AR / Giorgia Cesaro / House in Tateshina

House in Tateshina, Kazuo Shinohara’s latest project began in 1985 to end, unrealized, with his death in 2006. The idea of a hut in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture is the project of a small space (46, 24 m²) developed over a very long time (21 years).

Like much of what is intensely Japanese, the first drawing of the latter project drawn up by the hands of Shinohara is a map of signs; and if this map is correctly read it does not lead to the discovery of a hidden treasure but turns out to be a treasure itself. These first traces of the spatial composition of House in Tateshina, indeed, offer the possibility to observe the schematic finding of a first language, an elementary grammar (whose terms seem to be conjugated in apparently meaningless sentences), but through which it is possible to grasp and learn to assimilate a language. Although for the final structure of the project there is a more direct precedent in subsequent drawings, this sketch of House in Tateshina is certainly an indication of the impulse value that this organism so distant from the architect’s aspiration to spatial unity and the plastic continuity of the envelope, but so methodologically explicit in the identification of the constituent elements of the spatial discourse and in the experimentation of their compositional opportunities, may have acquired for Shinohara. It seems right thus to assign to this model at least the function of recalling similar experiments that can be found in the final project drawings, and on which we will have the opportunity to focus later.

Certainly, the features, the drives, the qualities of the lines and colours of this first drawing do not reflect the harmony of Japanese calligraphic art, but from the point of view of the purposes and meanings they seem to recall it anyway. This sketch of House in Tateshina is very similar to a kanji, because kanji are essentially images.

Between the real world and the artistic world, the notion of ‘image’ can reveal a special way of understanding the relationship between sensitivity and perception: in Japanese, the notion of zō [象] indicates both the ‘image’ and the ‘phenomenon’, thus specifying that in the Japanese horizon of the sense interacting with images, shaping or preserving them, contemplating or processing them, means intervening directly on the real, i.e., on the world of things and their infinite universe of ongoing processes.[1]

Highlighting the similarity between the first image of House in Tateshina and the character sui [水], as well as renewing the appeal for a comparison between the compositional signs of architecture and those of ideographic writing, is useful to show the ‘order of movement’ that the architect intends not only to test, but also to convey through these stenographic signs of a creative impulse. The ideogram sui [水], which means ‘water’, ‘liquid’ or ‘flow’, is in fact the ultimate product of a series of signs that indicate the action of flowing.[2]

According to what the Japanese notion of zō [象] indicates, each calligraphy that represents the ideogram sui [水] not only shows its own and unique rhythm of execution, but also refers to a specific one and equally unique experience that has as its content the object – but it would be better to say the process – called ‘flow’: the flow of things in images, of emotions in thoughts, and why not, also of bodies in space.[3] Distinguishing these movements in the drawing of House in Tateshina, grasping the graphic structure and tracing back to a possible meaning of the form by observing in it those signs that, even today, retain in their structure the reflection of an ancient message of knowledge, can be a seductive, albeit unusual, way to interpret the compositional language of the first drawing of House in Tateshina as that of a sign that wants to make the spatiality of the house a verbalization of an action or a progression.

At this point in the discussion, however, one might wonder if seeing in the drawing of House in Tateshina the graphic transcription of the ideogram sui [水] is actually able to render the dynamic quality of the ideal spatiality of the project: the sign, even when it has no phonetic basis, isn’t it always, and in any case, a geometrization of a changing reality, a stiffening of the dynamic processes it wants to represent? Isn’t it also for ideograms, as for the characters of a phonetic-based language, the impoverishment of a reality that would like to be interwoven with facts, actions, processes, dynamic events?

It is precisely in correspondence with these legitimate questions that the art of the dynamic rendering of the space of House in Tateshina is situated. Indeed, it could be said that this first model maximizes the representative possibilities of a writing already deeply connected to the dynamic qualities of things and events. If ideographic writing had the typographical form as its only possibility of expression, the advantages it would present with respect to phonetic writings would be considerably reduced.[4] The difference therefore lies precisely in the practice of calligraphy.

The movement from the calligraphic sign of the kanji to the space of the drawing can then be read as the simple passage from one relationship structure to another, from one scale to another. As happens in the calligraphic practice of kanji, the sketch of House in Tateshina can contain a double reference: on the one hand, to a physical entity, on the other, to an abstraction, i.e., to an entity thought philosophically and poetically. Hence, architectural design can be used to suggest a seductive mysticism, or to specify clear intentions of structural dynamics. In this, in my opinion, Shinohara was very precise. Extreme precision implies an intrinsic relationship between the drawing and the design idea. Understanding this relationship we can identify the essential lines of the composition – lines which, however, are quite visible.

