Ar 132

AR132—Residential Neil Durbach Nonda Katsalidis Robert McGauran Andrew Maynard Architects Moor Street House Under Construction MOS Architects Lali Gurans Orphanage Stephen Collier Architects Lavender Bay Boatshed

9 772200 243006 04

$15.95 AU D

October – November 2013

AR132 39311_001-AR132-Cover.indd 1

14/08/13 10:29 AM

AR132

Architectural Review Asia Pacific Summer 2013

Regulars

004

POSTVIEW—AR131 Thomas Hale

022

One to Watch—MAKE architecture studio Anna Johnson

028

On Trial Michael Holt

0 91 0 93

Folio In Conversation Diego Ramírez-Lovering

Under Construction

0 98 012

PREVIEW—AR133 Lali Gurans Orphanage and Learning Centre—MOS Architects Aleksandr Bierig

Reviews

010 016

Book Round-up Book Review—How to Make a Japanese House Alysia Bennett

020

Book Review—A Topology of Everyday Constellations Melonie Bayl-Smith

Interviews

Features

026 032 096 03 4

Neil Durbach (Durbach Block Jaggers Architects) Nonda Katsalidis (Fender Katsalidis Architects) Robert McGauran (McGauran Giannini Soon Architects) The End of Prefabrication Chris Knapp

038

Remote, In More Ways Than One Sarah Lynn Rees

Projects

0 44

Sydney: Balmain House (Fox Johnston) Craig Johnson

05 0

Đông Trieu: Stone House (Vo Trong Nghia Architects) Ha Leviet Ashui

05 6

Sydney: Cowshed House (Carterwilliamson Architects) Lucy Humphrey

0 62

Shanghai: Split House (Neri & Hu Architects) Austin Williams

068

Sydney: Lavender Bay Boatshed (Stephen Collier Architects) Leon van Schaik

074

Johor Bahru: Pile House (Pencil Office) Narelle Yabuka

080

Melbourne: Moor Street House (Andrew Maynard Architects) Maitiú Ward

086

Alibag: House on a Stream (Architecture Brio) Isaac Mathew + Ian Nazareth

39311_006-AR132-Contents.indd 008

14/08/13 7:57 AM

ON TRIAL Michael Holt

ON TRIAL

The Meeting of East and West: Kikutake and Le Corbusier

J

apanese architect Kiyonori Kikutake’s Sky House (1958) remains an exemplary project that defines the Metabolist agenda but, more significantly, underscores the notion that a single-family dwelling can be ideologically recursive and strategic.

Kikutake, however, was not without a somewhat unlikely precedent in the renowned Le Corbusier. Both architects established an order and method of working via their smallest designs – Kikutake in

Sky House and Le Corbusier at Villa Savoye (1929) – and developed their notions through written accounts (Kikutake’s Metabolist Manifesto, 1960 and Le Corbusier’s Purist Manifesto, predating the built work, in 1918).

Finally, each scales up their ideas to the level of the urban through Kikutake’s Tower-Shaped Community Project (1959) and Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme at Chandigarh, India (1953). To locate the origin of the influence, it is necessary to first

examine Le Corbusier’s position as the figurehead of Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

CIAM was a crucial discursive platform in postwar Europe, enabling policy-making and urban discourse, paramount to metropolitan reconstruction. However, as cities redeveloped, aggregated and expanded, CIAM’s impact began to wane.

The apex of disintegration was CIAM 8, Hoddesdon, UK (1951), ending officially at

0 28

39311_028-030-AR132-OnTrial.indd 028

14/08/13 8:47 AM

ON TRIAL Michael Holt

01. Axonometric drawing showing the slab detail and movenette structures 02. Sky House, Tokyo, 1958. Image courtesy: Kawashima Architecture Photograph Offi ce

CIAM 10, Dubrovik (1956). Catalan architect and CIAM president, Josep Lluís Sert, invited Britain’s Mars Group to form the agenda for CIAM 8, focusing on the civic ‘core’ or ‘the heart of the city’. Interestingly, this meeting was the first to recognise non-European architects, notably Japan’s Kenzo Tange, Kunio Maekawa and Junzo Sakakura. Incidentally, Maekawa and Sakakura had previously worked for Le Corbusier between 1928–1930 and 1931–1936, respectively. It is not only the global recognition of Japanese architects that CIAM 8 should be noted for, but rather as the precise point Le Corbusier’s star was fading in favour of Team X and the British Hi-Tech.

Kenzo Tange, working in the office of Maekawa between 1938–1942, presented the first project from a non-Western architect at CIAM 8 – the Hiroshima Peace Centre and Memorial Park (1955). While CIAM 8 was progressive in its inclusion of Tange, it was fundamentally flawed by its Western bias to issues of housing, given that such concerns are not limited to Europe. However the decisive split came in CIAM 9, when Team X’s Alison and Peter Smithson (with Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck), undermined the functionalist categories of work, dwelling, recreation and transport by proposing a cellular approach as the ‘aggregation of urban growth’. In

02

overthrowing the established order, Team X had formed their own position, but also gave the Japanese contingent an opportunity to return home with plans to create their own solutions to urban issues following the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It came in the form of Metabolism. Where CIAM promoted a platform for architectural discourse, giving rise to what is more commonly referred to as International Style, Metabolism was a radical, utopian movement in response to urban issues in postwar Japan. Indeed, the founding declaration of CIAM was largely the work of left-wing humanists Mart Stam, Hannes Meyer and Hans Schmidt, suggesting architecture must be dependent upon (rather than distanced from) the industrialised world. It was a marked attempt to remove architecture from traditional craftsmanship in favour of a rationalised method of production. An ideal to which the Metabolists followed suit.

The Metabolist Manifesto – a series of four essays entitled Ocean City, Space City, Towards Group Form and Material and Man, devised by Kisho Kurokawa, Fumihiko Maki, Masato Otaka and Kikutake – was presented at the Tokyo World Design Conference (1960), with an insistence on the need to separate parts of buildings or cities that have different rates of change, allowing for certain structures to remain

undisturbed as others naturally deteriorate.

The term Metabolism, coined by Kikutake, was a biological analogy – perhaps referential to Le Corbusier’s concepts of the house as a ‘machine for living’. And although Metabolism’s speculative and creative proposals were ultimately unfeasible, they instigated a discourse, refocusing architecture as a socially powerful tool for regeneration and interactivity – the very core of CIAM. Curiously, a feedback loop occurred: as Team X mediated European discourse away from such discussions, Metabolism’s ideals returned with vigour in, for example, the work of Dutch architect, Jaap Bakema.

Kikutake, having previously worked alongside Tange, designed possibly the most emblematic Metabolist building, Sky House. Designed and built in 1958, the project was an exploration into changeable systems. Kikutake designed ‘permanent spaces’ – where changes are not needed – and ‘temporary spaces’ that allow for ‘subspaces with the possibility of removal’.

The latter were ‘movenettes’, which controlled the relationship between building and surrounding. The children’s rooms, kitchen and bathroom, for instance, were designed as units that can be moved, enlarged or decreased in size, to facilitate future needs or change; an interchangeability of space. →

029

39311_028-030-AR132-OnTrial.indd 029

14/08/13 8:48 AM

39311_080-085-AR132-Projects-MoorSt.indd 080

14/08/13 9:55 AM

07 MOOR STREET Location Architect Review Photography

39311_080-085-AR132-Projects-MoorSt.indd 081

Melbourne, Australia Andrew Maynard Architects MaitiĂş Ward Peter Bennetts

14/08/13 9:55 AM