Category: architecture

In 2004, Kyohei Sakaguchi published 0 Yen Houses, a book of photographs of street people architecture in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. A burgeoning urban street population, mostly men in their 50’s and 60’s, is one consequence of the Japanese economic and real estate situation over the last 10-15 years. These men often continue to work, but they’re unable to afford housing, so they improvise their own, squatting on public lands (river banks and parks, mostly). They often form the favelas that preoccupy the nomadic scavenger-artist Tadashi Kawamata [who, after 20+ years of roaming, might be able to come home now that Japan has some, too.]
Police give advance notice when they’re coming to inspect, so the street people are able to move their houses–and then replace them after the police have gone.
This kind of accommodation to the extreme prices and densities of Japan is like a grey market version of Atelier Bow Wow’s study of Pet Architecture, the impossibly tiny structures that inhabit even the most improbably small slivers of land in Tokyo. [On the other end of the spectrum, of course, is Klein Dytham’s Billboard Building, a 2m-wide (at most) spec bldg put up on a former 3-car parking lot in the extremely expensive Hiro-o neighborhood after the road was widened–and the parking lot was rendered unusable.


It turns out that Sakaguchi first gained attention for some video pieces he did while still in college [Waseda U.’s architecture program]. Whether they’re art, documentary, or home movies, who can say, but they seem to fit the jishu eiga/self-made movie mode pretty well. The first, Living in a Water Tank, is just what it sounds like, a video diary of the 21-year-old Sakaguchi’s life inside an unused apartment building rooftop water tank.

Then he made House Biker, in which he cruised around Tokyo on a pimped out pizza delivery scooter with a functioning microhouse on the back. He called it his “O Yen Movie,” a retroactive extension of the new “Zero Yen” brand.
Sakaguchi’s work seems to provoke some embarassment and discomfort among Japanese audiences, but like most things in Japan, it mostly just entertains. Take last year’s Zero Yen House Tour, in which Sakaguchi led a bunch of college students in a contest to build their own shelters using only scavenged materials. If only their plight wasn’t so aesthetically interesting, who knows, they might get some help; but right now, these homeless guys might be too cool for their own good.
0 Yen House, published by Little More and available at amazon-uk [littlemore.co.jp]
0 Yen House Tour, Kyoto Seika Univ. [kyoto-seika.ac.jp]
Happiness is just a riverside shack for designer homeless [timesonline, “designer homeless”?? via archinect]
Sakaguchi Kyohei’s homepage, mostly in Japanese, but there’s a link to autotranslations as well. [kyohei sakaguchi]

The 71-year-old scion of a real estate family, Mori inaugurated his latest city, Omotesando Hills, in one of Tokyo’s most fashionable neighborhoods last month. There, well-heeled residents can now live just above some of the priciest retail shops on Earth, wandering sparkling hallways where $1,000 Jimmy Choo heels sell alongside $21 ice creams. “What the Guggenheim does with art, we do with shops,” Mori said in an interview at Roppongi Hills. “That is the only difference.”

– Minoru Mori, real estate developer and Mariko’s uncle

Conspicuous Consumption Shapes New Tokyo Skyline [washpost]

If he didn’t exist, Rem Koolhaas would have to invent him. Of course, then he’d be included in the Whitney Biennial. Business Week has an interview with Rem’s Mini-me, Josh Prince-Ramus, the Gen X starchitect-in-training running OMA’s New York office.

The Koolhaas Kids Come Of Age [businessweek
Josh Prince-Ramus: Don’t Make Me a Star [in this glowing media profile]. Really! Don’t! [gutter]

Here’s a picture of the interior courtyard of Tadao Ando’s Omotesando Hills, which opens in a few weeks. Like everything else on Omotesando these days, the facade is a frosty glass scrim.
[image: Harajuku-ss via jeansnow.net]
previously: Tokyo snapshots 1.4 – Tadao Ando ruins Omotesando

On Saturday, the Rem Koolhaas Prada store in SoHo was either engulfed in flames, soaked in water and smoke, or both.
The ostentatiously exposed drywall was Prada green and imported, if not actually manufactured to spec. [What’s the stock color of Italian drywall? Anybody?] Watch for the just-arrived merch to show up, freshly drycleaned, at a TJ Maxx far from you, very soon.
And what’s this? The Guggenheim is still hanging out in the building? Did landlord collector Peter Brant get his forever for-sale Warhol Last Supper out of their gallery in time?
Verbose Coma has pictures,, Gothamist has roundups, and modernartnotes has a draft checklist of art in the building [verbosecoma via gothamist]

