Living in a modern way in Tokyo is a luxury that few can
afford. This might seem a paradox for a city that continues
to be a capital of international architectural research. But
there is a reason. Its economy, geography and territory are
weighed down by a population and building mass that are so
high-density as to be unthinkable for even the most overcrowded
of European metropolises. The result is a situation
where the rent of a mere 50/60-square-metre apartment
can cost (an average of) 4,000 dollars per month. According
to Forbes magazine, this standard is second only to Hong
Kong. Naturally, prices rise sharply for high-quality housing
in more attractive residential areas. Thus it would be
rude to ask the cost of the townhouses that Kazuyo Sejima
has just finished building in the
Seijo district, roughly southwest
of downtown Tokyo.
Indubitably, if
we want to better understand this
architectural poetess’s work and,
more specifically, how she always
manages to obtain results that
are so coherent with her visionary
light-handedness, it is more
important to examine how she
approached the design of housing
units that link the ideas of community
and privacy, a sense of place and abstract geometry,
egalitarian simplicity and sophisticated elegance. The
project’s resolution is as composed as its objective was
ambitious: to create a miniature urban settlement that gives
each apartment such form and space that it actually turns
into a little townhouse, but without denying its inhabitants
the possibility of socialising, and above all without breaking
the unity of the complex as a whole. The basis for this
unusual revision of the unité d’habitation is the creation of
a spatial module that when assembled and multiplied in different
directions and sequences can theoretically give life to
an entire city. This is well illustrated by the white model that
was made to demonstrate the possible ad libitum extension
of the original matrix. We should not forget that at the
beginning of Sejima’s career, before she met Nishizawa and
founded SANAA, her work seemed to contain the faraway
influence of certain radical groups (particularly Italian ones
like Superstudio and Archizoom) and their conceptual grids
from the ’70s, which could have set the lines of development
for new urban utopias, even though we don’t really
know with which purposes and with which modes of habitation.
The vicissitudes of life, the star system, her clients
and her tenacious determination to establish herself as one
of the best architects of these two centuries (and not as a
conceiver of scenarios, be they as prophetic as those of the
radical avant-gardes) have brought Sejima to a friendlier
version of so much conceptual lucidity.
This is how the design utopia in Seijo was transformed
into real, authentic, small houses. There is a sense of belonging
and, at the same time, comfortable intimacy created by
very special nuances: the delicate quasi-pink bricks covering
the outside of the complex and reflecting light inside
the apartments like matt mirrors; the large glazed openings
looking out onto the other houses without affording views
of the interiors; the minute interstitial gardens meandering
around the townhouses’ template like natural embroidery. It
is a fractal whole, almost a horizontal tower, with a uniqueness
composed of many diversities, just like humanity and
its billions of individuals.
For now, many of the townhouses here at Seijo are still
uninhabited. As he waits for other children to come and live
here and play with him, the young son of a couple talking
to friends, photographed by Iwan Baan, seems very content
to have a playground consisting of the secret gardens of
“Seijoville” all to himself.
Kazuyo Sejima, Seijoville
For her Seijo Townhouses in Tokyo, Kazuyo Sejima succeeds in experimenting with a singular model of “collective housing” for an elite group of users. Design Kazuyo Sejima. Text Stefano Casciani. Photos Iwan Baan.
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- 19 June 2008