Observing the internal volumes of the house projected into the plane, it can be seen that the lateral axis of the first rectangle, the central axis of the second and the diagonals of the third, meet at the centre of a circumference and, forming angles of 45°, divide it into equal parts.

These lines are certainly a reflection of the architect’s personal dedication to elementary geometry. By stating this, however, only a partial explanation of the significance of the configurative design of the house would be offered. The meaning of these lines is to place the human body at the centre of the space. This presence is of course something invisible, which however can be sensed in these lines that fluctuate through suggestions of materiality and emptiness. The lines seem, indeed, to have been traced by Shinohara, rather than for the construction of the design, to make an ideal user perceive a certain spatial quality. Imagining a person within this space, it can be seen how his movement identifies a sort of force field determined by the interaction with the envelope which, thanks to the use of accelerated and slowed perspective, i.e., amplifying or contrasting the optical convergence of the receding lines in perspective, alters the spatial perception, thus giving the sensation of an environment more or less deep than reality.

In the final drawing these ‘lines of force’ will then be hidden and reduced to the extent of other lines of sight. Their foreshadowing intensity is imagined having been replaced by construction practice. However, it is precisely in this sacrifice that the possibilities of the space inscribed in the plan and in the final sections of House in Tateshina will be defined and preserved, and Shinohara’s creative impulse will acquire strength and integrity.

In 1984, the year before the first formulation of the House in Tateshina project, Shinohara – as Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor – was invited to lecture at the Yale University School of Architecture.[5] Before showing his projects, before his realizations, he presented the urban structure of Tōkyō, his city. He explained that the atmosphere that pervades the everyday life of its inhabitants is very different from that which he had perceived during his recent visits to the great European cities, informed by the ancient fires, the places of coexistence of the Greek and Roman tradition, and ordered by modern urban axes, large tree-lined avenues and pedestrian paths. He also said that he recognized in Tokyo – “where the theory of the modern city seems so far away from the dreams of the urbanists”[6] – a typical beauty of its own, which he demonstrated in the vitality of its growth and expansion, in the freedom of the combination of the most disparate building types and in the visual cacophony of the shapes and colours of the signs of the shops and businesses that populate its streets.

With respect to this special “vitality of chaos”,[7] which, speaking of the urban context of Tokyo, the architect had exalted in an almost paroxysmal way by calling it the “progressive anarchy”[8] of the city, Shinohara had explained that, according to him, the only logical answer could be the construction of a new quality of domesticity, from which to start again to give meaning to the compositional gesture. He had argued, in fact, that since “the illogical gap between the ordered space and the disorder of the city is what nourishes the vitality of chaos”[9], any building that purported to be only a part of this chaos would never be able to deal with the anarchy of the city.[10]

To highlight the idea that had informed his new theory of residential design, in which “the concept of architecture directly intersects with the situation of urban anarchy”,[11] during the conference, he quoted the words he once read in an article written by a biologist for a scientific journal:

For any system – whether it is a computer or a biological system – if it has no capacity to accommodate random resources, then nothing new can be produced by that system.[12]

For an architect worried about not being a mere copyist of traditional forms, history had to be considered important more than for the problems solved for those left open, for the experiences that have not proved their purpose and still possess the values of freedom. In fact, the effort to see an order, or rather, a structural method within a chaotic and wild urban nature is an indication of Shinohara’s commitment to discovering a new principle of explanation for the art of building.

The latest drawings of House in Tateshina are not devoid of that ‘vitality’ that he saw pervading the city of Tōkyō: they seem to re-present it, compressing and condensing it into a composition of simple geometries, underlined by the lightness of their volumes and from the echo of their spaces.

As clear and linear as the final layout of the House in Tateshina project is, in fact, inside it ‘lines of movement’ complicate the compositional aspects, as if to remind us that the architect’s main concern was to investigate the degree of complexity, or of chaos, compatible with the apparent simplicity of the form.[13] While favouring regular compositions and balanced proportions, Shinohara had often shown that he was able to use distortion to produce unexpected effects. In my opinion, the last floor plan of House in Tateshina is a masterful example of this, as it is played on the delicate relationship between symmetry and asymmetry.

