Sejima by Ishigami: inside the house in the plum grove

In the context, so legendary as to be almost proverbial, of Tokyo’s residential fabric, in the late 1990s a copywriter commissioned Kazuyo Sejima – co-founder of SANAA, a living symbol of contemporary Japanese architecture, and curator of the Venice Biennale in 2010 – leaving an initial carte blanche, with only the observation that she did not really want a comfortable home, she’d rather think of a place from which to leave at some point, where to constantly come and go. She recounted these initial moves to Domus, which published them in January 2004, on issue 866. And this conversation was followed by more words, exchanged with Sejima herself, and by pictures of the house, inhabited, taken by Noguchi Rika, and by Junya Ishigami, who in the years that followed would have a way of making a name for himself in the world of architecture. It is a house that goes took the place of a plum grove, and for that reason it wanted to preserve some of the existing trees; a house that aimed to make the interior a sequence of minimal spaces, redefining the relationship of the inhabitants with objects, and with their fellow human beings: a project that soon took on the value of a manifesto for domestic living.

A tiny lot: how to make a decent nest in such limited space?
This is the eternal problem plaguing anyone living in Tokyo. Sure, you’d like to have the kind of house featured in lifestyle magazines, built on expensive, prime real estate that would undoubtedly squeeze your savings dry...inevitably small yet with the appearance of space, as uncluttered as possible inside. That’s probably the standard image sought by most would-be homeowners in Tokyo.

Japan’s housing industry, a champion of rapid post-war urbanization, heroically addressed the rigours of urban space and ultimately came up with an array of variations on the single-family dwelling to meet the dreams, finances and, of course, the extreme site constraints of Japanese households, more than 80 per cent of which are (subjectively) “middle class”. The resulting prefab houses are generally configured and mass-produced according to a standard LDK housing scheme: 2-3 bedrooms + living room (L) + dining room (D) + kitchen (K).

Architect Kazuyo Sejima has her doubts about such formulaic spatial equations. Based on careful observation of the lifestyles and behavioural patterns of individuals commencing new lives as homeowners, she actively questions whether this model or the desire for fictional constructs fostered by the media does anything but channel everyone into “keeping things small”. Are they not merely being manipulated by the notion that small is a shortcoming?
As birds seek out materials and places to nest within their own ecosystems, inhabitants can make the most faithful house builders. On a tiny lot in one corner of a typical Tokyo residential area, Sejima breaks away from preconceived images, utilizing the given limitations as compositional cues.
Keeping her eye on the realities of the family itself, she delivers a masterful rethinking of the single-family dwelling.
Inside this white cube is an unconventional living space where a family of five can perch within the ecosystem of the Japanese family and community.

Beyond aesthetic appraisal (or the moralistic questioning of the urban living condition), Sejima’s house deserves close attention. Cumulatively, the experiments and innovations that embody this tiny box form a deliberate proposal for an alternative way of inhabiting a congested condition. In other words, the way how to liberate yourself and enjoy life.

Domus: This is a most unique house, yet when we asked the couple what special concerns they communicated, we were surprised to learn that they left it all up to you. Where did you begin the design process?
Kazuyo Sejima: The plums were in bloom on the lot, just beautiful. It was the couple’s wish to keep the trees, and I did my best to comply.
I made the house as compact as possible so as to have plantings of a few plum trees on all four sides. Initially they said they wanted a ‘one-room lifestyle’, which I took to mean an accumulation of different rooms linked together. It’s a family of five (a couple, a teenage daughter, a young son and a grandmother), so that would normally mean four bedrooms and a living room. I first tried to make as large a living room as possible, keeping each of the bedrooms small, but I’d get only 18 square meters at most. People have a lot of material things, but under the prevailing Japanese LDK system, in which only the ‘living-dining-kitchen’ is laid out in common, there’s really no one place to enjoy everything – nowhere to set out all those objects. In Japan, it’s accepted practice to allot one bedroom per person, and then squeeze in a common space almost as an afterthought. That really makes it too small for so many possessions, so things get packed away separately in disarray.
So a family that’s just built a new house would normally restrain themselves – for ‘gracious living’ – from accumulating material objects so they won’t overflow everywhere. But I’d always thought that wasn’t fun. Though until this house, I always ended up in a condition in which having less things made for more beautiful buildings. I was struggling not finding the right answer, when all at once it hit me: why not make lots of little rooms? That way, a small room designated for just books, for example, would still look good, however crammed it may be. And each of many smaller rooms could be scaled to particular pieces of furniture, a much better solution. Essentially, this amounted to dividing things up, a more definitive dismantling of the space than the LDK model. By subdividing the space into small rooms, one could be free to choose. By making a bedroom smaller, for instance, one might gain another ‘retreat’, thus offering a choice according to one’s mood.
Even privacy, the original idea behind thick, sturdy walls to compartmentalize rooms, seems less attractive than being able to be with the family or stay apart when one wants – might not that be another kind of privacy? If a grandmother argues with her grandson, up to now their only recourse would have been to shut themselves up in their own rooms, whereas with this house they have many more options.

