S AM Swiss Architecture Museum
Yuma Shinohara Andreas Ruby (eds.)
Christoph Merian Verlag
Make Do With Now introduces the thinking and projects of a new generation of architects working in Japan today. This generation must grapple with a plethora of urgent problems currently plaguing the country, including rapid population decline and empty ing provinces, the proliferation of vacant houses all across the nation, neoliberal urban development, a largely stagnant economy whose burden falls disproportionately on the shoulders of younger generations, and, of course, the global climate crisis.
Instead of being humbled into resigna tion or seeking refuge in a depoliticized pursuit of “architecture for architecture’s sake,” however, many architects of this generation are choosing to confront these issues head-on. Almost two decades after architecture from Japan was celebrated throughout the world for its ephemeral, light-filled spaces under the banner of “New Innocence,” the current wave of Japanese practices features a decidedly new aesthetic politics that isn’t afraid to leave things rough around the edges. 1
Turning their marginalized position into a strength, these practices are developing a range of critical, ecological, and social practices that creatively “make do” – with limited resources, with found materials, with existing spaces. Whether working from the periphery, exploiting gaps in the system, or occupying new roles in the process that have previously been overlooked, these practitioners are articulating a new architectural agency that radically departs from the traditional image of the architect-auteur.
This also means rethinking what architecture actually entails. Having come into professional practice following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster, this generation is fundamentally aware of the fragility and contradictions of prevailing systems. Perhaps this explains their interest in networked flows: buildings are no longer seen as stand-alone objects, but rather as inextricably linked to the larger social,
material, capital, and information cycles that exist both inside and outside of them. Architecture, then, becomes a matter of engaging with these flows to achieve desired outcomes: directing them, blocking them, or even subverting them.
While these architects are surely developing these positions in relation to international perspectives – ideas such as Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory or Ivan Illich’s critique of institutions are commonly cited, for example – they are just as much turning to practices and structures traditionally cultivated in Japan for inspiration. 2 In a moment where the postwar, rationalist order of growth and development has reached an impasse, older phenomena such as collective housebuilding, traditional artisanship, self-sufficient material economies as found in rural villages, or informal social structures at the neighborhood scale – all things that have been marginalized in the name of development – are being reevaluated and reclaimed. The reuse of materials is just as likely to be couched in a modern language of sustainability as the traditional Japanese attitude of mottainai [what a waste], hearkening back to a paradigm of scarcity where frugality was not a moral choice, but simply common sense.
How does one define a generation?
Is it an age range, a common social milieu, a set of shared values? Is it an identity internally defined, or does its contours only come into view in retrospect, or when seen from an external lens?
The question is particularly pertinent in the context of Japanese architecture, where, perhaps more so than in many European or North American traditions, the historiography tends to describe a linear sequence of generations, emerging at intervals of approximately ten years.
This project approaches “generation” in a looser sense; while a majority of the mentioned architects were born after 1980 , thus representing the youngest cohort currently practicing in Japan, selection was not based on an arbitrary age cutoff, but rather on an affinity to certain common interests and approaches that signal a new way of approaching and doing architecture.
The following are attempts to sketch out these trends and commonalities among the practices of these architects, a venture at forming a makeshift vocabulary for describing a generation that is very much in the process of articulating itself.
Increasingly, architecture in Japan is one of transformation and reprogramming, rather than of new construction. If previous generations of young architects had made their name through adventurous single-family homes, commissioned by young families to mark new phases of their lives, one could speak now of a “renovation generation” whose first projects consist of small-scale refurbishments of existing buildings and interiors – an observation borne out by taking a look at any recent architecture magazine in Japan. On the one hand, this trend is a function of scarcity – commissions for new constructions are few and far between, often because young people simply do not have the resources to buy property and finance new houses from the ground up – but this is also reflective of a general shift in cultural values.