Although in plan the shape of the house is a rectangle of 4, 9 m x 7, 5 m, the walking surface has been reduced by the intrusion of a floor that follows the slope of the land on which the house insinuates its foundations. In this way, the shape of the house appears perfectly rectangular and symmetrical, a symmetry that Shinohara had contradicted by using this and other simple solutions, i.e., by inserting dynamic components within the regularity of the form capable of making the ‘vitality’ of the space evident. The complexity of the city was thus summarized by Shinohara in a few gestures made of rigor and asceticism, where the pure lines of Euclidean geometry are confused with the equally pure ones, albeit full of asymmetrical tensions, of the city areas full of houses irregularly placed, or with a neighbourhood subject to unpredictable developments. This agitation of forms always has as its purpose the elevation of our consciousness, the emerging in us of latent emotions, keeping our attention and vigilance awake, even in the obsessive repetition of daily gestures, to compose and recompose order and disorder.

Imagining crossing the threshold of House in Tateshina, the small space of this hut appears in its entirety: three windows illuminate it, two placed in the centre of the transverse axis and a third cantered on the longitudinal axis of the volume. Corresponding to this last window there is the entrance door which, however, is located on the right side of the axis, thus giving those who open it an immediate impression of subtle imbalance. This perception is accentuated by the volume of earth that penetrates the interior of the house, and by a second volume which, following the shape of the first, is suspended over the space creating a mezzanine, accessible by a stepladder. Symmetry therefore governs the composition, but it is the asymmetry that insinuates itself into specific parts of the whole that dynamically transforms the static structure of the project.

The method and purpose followed by Shinohara seem to have been animated by the desire to produce a perspective acceleration effect towards the back wall which, by capturing the distant landscape in its wide opening, aims to fix a few privileged points, or to open the building towards the landscape to better enclose it inside.

For this double movement Shinohara had relied on the inclinations of the different floors, through which the shadow, and above all the reflections of light that propagate in it become an exceptional means to break the dynamism of nature into the deepest layers of the house.

Thus, introducing into the regular perimeter of the hollow space the perspectives generated by the distortion of the volumes and the light that follows the inclination and the trend, one can imagine that Shinohara wanted to bring the viewer to participate in this ‘adventure of movement’, inviting him subliminally to cross the house and look towards the entrance wall.

The vision altered by the tightening of the seen, i.e., by a decelerated perspective elicited by the staggering of the two lateral bodies with respect to the longitudinal axiality of the main volume, now makes the space appear as an interior which, closing in on itself, shrinks with respect to its actual size. By imagining a person inside the raised volume, one can imagine how the eye, following the transverse axis of the house, can see the outside through the openings on the wall of the raised volume and the shell of the house.

A system, that of House in Tateshina, of a disarming simplicity. Yet, this simplicity encloses and secretes an interlocking play of one room within another, of a space within another, of a point of view that encompasses other points of view. In the clear geometric regularity of the proportional system of the project, Shinohara, composing the space in its internal bonds and connections (i.e., in the struggle and in the ‘space machine’ of which he had always spoken about: a model of ‘space’ [虚空, kokū] i.e., ‘where all things can be everything without obstacles’.[14]

As Harold Rosenberg wrote about the minimalist work of art that “instead of deriving principles from what it sees, it teaches the eye to ‘see’ principles”,[15] so the project of House in Tateshina highlights that even when Shinohara thought the project outside from large urban centres at least an idea of the Japanese city was still present in its architecture. More precisely, he proposes a call to ‘vitality’ even in an isolated project on the side of a mountain. The reference to the ‘recourse of chance’ or ‘fortuity’ [偶然, gūzen],[16] that is to the contingency of what grows and expands spontaneously, can, in fact, manifest itself both in the urban context and within ‘nature’ [自然, shizen].[17] There is simply the problem of how to act in it, of interacting with spontaneity, and with its contingency to build a place of contemporary culture. Making nature and culture coincide therefore means seeking in them a ‘principle of common understanding’ [理会, rikai] that acts as a ‘unifying reference’, or what is called in Japanese aesthetics kiai.