What was the practical challenge in subdividing the space into rooms?
Making the rooms so very small, there was just no way to have ordinary walls. What’s more, since we were working with a ‘one-room’ idea, we arrived at walls to render independent rooms together with holes in the walls to connect them. Thus the rooms feel both connected and independent. They’re also thin enough to be membranes rather than walls.
Yes, just simple partitions.

Did you insist on the scant sheet-metal thickness as well?
Twelve millimetres was the basic requirement from a structural standpoint, but the workmen asked for 16 because 12 would warp when welded. Actually I wanted them to be thinner.

How about insulation and air-conditioning?
There’s a bare minimum of insulation. The exterior is coated with reflective paint, so summer heat can only get in through sealed portals, but there’s no stopping radiation, so in the end we put in insulation. In Europe they typically use a thickness of 100 millimetres, but in this house there’s no more than 30. Sheet metal cools very quickly, so the insulation prevents the coolness from passing through.
We used very few air-conditioning units. There are ducts that go to the very highest point, which serve to return warm air to the bottom and circulate it throughout. There’s good airflow overall through the rooms.

Via the openings here and there in the interior walls.
Seen from outside, the openings look as if they could have been larger, but as the interiors are small in scale, making the openings any larger would have destroyed the proportions.

There’s also a certain pleasure in how what one imagines when looking from outside is undercut once inside. The subtle colours in which the walls of each room are painted are also such a pleasure.
You know, wallpaper is so expensive. Actually, I wanted to use several different wallpapers, but in the end we opted for painting. Up until now I’ve resisted wallpaper. With thick walls, wallpaper merely seems like one last superficial decoration, but it’s different with sheet metal. Affixing wood (as in the study) or even rose-patterned wallpaper to thin steel, the metal seems to take on that texture, as if it were actually made of it. So theoretically almost any material could be applied to positive effect. The way in which the openings are placed is also quite distinctive.
With this spatial composition (the openings around the daughter’s room), we wanted to eliminate the feeling of depth. You can see into the next room through the openings, but it makes the room itself look flat, like a photograph. You can’t tell how deep or shallow the space is. It looks more like a trimmed picture tacked flat against the wall.

Some rooms look to the outside through another room’s window; that’s how the rooms are strung together. They said they didn’t need glass in between, so the openings are simply cut through. There’s something just a little different about how adjacent rooms relate, each cutting only very ‘incidentally’ into the other. Of course, you can hear sounds from the next room, so in the strictest sense there is no privacy, but the feeling is different from the way sounds travel between hotel rooms that are full compartmentalized.

Probably an ideal spatial configuration for a family that wanted a ‘one-room lifestyle’.
Family members are drawn together yet can keep an adequate distance.

The wall of the boy’s bedroom, being an external wall, has a big, bold window.
Does this reflect any special view about how the exterior related to the interior via windows?
Actually, the window is raised to a height where even an adult sitting on the bed can’t be seen. There’s no peeking into a window as long as you are lying or sitting on the bed.

So exterior and interior just happen to be separated, just as incidentally as they are linked.