Since the period of rapid economic growth following the Second World War, Japan and its construction industry have been traditionally marked by a “scrap-and-build” model, tearing down old buildings and erecting new ones in cycles of approximately thirty years to accommodate new needs. 3
However, declining demand for housing due to a shrinking population, in addition to an increased awareness of the environmental burden of the scrap-and-build model, have forced a shift from a consumption-centered “flow” paradigm to a “stock” paradigm, whose emphasis lies on reusing existing building stock and on building for the longer term. On top of that, in 2018 an astounding 13 . 6 percent of all houses in Japan stood vacant, the highest rate it has ever been. 4 With further demographic change on the horizon, certain metrics predict that the housing vacancy rate will rise to as much as 30 percent by the year 2038 . 5 As the ecological costs of new construction become ever more apparent, engaging with this existing building stock seems to be not only the pragmatic choice, but also a moral imperative. The frontier for architects in Japan today is thus less the mythical tabula rasa of the sara-chi [empty lot] than the swaths of un- or underutilized building stock inherited from previous generations. Projects such as House I by SSK (p. 262 ) or Dig in the Doma by Lunch! Architects (p. 226 ) make use of the flexible qualities of traditional Japanese timber architecture to introduce new spat ial qualities while carrying forward the histories and memories accrued over time by the original buildings. The WOTA Office Project by mtka (p. 230), on the other hand, subtly edits the various traces accumulated in a seventyyear-old bank building to create a project where the new and existing enigmatically intermingle. And Ebina Art Freeway by GROUP (p. 210 ) demonstrates that adaptive reuse need not be reserved for historic or monumental structures, transforming a group of unspectacular prefabricated homes from the 1990 s into a space that surprises with its radicality.
All too often, renovations are seen as less prestigious than new constructions, as marked by compromise and limitations. Yet what if we were to understand these projects not as mere survival tactics or preludes to
more desirable commissions for new buildings, but rather as aesthetic and constructive statements in their own right?
Lacking opportunities for experimenta tion through traditional commissions, many architects are turning to the one sphere where they have absolute control as a space for testing out their ideas: the places where they live and work.
While architects’ private residences have long been a fruitful field of experimenta tion in Japanese architecture, the trend seems to be undergoing a particular flourishing in recent years. 6 A house such as Suzuko Yamada’s daita 2019 (p. 286 ) carries on this legacy of formal experimentation, whereby its materialization using standardized industrial materials and its reinterpretation of the house at the intersection of multiple paths and sightlines suggests a new set of concerns. Whereas typical case-study houses of the past had been built from scratch, Masaaki Iwamoto’s Flat in Sakurazaka (p. 214 ) makes a statement by renovating an existing building, demonstrating how inherited building stock can be retrofitted to accommodate new, more flexible forms of living. With Holes in the House (p. 48 ), Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku push this model even further. Their incremental transformation of an inconspicuous house from Japan’s boom years into an “urban wild ecology” is a lived manifesto for a different way of doing and thinking architecture: a house in permanent evolution, changing along with the lives of its inhabitants.
A further trend is the extension of this experimental spirit to the workplace. In con trast to the withdrawn architectural offices of yore, often found on the higher floors of anonymous multi-tenant buildings, many younger architecture practices are opting for workspaces that are open to the city around them. Hosting events or functioning as coworking spaces open to members of
other professions, these spaces reflect a new openness among architects toward their local communities. In House 03 by Studio GROSS (p. 258 ), for example, the office becomes an interface between the lives of the architects and the city, a flexible and permeable membrane that can absorb inputs from its surroundings while also doing its part to revitalize the neighborhood around it. A project such as Junpei Nousaku’s Fujimidai Tunnel (p. 246 ) takes this idea in a different direction, reinterpreting the architecture office as a shared community space and throwing open its doors to locals who are looking to try out new business ideas.
In these projects, architects are stepping out of the shadows and putting their own lives on display. No longer content to merely envision new ways of living and working at the drafting board, they are themselves modeling new lifestyles and thereby imbuing the role of the architect with a new agency.
In an age in which architecture and urban development are increasingly shaped by external political and economic forces, architects are only invited to participate as mere service providers in existing processes of urban transfor mation, if at all, and rarely drive such processes themselves. Particularly in Japan, where larger-scale developments of an urban scale are the province of large general contractor firms or a handful of star architects, independent practices often have little influence in shaping the urban environments around them.
With architects mostly excluded from making the city directly, they are trying out another model: creating new buildings that actively interface with
the neighborhoods around them, inviting the city in and actively influencing it in turn. The resulting architecture manages to realize urban structures within the confines of limited volumes and property lines, providing public or semipublic spaces as well as different functions that resemble the liveliness of a small neighborhood.
One example is dot architects’ Chidori Bunka (p. 176 ), which takes a vacant, closed city block and radically opens it up, creating an “alleyway” in the block interior that functions as a juncture between the various dining and cultural facilities that are distributed throughout the complex – a town square in miniature. On a slightly larger scale, Kasugadai Center Center by teco (p. 270 ) features a series of open corridors that extend the street into the building, weaving together diverse functions and allowing for informal spaces of exchange between its different users. With BONUS TRACK (p. 274 ), Tsubame Architects realize an entire micro-neighborhood on a piece of land made free by the undergrounding of a rail line, thus creating a flexible urban structure that remains affordable for indepen dent business owners and can be gradually changed over time. In their respective contexts, these projects perform an act of repair, restoring an older model of Japanese urbanism that is centered more around liminal areas of encounter and chance than clear functional boundaries.
