie to nature using glass and an openness to the street, that can alter what one deems as being “inside�. Gardens are indispensable to the traditional Japanese home. The intimate relationship between the two is completely ingrained in the country’s culture. The essentiality of a garden as something for viewing and contemplation has been its main purpose over the centuries, but in some ways, their usage has changed. The introduction of modern technology and the necessity for usable space has impacted the notion that the garden is to be used for viewing only. However, factors such as climate and the blurring of the boundary between inside and outside have remained. Modern buildings such as Shibaura House, The Nicolas G. Hayek Center and Sunny Hills abstract the idea of what a garden looks like, blurring the lines between what is deemed inside and outside. This is achieved by designing a simplified or abstracted version of the garden into the architecture, in addition to using layering and transparency.
Courtyard garden, private home in Naoshima Private home of Hakuya Noguchi
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Garden in Myoshinji Temple
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To understand how Japanese architecture evolved, it’s important to look at its history. Unlike some western buildings that have thick walls, Japanese buildings historically have thin walls. Architect Tetsuro Yoshida, in his book The Japanese House and Garden, says this is due to the distinctiveness between each of the four seasons. Each season is roughly the same length of time and can be recognized as different from the others by characteristics. Summer is characterized by being hot and very humid. The moisture that comes with humid air can become trapped within the walls of a building. Therefore, it is important to keep constant circulation within an area to keep the humid air in motion. The Japanese solution to this problem was to keep the walls light and create as many openings as possible to regulate the air.1 In a typical Japanese house, there were a few fixed walls with many sliding doors that create large openings for air to pass through. There are two types of sliding doors in traditional Japanese architecture. The fusuma are opaque sliding doors and the shoji are transparent sliding doors. Typically, the fusuma are found on the inside to provide privacy, while the transparent shoji are on the exterior to let in light. Beyond the exterior shoji screens would be the engawa, which is a wooden walkway just outside of the interior of the house. It is a physical transition from inside to outside. Traditionally, residents will sit and stand on the engawa to view their garden and meditate. In the summertime, it would be used just like any other portion of the house. During the holidays many will sit on the edge and eat fruit. The way the house is laid out makes the different horizontal surfaces the only apparent divider between the inside and the outside. The division between the organic earth and the structured architecture is what sets
it apart, as the vertical space between the two are connected when the shoji is open. This sets the stage for interior and courtyard gardens to be viewed during all seasons, from inside during the winter to outside during the warmer months. In modern times however, the significance of a garden simply for viewing and maintaining, seen in traditional and Japanese homes, has become less of a private endeavor and has turned into more of a public experience. In his book, The Inner Harmonies of the Japanese House (1990), Atsushi Ueda describes how the home garden is disappearing in the modern detached house. Ueda mentions that the decrease of Japanese home gardens can be said to be the result of the rising cost of land per area; however, the absence of the garden is not what is most noticeable. What is most noticeable about what he calls the “new home” is the repurposing of the garden space for parking or drying clothes.2 This is how the use of traditional gardens translates into the modern commercial building. Many new buildings bring in nature, but not all buildings with greenery can be representative of Japanese traditional architecture and gardens. The same can be said about buildings that use transparent materials like glass on the exterior. A glass façade does not equate to a fluidity between the inside and the outside. A study on modern Japanese buildings Shibaura House, The Nicolas G. Hayek Center, and Sunny Hills will give an analysis on the results of how traditional Japanese architecture and gardens evolved over time. It will also give a look into how the third space is used commercial buildings, much like Ueda’s observation on the new usage of residential garden space in modern homes.
A private home in Osaka
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Shibaura House is a five-story building located in the Minato ward of Tokyo, Japan. Designed by Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA Architects and completed in 20113, the building houses four floors open to the public and one floor as private office space. One thing to note about this building the use of terraces in such a way that the façade of the building remains flat. Every floor has a two-story high area that is open to the elements, aside from the first floor which ops to have an indoor mezzanine instead. The second floor is the first to have an outdoor terrace; however, the feeling of the space is very unlike a terrace. It reads somewhat like a screened in porch. Although it is open air, a light floor-toceiling chain link fence sets the boundary rather than a half wall or balustrade. The shape of the space is oblong, with the curved side of the interior opposite the flat side of the façade. Each floor is connected by a narrow, curvilinear staircase. Starting on the floor of each terrace, the stair winds up to meet a platform that extends outward from the interior concrete slab of the floor above. The use of this space relates back to what Atsushi Ueda observed about the new home garden. Each of the terraces, or “gardens”, in Shibaura House are completely transparent from the outside and inside are used for multiple purposes. All three terraces house several potted plants and trees, which act as the garden element. However, unlike a traditional garden that is to be viewed and maintained, the spaces that serve as gardens in Shibaura House are used to do work in as well. Whether they have a picnic table, as seen on the third floor terrace, or just a table and chairs, these spaces are meant to be used as much as they are to be viewed. The merging of the active working space and the passive viewing space is a compromise between the fast pace of modern times and the peacefulness of the tradition.
