Here’s a second batch of photos from Jeremie Souteyrat’s book Tokyo no ie (Tokyo houses).
The book also includes an interesting text by world-famous architect Kuma Kengo (link to my interview. Here are a few excerpts.
Den’enchofu
I come from Okurayama, a suburban community located between Yokohama and Tokyo. From the time I was four years old, I took the train from there to the outskirts of Tokyo, where I attended nursery school in Den’enchofu. The trip only took some 15 minutes, yet at each station where the train stopped were all kinds of houses in which my schoolmates lived and where I often visited. So even from that tender age, I was able to observe many sorts of residencies, and I was astonished to note so many different building styles. At that time, the end of the 50s, there were still people living on small farms, but also very rich families who could afford to build quite modern-style homes. I well remember how I pondered a great deal over such broad diversity.
Den’enchofu is a district of very large private residencies. But from a young age I disliked this sort of luxury, the very large homes of the new rich. But there were also architect’s houses, and these suited me far better. They weren't overstated and I found them to be very smart in terms of their design. These scarcely belonged to well-known architects such as Tange or Isozaki later became, but nevertheless, I found they possessed a true sort of richness. They weren't especially large, but I told myself that they contained true luxury. I wanted to live in a house like that myself and that was why from an early age I made up my mind to become an architect.
Tokyo Houses
Owing to the particular quality of Tokyo and, above all, the scarcity of space, houses in this city can seldom be designed as completely open. Moreover, even their surrounding gardens are likely to be small in size. The houses aren't expansive, but neither can they afford to be closed, and in my opinion, it is this “in-between” quality that best characterizes Tokyo: open and closed at one and the same time. It is this ambiguous quality that I search for when designing a house. And this double nature is probably specific to Tokyo. When you design a house, the result will always be either “open” or “closed” toward the city and its surroundings. Usually, it has to be one or the other, but Tokyo is quite ambiguous in this regard.
I normally try to use local materials. In Tokyo, however, I feel a need to employ more ambiguous materials, those that are able to encompass more than one meaning. Plastics, for example, are artificial, but at the same time they possess a suppleness that is almost organic. Thus, they are materials that are open and closed at the same time. In the same way, in my Steel House (2007) I used a material that is usually qualified as industrial, but I tried to increase its relative flexibility. I always choose materials that have a built-in sense of double play.
A good relationship between a house and its surroundings is in itself a matter of ambiguity. You must take the urban environment into account. If you live in the country, then you have to respect the environment whilst in Tokyo I want to distance myself without letting go entirely of the sadness that a complete enclosure would entail. This sort of ambiguity is ever present.
Architect-designed houses represent a mere 1% of all Tokyo residencies.
Still, I have the sense that there are quite a lot of opportunities for an architect to design a house here. Indeed, you see a great many. Also, it's interesting that in Tokyo architects do lots of small houses, not the largest ones. They are jewel-like small yet astonishing. I don't think you will encounter that elsewhere. There's know-how in making what is small exceptional, an ability to add ambiguity to what is small in scale.
Contradiction is commonplace in Tokyo, beginning with the building of so many small houses in such a vast city. In fact, it's really absurd to think of these tiny dwellings, each with a little patch of garden, in such a great city. But that's what renders Tokyo interesting, and the very fact that it’s architects who conceive them is another piece of absurdity. It really is absurdity that creates interest in a city. It gives the place a certain personality and uniqueness. It would be more reasonable to build communal housing like Le Corbusier did, then give the rest over to parkland. But that's not quite what the Japanese themselves want.
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There are some interesting architectural designs there, Gianni, but what I find intriguing are the many telephone lines crisscrossing the sky. It's almost Soviet-looking, which, for a country like Japan, is not the look they're going for, I'm sure. Also, I noticed washing hanging over front balconies and the like. I always thought of Japan as the tidy Asian country but that isn't necessarily so.
I love the audacity of these houses!