In all of these cases, the architects were closely involved with their clients in the development of the concept, program, and execution; some continue to be involved in the day-to-day operations of the buildings even after completion. In this way, these architects are forging a new model of social engagement, changing the city incrementally through individual buildings.
Alt-ArchitectDoes the traditional model of the architecture firm function anymore? This question seems to occupy a wide spectrum of young architects today. 7 Independent firms have had a difficult time staying afloat even in good times, but following the 2008 economic downturn, and a further blow to the economy with the 2011 earthquake, the situation is particularly difficult for young architects working today. Commissions are hard to come by, while the handful of competitions that do take place remain out of reach for small offices due to high entry requirements. Just as the urgencies of the present moment seem to call for architects to directly engage with society more than ever, they are finding themselves with their hands tied.
This situation has led some architects to envision new models for architectural practice, interrupting the traditional linear relationship of client, architect, and constructor, if not collapsing it entirely. Inspired by start-ups, design firms such as CHAr (p. 80 ) and VUILD (p. 282 ) have centered their practice on tapping into underutilized resources such as aging wooden apartment buildings or the lumber industry, respectively. Instead of the creation of individual buildings, their main focus lies in the design of entire systems, intervening in the very mechanisms that incentivize housing provision or material supply chains. Architects are no longer merely designers, but also activists, entrepreneurs, and developers in one, creating their own projects rather than waiting for commissions to come to them.
Other practices, such as dot architects, 403 architecture [dajiba], or TAB (p. 266 ), combine their design practice with hands-on construction, working alongside craftspeople (and sometimes also clients) on site and developing solutions in dialogue with them. Beyond being a pragmatic response to financial limitations, DIY is for them also part of a considered methodology: a way to break
down traditional hierarchies and practice a form of design that emerges out of an honest engagement with people and materials.
A questioning of the traditional model of the architecture firm can also be seen in the (re)emergence of collective forms of work. In organizations such as 403 architec ture [dajiba] in Hamamatsu, dot architects in Osaka, GROUP in Tokyo, or TAB in Gifu, the identities of individual architects are subsumed into a group identity that is more about a certain position and methodology than individual renown. 8 Projects such as Ishimura + Neichi’s Senju Motomachi Souko (p. 218 ) or Lunch! Architects’ Dig in the Doma are based on an open structure in which the architect is merely one player in a horizontal network of various collaborators, each bringing different perspectives and skills to the site.
These practices call into question the typical idea of the architect as singular author, instead proposing an understanding of architects as networked actors whose work is dependent on the participation of a wide variety of collaborators. In this ar rangement, the expertise of the architect is less about originating an idea ex nihilo as it is about strategically interpreting, absorbing, and synthesizing others’ points of view.
For many years, Japanese architecture was celebrated for its unique and varied residential buildings, whose contrast to their humdrum surroundings was often played up in architectural media. Even when the building strived for openness and transparency, in formal terms it represented an auto nomous unit that defined itself in opposition to its context. Against this, recent architecture in Japan displays what might be called a new contextual turn: renewed attention to the everyday textures of Japanese cities, seeking hints within the seemingly banal in order to arrive at solutions that are at once universal
and reflective of a specific sense of place.9
In the work of 403 architecture [dajiba] (p. 112 ), each project responds to or gives material expression to the context of their home base of Hamamatsu in some way, blurring the bound aries between the architectural project and the city. Elsewhere, every design by tomito architecture (p. 144 ) is preceded by an intensive period of research that includes historical and structural analysis of a place as well as on-the-ground fieldwork and interviews with local residents. The information gleaned from the city is absorbed and recomposed to create the architectural work; especially in the firm’s earlier projects, the city even made its way into the building in a very physical way, as bits and pieces donated by neighbors or gathered from nearby sites were gradually inte grated into the structure. Resonances to this approach can be seen in projects as diverse as Rui Itasaka’s Hanmugi Hat (p. 254 , with Tezzo Nishizawa), where the form and materiality of the house were derived from the everyday scenery and textures of its small-town context; or Maki Yoshimura’s Yama sato Nursery School Annex (p. 234 ), where a close reading of the overlapping historical, structural, and topographic contexts is used to arrive at a surgical intervention that is just enough to bring back into motion a situation clogged up by decades of makeshift modifications. This attitude goes hand in hand with the general trend toward adaptive reuse instead of new construction. Indeed, inherent to projects such as Chidori Bunka or Shigenori Uoya’s Container Machiya (p. 278 ) is a revalorization of the anonymous architecture of previous generations, and an attempt to continue building on existing material and urban structures without succumbing to simple preservation.