A tabloid summary of Herbert Muschamp’s long essay on 2 Columbus Circle: back in the day
AbEx: straight
Historicism, Pop: gay
Museum of Modern Art: straight
Gallery of Modern Art [aka 2 Columbus]: gay
But didn’t AbEx evangelizer Frank O’Hara and modernist architect Philip Johnson also work at MoMA? And hasn’t Muschamp talked about what a great pickup joint MoMA was in the 70’s?
Maybe it’s not a question of straight and gay, HM, but butch and femme. Or maybe, you know, it’s you, Herb. All I know is, Muschamp’s architecture writing has totally blossomed since he came out of that Times arch. critic closet of his. It’s a lifestyle choice [sic] we should all support.
The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle [nyt]

Modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft’s widow willed his exquisite travertine-clad Georgica Pond home–his only domestic design– and their carefully installed collection of modern art to MoMA when he died in 1994.
MoMA sold it to Martha Stewart in 1994 without any restrictions or covenants. Stewart, caught up in the Minimalist revival of the day, hired John Pawson to redo it.
Several years later the house, a gutted shambles on the brink of a poorly conceived expansion and with some of its travertine scavenged for Stewart’s Bedford, NY kitchen, was transferred to Stewart’s daughter Alexis, who put it on the market in 2004.
It sold to retro textile guy Donald Maharam, who disingenuously declared the house an unrestorable ruin and razed it in July.
The culpability compounds with each set of hands that touched this property.
Bunshaft could have put covenants on it before willing it to MoMA, but didn’t, possibly on the assumption that the Museum would, by the nature of its mission, take steps to preserve this important design.
MoMA could have put restrictions on the house when it sold it to Stewart but didn’t. MoMA’s not in the house business, so the idea that MoMA woulda shoulda kept it is naive at best. As is any idea that Bunshaft could’ve intended for MoMA to do anything but benefit from the gift of the house.
But still, the operating principles here were fiduciary, not curatorial or conservationist; and yet the “understanding” with Stewart and the publicity around it at the time, points to a perceived responsibility beyond merely maximizing the museum’s return from a donation. Q: Did the Museum set aside the proceeds from the sale for future acquisitions? “Art-for-art,” as befits a deaccession? I highly doubt it. If not, however the sale was presented–or spun– in the press, on the museum’s ledger, the house was a financial asset, not a work of art.
Stewart could have left the house as is, but didn’t. Can anyone be surprised by that? Martha Stewart is a hack. The queen of hacks. It was her penury and negligence that let the house deteriorate. She’s lucky that an over-inflated sense of your own aesthetic superiority leading to the decimation of a modernist landmark isn’t a crime, or she’d still be in jail.
Ever since the sale, MoMA said it had a “good faith agreement” with Stewart to preserve the house, which was a stripped, weed-covered shell when her lawsuits with the house’s next door neighbor were finally settled.
Pawson’s a frickin’ hack, but he coulda–no, he was just Stewart’s hack.
Alexis… this was a wealth transfer mechanism, nothing more.
Maharam’s a hack, and a spineless hack at that. He could have restored the house if he cared to, instead he hides behind the excuse that it was beyond help. The incremental expense of doing so is approximately zero compared to the price of the land. And it’s not like he can build anything else; wetlands zoning restricts him to Bunshaft’s original footprints (and whatever Stewart/Pawson managed to get approved.)
Did someone mention approvals? That’d be the East Hampton town board who sat by while one of the few interesting feats of architecture in the whole place was modified and destroyed. But then, why should important modernist design get any better treatment in the potato fields of the Hamptons than they do on the corner of Central Park?
In LA, three of Frank Lloyd Wright’s concrete block houses hover on the brink of ruin. Important corporate headquarters–including one of Bunshaft’s–get redeveloped with impunity. Modernist preservation groups like Docomomo whimper to no effect. How many 20th century landmarks must be lost before something changes?
Without any explicit agreements anywhere regarding its preservation, without any laws, zoning, landmark designations or other institutional protections, and in the face of the Hamptons real estate juggernaut, the house was doomed before Mrs. Bunshaft’s assistant ever called Frank Campbell.
I used to sail and kayak on Georgica, often with the express purpose of seeing Bunshaft’s art and the luxurious simplicity of his house. So excuse me if I seem especially pissed and despondent.
Martha’s Touch [nationaltrust.org via archinect]
Also: The Architecture Newspaper’s earlier coverage [archpaper.com, includes pic]
Disrepair At Martha’s [the easthampton star, 2002]
HC&G says MoMA chose Stewart’s bid over her Georgica neighbor, developer Harry Macklowe, on the understanding that she would do righter by the house.
[11/05 update: An earlier version of this post criticized the Preservation article as cribbed from previously published accounts of the Bunshaft house saga. This speculation was prompted by similarities in quotes and by a dangling reference to a “Krinsky,” Bunshaft’s biographer who goes otherwise unmentioned in the Preservation piece. The writer of that piece has since contacted me–presumably because I unfairly called him a hack–and provided further information that shows my purely text-based speculations were incorrect. The Krinsky thing was a copy editing oversight; and guess what, the same people talking about the same thing tend to do it in similar ways, so no surprise if their quotes sound similar.
Anyway, my apologies to the writer, an innocent bystander who got hit when I started flinging all those “hack”s around.]