Shibaura House, 3rd Floor Terrace
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The Nicolas G. Hayek Center, also known as the headquarters of Swatch Group in Japan, was completed in 2007 as the work of architect Shigeru Ban.4 Located in the Ginza district of Tokyo, the design shows another take on traditional Japanese gardens in modern architecture. The façade of the building is completely open to the elements. Spanning all fourteen stories, the interior is clearly visible from the street and can be closed off via a glass storefront with a mechanism resembling a garage door. The building itself consists of multiple parts, the most iconic of which are the floating elevators. Another part are the platforms of space of which individual stores under the Swatch Group occupy. Finally, although not exactly occupiable, there is a garden. The building consists of fourteen floors divided into four sections. The ground floor provides access into the building; however, it is not simply of point of entry. It serves as a common ground for the sculpture created by the glass elevators. Although they vary in shape, each one houses a display case within and is labeled with the respective brand’s logo. The individual elevators have only one destination and are strategically placed so that when they reach their designated floor, they fit right into a pocket in the floor of the level above. In the first section, the floors start as being open to below until they eventually occupy the whole space, as seen on the fourth floor. Although each floor’s main space is enclosed, every section is divided by a terrace. The terraces are simple in design but are made complex in practice because of the relationship to the garden abstracted as a green wall. They act somewhat like the engawa, connecting garden to the interior. The green wall extends vertically from the ground floor all the way up to the fourteenth floor and can be viewed from every floor’s interior. This abstraction of Japanese gardens differs from that in Shibaura house in that its main purpose is for viewing. However, like the terraces in Shibaura house, there is not only a transparency between the garden and the street, but also a transparency between the interior space itself and the green wall, which is separated by glass. Because of the sheer surface area the green wall occupies, it makes itself known a main feature piece of the building. Like in traditional Japanese architecture, it continues to fill the role of reorienting the focus to nature.
Swatch Group Headquarters, Japan Ground Level
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Pineapple cake shop Sunny Hills, located in the residential neighborhood of Aoyama in Tokyo, is the work of Kengo Kuma & Associates. Completed in 2013, the building’s exterior is unique in that it was inspired by the shape of a woven bamboo basket. Planes made from wood joinery are present in both the exterior as a façade and in the interior as partitions. From the exterior, it seems as if there is nothing but the “basket” separating the interior from the outside elements, however the building has an interior glass layer that allows transparency and separation between spaces. The joinery itself is built from an adaption of the Jiigoku-gumi system, which is also used in shoji screens.5 “[The] Jiigoku-gumi system is a superposition of two layers of slender, wooden sticks tightly fixed together with a third layer. It is similar to weaving or knitting.” – Kengo Kuma via Interview with Domus The use of the Jiigoku-gumi system is another example of layering. However, unlike how Shibaura House and The Nicolas G. Hayek Center tackle layering mostly through horizontal layers, Sunny Hills takes a vertical approach to layering. The complexity of the wooden façade, the glass enclosed interior, and the wooden partitions that frame the interior stairway and garden are all vertical layers that make up the transition from the outside, in. These elements set the stage for the garden inside. The garden in this case is pretty straight forward. Differing from the two previous buildings mentioned, the interior garden of Sunny Hills directs more to the landscape commonly seen surrounding traditional Japanese architecture. The building stands on a steep hill and conforms to the slope it rests on. This is seen in the slope of the interior garden, which is positioned as if the other interior elements are set directly into the earth. The three buildings discussed all nod to how traditional Japanese architecture uses transparency and layering to connect the interior to the outside, and how it orients the user toward nature. However, they all have different interpretations of how that can be achieved. Shibaura House uses an abstracted version of a Japanese garden to merge the traditional, passive use for viewing, and the active, modern use that has evolved today. The Nicolas G. Hayek Center abstracts the relationship of the interior, exterior, and the transition between the two, known as the engawa, which is seen through the use the connection between the fourteen-story green wall and the four terraces. Finally, Sunny Hills uses vertical layering to set the stage for its interior garden, which is an element that mirrors the position of traditional Japanese architecture on a landscape. After further analysis, one can conclude that although this much thought may not have been outwardly displayed in the inspiration behind each project, the concept of the Japanese garden is so deeply ingrained into the Japanese culture, it naturally evolved over time into the modern architecture seen today.
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Sunny Hills Lobby
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ENDNOTES
1. Yoshida, Tetsuro. The Japanese House and Garden. Frederick A. Prager, Publishers. 1964. p. 11-16, 155, 168-176. 2. Ueda, Atsushi. The Inner Harmony of the Japanese House. Kodansha International. 1990. p. 62, 153-157, 160-168. 3. “About Floor.” shibaurahouse.jp. Accessed 01 Mar. 2019 4. “Nicolas G. Hayek Center.” architectmagazine.com. Accessed 01 Mar. 2019. 5. Balboa, Rafael A. “Sunny Hills and the matter of business.” 13 Jan. 2014. domusweb.it. Accessed 01 Mar. 2019.
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