These sites far from the metropolitan centers of prestige – the tired neighborhoods of the periphery, the midsize provincial cities, the rusty seaside towns – have become the frontier for a new model of architecture based in a slow and careful engagement with places and the peo ple that live in them. In opposition to an architecture of broad gestures and big ideas, this form of practice seeks the future in what already exists.
While it would be too simple to reduce the concerns of an entire generation to a single event, there is no denying that the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11 , 2011 , was a pivotal moment to many. The immediate and long-term aftermath, includ ing energy shortages in the capital region, political deadlock, a contentious public debate on nuclear energy dependency, and the ultimate resumption of business as usual, made clear the linkages between energy, consumption, and catastrophe, and laid bare the fragilities of a system that had been taken for granted up to that point.
This new generation of architects is thus attuned more than ever to the inter connectedness of things. They see architecture as part and parcel with the material, social, and economic relationships that surround and constitute it. Imagining an alternative archi tecture thus requires a fundamental rethinking of the systems that undergird it, starting with where the materials we build with come from – and where they will go.
In both Norihisa Kawashima’s Good Cycle Building 001 (p. 238 ) and Fuminori Nou saku’s Akeno Raised Floor (p. 242 ), this question takes center stage, with the frame of design expanded to encompass both the responsible sourcing of materials and their afterlife when the building is no longer there. Shun Takagi’s House Monk Beat (p. 250 , with Yukinari Murakami)
represents a hyperlocal version of this material turn, mobilizing dormant resources in a rural village, such as forgotten stones, a neglected forest grove, or surplus soil, to build a house from scratch. In Ishimura + Neichi’s Senju Motomachi Souko, materials circulate continuously throughout the building, their regular recombination becoming the architectural project itself. Finally, Kissa Noza rashi by Kengo Satō (p. 222 ) gives form to a different flow of substance, in this case from the countryside to the city, mirroring the architect’s own back and forth between the two contexts.
In all these projects, architecture is no longer conceived as a single, static object, but rather as a dynamic form emerging at the intersection of multiple material trajectories. Carefully tracing these histories, architects are imagining alternatives to industrialized supply chains and developing a new material ethics that foregrounds a culture of sufficiency.
Make Do With Now does not aim to be a final statement on the architecture emerging from Japan today, but rather ventures a momentary inventory of the diverse positions and ideas that can be observed.
The first part of the book provides a bird’s-eye perspective of recent develop ments in Japanese architecture through two contributions, one by a historian, the other by an architect. In his essay, the architectural historian Kōji Ichikawa interprets the activities of young architects in Japan in historical perspective, mapping out the shifts in the concerns of architects over the last twenty years. Architect Momoyo Kaijima’s contribu tion examines the role of the architect in Japanese society, taking a closer look at successive “new waves” that have shifted the parameters of architectural engagement over the years and identifying some of the barriers that exist for practitioners today.
The second part of the book profiles five architecture offices – Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku, CHAr, 403 architecture [dajiba], dot architects, and tomito architecture – that have distinctive approaches to their work and their thinking about architec ture. Photographic essays by Go Itami docu ment select projects and the contexts in which these architects operate, providing a look at what it means to be a young architect working in Japan today. In dialogue with these profiles are five short contributions by established and emerging Japanese historians and theorists. Ranging from speculative visions to ethnographic records of developments happening in real time, these contributions are not so much intended to explain the works of the featured architects as to sketch out alternative ideas of what architecture itself (and architects themselves) can be.
The third segment of the book comprises an index of twenty representative projects. Diverse in both scale and program, the selection aims to provide an x-ray scan of contemporary architectural production in Japan and demonstrates that it is difficult to reduce the various attitudes and concerns of this generation of architects to a single issue. Rather, the image that emerges is that of a generation seeking new modes of architectural engagement in an effort to articulate an adequate response to the urgent prob lems of today.
Finally, the architectural historian Cathelijne Nuijsink provides a coda to this investigation, departing from the confines of Japan and interpreting the activities of successive generations of Japanese architects in an international context. Architectural develop ments in Japan have never happened in a vacuum, but rather have always been in dialogue with developments in the world at large. In this globalized age, in which capital, information, and people cross and recross borders, it indeed seems anachronistic to think of architecture in “national” terms alone. It is thus fitting to close this book
with an opening, an invitation to build new alliances shaped by common concerns across national boundaries.
