Images (c) Iwan Baan, via Domus.

After reading about Rem Koolhaas’ and Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s new book on the Metabolists yesterday, this project by Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa caught my eye while browsing Domus. The Metabolists believed that organic life offered a workable paradigm for large-scale urban living. What made their analysis so fascinating was the acknowledgement of death, of the inevitable endgame where humans and buildings alike become irrelevant. Referring to the millennia-old biological process of small-scale change within a large-scale collective organism (eg, fractal theory), they theorized that a massive city-scale grid accommodating frequent unit-scale change would solve Japan’s housing crisis. Fumihiko Maki described “a large frame in which all the functions of the city are housed, made possible by present-day technology.” Though it was built more than fifty years later, Nishizawa‘s project proposes a similar vision for urban life. Continue.

The 2006 home certainly doesn’t fulfill the Metabolist proposal of a large-scale urban grid, but it does carry out some of the key goals of the movement at a small scale. Nishizawa designed a home that fulfills only the most basic structural components implied by the word “building.” Sitting on a tiny 4mx8m site, individual “rooms” are organized vertically by the concrete slabs. To move from the bedroom to the kitchen, you must trace a vertical path. No divisions exist within each horizontal volume; the writers who live there use curtains or plants as screening devices. Except for the ground level, there’s no façade, either; again, plants are used to screen the private spaces from the outside world. Changeability within a static grid, a proposal for the future of the city, both today and in 1959.

Images (c) Iwan Baan, via Domus.

by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

posted in Uncategorized

tagged house, japan, metabolists, Ryue Nishizawa, tokyo

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