Hiroshi Hara has been able to embody the diversity of Japanese architecture throughout the entire historical period that began after the Second World War: in 1981, Alessandro Mendini's Domus featured him with the likes of Arata Isozaki and Tadao Ando – Domus guest editor in 2021 – in a monographic issue on modern Japan, presented with an essay with the eloquent title: “A Portrait of the Architect as a Young Japanese”.

Born in Kawasaki in 1936, Hara graduated from the University of Tokyo, where he began teaching as an associate at the Faculty of Architecture – among his students were Pritzker Prize winner Riken Yamamoto and Kengo Kuma – but it was at the Institute of Industrial Sciences of the same university that he would complete his career, embodying that encounter between form and technology that characterizes a culture and its expressions, such as the Metabolist movement did in the 1960s. The buildings he went on to design are all articulations of this encounter, from the monumental Umeda Sky Building in 1993, with its observatory suspended over Osaka, to Kyoto Station, the hybrid space of the Sapporo Stadium and the experimental houses in South America. The Niramu House in Tokyo is also an experiment in redefining the Japanese house archetype: it appeared on Domus in June 1981, issue 316.

What is your image of Japanese architecture? Do you know why we Japanese have built so much? Do you know how Japanese architects go about securing a commission and arriving at a final design scheme? These are difficult questions and it would be almost impossible to supply clearcut, definite answers, but they are among the questions we ourselves have been asking for a number of years.

Perhaps our European colleagues are unaware of the issues raised by such questions and are merely pleased to admire the photographs of our work a little jealously. Anyone who has visited Japan recently will have seen the clusters of well-spaced skycrapers in Tokyo and Osaka, as well as the splendid local museums and concert halls in provincial cities and towns. He must also have wondered about the imbalance between modern buildings of this type and the proverbial “rabbit hutches” where we actually live. It can hardly be doubted that such contrasts result from the socio-economic conditions obtaining here in Japan. What is our responsibility as architects when confronted with this situation? We are happy enough to be asked to undertake a large or prestigious commission. 

On the other hand, we are frustrated from the start and cannot really do anything to solve the problem of housing. But you won't be shown anything regarding such matters in this special issue. Instead, you will be introduced to a selection of small buildings designed not by the great professionals who are leading members of the building industry, but rather — with one or two exceptions — by small private firms who design more or less whatever they can get, but on their own terms within the limits of the work offered. 
 

These architects belong for the most part to the so-called “younger” generation (actually anywhere between 30 and 55 years of age). They are still the “promising” ones, who have no fixed relation to Japanese society ih general. They are “outsiders” — fickle, unsettled, “radical” in terms of artistic temperament (although rarely in terms of personal character). They are ambitious and able, but not standard bearers... but perhaps we ought not to generalize about Japan today as a whole from such a small number of examples. I would like to begin by sketching some of the actual conditions surrounding the architectural profession. Before attempting this, it seems reasonable to give a brief outline of our Japanese notions of Europe. 

About the Orient, Europeans themselves have a rather clear idea. They are Westerners and Japan must, therefore, be located in the Far East. The Japanese, however, feel that the Middle East in quite similar to Europe when compared with Japan. On the other hand, they regard themselves as a species of European, although relative newcomers from the viewpoint of science and technology, and notably in fields relating to industrialization and production. They believe that Japan is not so much an oriental as a new kind of European nation.

The Japanese home was traditionally distinguished by an openness to its surroundings and a spatial flexibility, which rooted it to the landscape and enhanced its underlying aspiration to friendliness. The rapid upheaval of modernization, changing social life and the intensive exploitation of urban land rendered these features increasingly ineffectual and unrealistic. 

This Niramu House — belonging, like the earlier Awazu House, Hara House, etc., to the same series of Reflection Houses — is intended as a theoretic-design attempt to re-establish a new style of Japanese home. One wing concentrates a closed space around a core which is strongly characterized by curved symmetrical walls and transparent partitions, under three skylights; whilst the other wing develops a traditional open space. The house thus combines traditional and modern methods and reaches a fresh synthesis through its clashing heterogeneity and homogeneity.