Empathetic Jungle in Tokyo
/ In her design of a studio-home in the city theJapanesearchitectSuzukoYamadahasevokedanexperience she had in the African park of Virunga. Out of this has come a stage on which daily life is played out without walls and boundaries, interwoven with nature and mutable over time
DESPITE BEING ONE OF THE MOST URBANIZED SOCIETIES ON THE PLANET, Japanese culture is characterized by its deep ties with nature, often represented by a rarefaction that goes to the essence of things, and that stems from a capacity for empathetic observation. To describe a house she has built in Tokyo, Suzuko Yamada, one of the most promising figures in contemporary Japanese architecture, writes of how she was inspired by an experience she had in the forest on the border between Ruanda, Congo and Uganda. A group of gorillas she encountered in the vicinity of the Virunga chain of volcanoes was perched securely among trees, shrubs, grass and leaves, in a comfortable position that took advantage of the differences in level of the ground.
The architect has taken this almost domestic scene as the basis for an intellectual challenge: creating a house in Tokyo with no walls or boundaries, where layers of materials and disparate objects can offer the same kind of informal comfort, while also providing a degree of privacy. The house came out
THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN INSIDE AND OUTSIDE IS NOT CLEARLY DEFINED
like this, as an assemblage of bits and pieces, beams made of cheap wood, steel profiles, metal tubing, galvanized steel gangways and other interlaced materials, utilized as a loadbearing structure as if they were something like the trunks and branches of a forest. From a distance the whole thing looks like a dense and impenetrable tangle, but when you come closer it is possible to make out some recognizable fragments, a window, roof, door or curtain that in the future will be covered with creepers, already sprouting today. Situated on a lot of just over 100 square metres, the house and studio are laid out on three levels and accommodate a couple together with their parents and children (as well as a garage). The internal and external circulation, always in direct contact with the garden, allow the members of the family to wander around freely, installing themselves wherever they feel most at ease. Thanks to a system of aluminium shutters the rooms can be extended onto outdoor terraces, changing their function in accordance with the traditional Japanese life
style, in which a room can be used in many different ways over the course of the same day, for sleeping, working, eating... The external circular staircase runs around the trunk of a tree, and some edible plants are also used as a courteous manner of nurturing a dialogue with the neighbours.
The house has no clearly defined perimeter, no main entrance and not even a definitive state. Rather, it is an ecosystem undergoing constant change, due in part to the extremely shrewd choice of materials, mostly prefabricated industrial parts, and the way they have been assembled. The internal structure is made of wood to allow easy modification of the spatial arrangement, while the external one is made of steel. The handrails of the stair and parapets are made of iron tubes fixed together with the joints used for water pipes, easy to assemble and dismantle. In short everything here changes, moves and adjusts to suit shifting moods and desires, responding to time. Exactly as if it were a patch of African jungle transplanted elsewhere. ○
THE HOUSE IS AN ECOSYSTEM UNDERGOING CONSTANT CHANGE