Such alliances have a particular urgency in this present moment. Issues such as shrinking populations, profitdriven urban development, stagnating growth, and climate change are not unique to Japan, but rather characterize many advanced industrial nations today. The overlapping and accelerated emergence of these problems in Japan simply means that this country is, perhaps, a few steps ahead of the rest. The radical architectural solutions formulated in response to this situation are by no means a distant phenomenon; they are a glimpse forward into a prac tice and understanding of architecture that is quickly also becoming the norm elsewhere. Indeed, any look around the landscape of young architects in the West shows that Japanese architects are not alone with these concerns. What is happening in Japan now is relevant for the world at large, holding lessons for a wider discussion about architecture’s role in a post-growth context.
One such lesson is that it all comes down to a point of view. These projects demonstrate that to “make do” by no means signalizes a lack of anything. On the contrary, they help us perceive the plenitude that comes with sufficiency, the creative flourishing that follows when we recognize that we already have enough. Instead of pining after the illusion of constant growth, what if we start focusing our energies on caring more for what we already have?
At a time of increasing crises and divisions, impending recessions and arrows that seem only to point down, perhaps this is a perspective that we can all use now, more than ever before.
1 “A New Innocence: Emerging Trends in Japanese Architecture” was a lecture series at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2011 that featured Sou Fujimoto, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryūe Nishizawa of SANAA, Junya Ishigami, and Toyō Itō.
2 For applications of Latour’s Actor Network Theory to architecture in the Japanese context, see, e.g.: Fuminori Nousaku, “Kenchiku ni okeru akutā nettowāku to wa nanika: ‘Takaoka no gesuto hausu’” [What is the actor network in architecture?: “Guesthouse in Takaoka”], 10+1 website , February 2015, https://www.10plus1.jp/monthly/2015/ 02/issue-04.php; “Kenchiku no zenshinteki tenkai” [Gradualism in architecture], 10+1 website , special edition, January 2020, https:// www.10plus1.jp/monthly/2020/01/. For Illich, see, e.g.: dot architects (Toshikatsu Ienari), Cut Trees on the Mountain, Make a Boat, Float It on the Sea , trans. Alan Gleason, Contemporary Architect’s Concept Series 27 (Tokyo: LIXIL, 2020), 34.
3 Nate Berg, “Raze, rebuild, repeat: why Japan knocks down its houses after 30 years,” The Guardian , 16 November 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusablehousing-revolution.
4 Statistics Bureau of Japan, Heisei 30-nen jūtaku / tochi tōkei chōsa [Statistical study of housing and land use, Heisei 30], Tokyo: Statistics Bureau of Japan, 2019, https://www.stat.go.jp/data/ jyutaku/2018/pdf/g_gaiyou.pdf.
5 Nomura Research Institute, “2040-nen no jūtaku ichiba to kadai” [The housing market in year 2040 and its challenges], by Akira Daidō et al., Tokyo: Nomura Research Institute, 2022, https:/ /www.nri.com/-/media/Corporate/jp/Files/PDF/knowledge/report/ cc/mediaforum/2022/forum337.pdf.
6 The topic was explored in depth in the exhibition The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945 in 2017, see: “The Japanese House: Architecture and Life After 1945,” ed. Kenjirō Hosaka and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, special issue, Jūtaku Tokushū 2017, no. 8 (August 2017).
7 In Japan, architecture offices can be organized broadly into three categories: (1) large, corporate architecture firms; (2) general contractor firms with architectural design departments; and (3) the so-called “atelier” firms, often carrying the name of their founding partner and a modest staff size of anywhere from one to twenty people. Whereas the first two – generally grouped together as soshiki-kei , or “organizational” firms – are responsible for the bulk of new construction in Japan, be it large-scale infrastructure projects, office high-rises, or public buildings, the “atelier” firms are known for emphasizing the authorial side of architecture and have largely contributed to the reputation of Japanese architecture abroad today. The latter category is also the focus of this project.
8 This turn toward collectives is reminiscent of the “Unit School” generation of the 1990s, a time of similar economic stagnation; for a more detailed examination, see the essays by Kōji Ichikawa and Cathelijne Nuijsink in this volume.
9 The analysis and evaluation of the everyday in a form of “architectural ethnography” has a long tradition in Japan, ranging from more recent examples such as Atelier Bow-Wow’s Made in Tokyo (Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, 2001) to even older models such as the Rojō Kansatsu Gakkai [Street Observation Society] of the 1980s or Wajirō Kon’s visual documentation of everyday material culture during the 1920s. In this sense, it is perhaps more correct to speak of a contextual (re)turn.