The term kiai [気合] literally means: ‘union’, ‘meeting’ or ‘agreement’ [合, ai] of ki [気], i.e. of ‘energy’ or ‘vital breath’. Kiai is then the ‘meeting of the breath’, understood as harmonization through a synchronous breathing between two entities, e.g., as between painter and landscape. Ultimately, therefore, kiai is ‘harmony’, but also ‘attention’ and ‘sensation’. This term is, in fact, used both to indicate an ‘affinity’, an interpersonal ‘sympathy’, and a ‘deep concentration’ with which one dedicates oneself to an ‘important task’ [機会, kikai]. In an artistic sense, kiai therefore involves the ability to harmonize the artistic gesture with the changing and super-personal rhythm of the existing.[18]

But how to find this principle of intelligibility, of harmonization with nature, in something that develops in an unpredictable or casual way, and manifests itself in an irregular way?

To identify the principle of kiai, what regulates this paradoxical ‘harmony of randomness’ can help the images described through the kakekotaba [掛詞, ‘pivot-word’]: i.e. rhetorical figures, peculiar to Japanese poetry, based on the superimposition of two or more images through the homophony of the words. For example, the word shiranami [白波] which literally means ‘white-crested wave’, or the white trail behind a boat, can suggest to a Japanese the word shiranu [知らぬ] which means ‘unknown’, or namida [涙] which means ‘tears’.[19] From the point of view of the intellectual content it seems that there is no logical connection between these words, yet these simple verbal associations, from the point of view of the emotional meaning, allow the emergence of emotions which, in a poem, can be offered as a perfectly coherent totality. It is not difficult, in fact, to understand how a poet can create a poem from these three images: a boat goes into the unknown, a woman in tears looks at the white-crested wave left by the boat of her beloved. A famous example is the Fujiwara no Teika’s tanka:[20]

きえわびぬうつろふ人の秋のいろに身をこがらしのもりの白露[21]

Kiewabinu utsurō hito no aki no iro ni mi o kogarashi no mori no shiratsuyu.

Two very different interpretations can be given of these verses. Thanks to the chain of kakekotaba they can, in fact, mean at the same time: “Alone and sad I hope for the end, and I torment my heart to see how inconstant her love is. I slip away, like tears of dew” but also “The white dew already disappears, in this forest where the colour of autumn changes, and an icy wind blow”. The image of a natural phenomenon and the image of the end of a love match perfectly because in the mind and in the word of the poet there was a continuous shift from one order of images to another. The tendency to perceive the connection between words even only within their kiai, i.e., without considering the logical connection of their conceptual meaning, ensure that the image of the dew, which will be soon carried away by the autumn wind, melts and becomes one with the image of the woman who was abandoned by her lover, sated of her. Indeed, the word ‘dew’ was not used as a simple metaphorical expedient to describe a woman’s state of mind, or to recall the idea of her tears; rather, as can be seen from the second poetic image, it has been used in its complete and proper meaning as a natural phenomenon. The author’s intention was that the two interpretations were accepted and received at the same time, so that the two different meanings, complete and autonomous in themselves, are indissolubly enclosed in each other.

Although not all Japanese poetry always reveals such complexity, nevertheless the ‘harmony of randomness’ seems to be a characteristic of Japanese, which is certainly one of the most evocative languages in the world, as revealed by its sentences in which everything they want to say always seems to tend to vanish in doubt, in indeterminacy or in the multiplicity of possibilities: ‘maybe’, ‘who knows?’.

The House in Tateshina project is also exemplary in this sense, where the coexistence of different perspectives, their multiplicity, inscribes dynamic sequences in the space that make a fundamentally simple and unitary system complex and articulated. In its clear geometric organization, in fact, a measure is already evident at first glance, yet we are unable to discover a rule that forms its basis. It is kiai: one can only grasp it intuitively, knowing that it is not possible move any of its parts elsewhere.

In this long-studied composition, Shinohara then seems to have concentrated more on situations than on facts, more on relationships than on objects, on the discipline of the processes of spontaneity rather than on that of the definition of space, as is perceived by observing the way in which he organized the environment through landscapes that allow us to pass from place to place in an almost sensual way; a principle that seems destined to become the legacy of his way of designing.

House in Tateshina therefore speaks of a world without hierarchies, where different spaces come together, each with their own inclinations, each playing their role while participating in the unity of the whole.

In a space that enhances the interminable succession of brief moments of the present, the stimulus is drawn to think of architecture as something alive, based on the flow of emotion, of what is perceived here and now.

By creating residues of meaning, in this latest project, Shinohara has managed to present space as a pending question, raised to the most physical stage of fragility. On this occasion, indeed, the architect seems to have sought that subtle point of balance where the sense of space is brought up to where it is no longer possible to ask other questions.