The awesome and ingenious Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow (the Japanese translation, Atelier Wan, sounds nicely like “1,” too) is keeping a blog of the combination house/studio they’re building for themselves in Naka Meguro, a central, dense, and expensive section of Tokyo. The lot they found was affordable only because it’s tiny and enclosed on all sides. Still, it’s zoned for more than 660 sqm, (including underground) of live/work space.
Because of their shape–a square-ish lot blocked in and invisible from the street, and connected to it by only a narrow passageway or easement–plots like this are called flagpole sites. The site poses just the kind of severe challenges that AB-W has specialized in addressing, though.
To fit their live/work program into the envelope of the building, they have integrated and jig-sawed the home and studio spaces together, and they seem to have managed to carve out incredible space, light, privacy, and even some views on a lot that looks like something out of a Gordon Matta-Clark exhibit. Of course, it’s all in Japanese, so good luck with that excite.co.jp translator…
House & Atelier Bow-Wow [via archinect]
Tokyo House: projects for flagpole, eel, and box sites

The awesome and ingenious Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow (the Japanese translation, Atelier Wan, sounds nicely like “1,” too) is keeping a blog of the combination house/studio they’re building for themselves in Naka Meguro, a central, dense, and expensive section of Tokyo. The lot they found was affordable only because it’s tiny and enclosed on all sides. Still, it’s zoned for more than 660 sqm, (including underground) of live/work space.
Because of their shape–a square-ish lot blocked in and invisible from the street, and connected to it by only a narrow passageway or easement–plots like this are called flagpole sites. The site poses just the kind of severe challenges that AB-W has specialized in addressing, though.
To fit their live/work program into the envelope of the building, they have integrated and jig-sawed the home and studio spaces together, and they seem to have managed to carve out incredible space, light, privacy, and even some views on a lot that looks like something out of a Gordon Matta-Clark exhibit. Of course, it’s all in Japanese, so good luck with that excite.co.jp translator…
House & Atelier Bow-Wow [via archinect]
Tokyo House: projects for flagpole, eel, and box sites

Although the pictures are nice, too.
Turn-ons: urbanism, Meier’s third condo tower, Gluckman Mayner’s One Kenmare, long walks on sensitively adapted elevated railroad track parks, Gordon Matta-Clark exhibitions.
Turn-offs: Freedom Center squabbles, deceptively meaningless master plans, Gwathmey’s Sculpture for Living.

This new building is across the street from my in-law’s apt. in Tokyo, in the Minami Azabu neighborhood about 5-min. walk from Roppongi Hills.
It just went up a few months ago, and the evening I went over to examine it close up, the young Japanese architect happened to be there with a photographer, taking pictures for the firm’s website. These pictures, in fact, at Klein Dytham.
The site used to be a tiny parking lot, he said, but then the road/sidewalk was widened, cutting into the lot. As you might expect, there’s a tiny little service core in the tapering end at left, but if there’s a basement, its entrance is well-hidden. Basically, what you see is what you get: a rare spec building with a strong architectural presence.
Now, one day back from Tokyo, just as I’m about to post this, I find that Regine has already scooped me on the building that I’ve been walking by almost daily for the last month.

Billboard House Moto Azabu [huh? klein-dytham]

Near where we’ve been staying in Tokyo is this striking building, which I had to check out. The screen-like facade turns out to be cinder block-colored bricks set on end in a blackened steel frame. A meter back is the entry courtyard and the stark glass box of the restaurant, which feels suspended in the thick forest behind it. Of course, it’s on a busy corner of a major street (gaien higashi-doori, if you’re coming).
The restaurant is called Waketokuyama, and it’s apparently the Per Se of Tokyo, from the stunningly simple cuisine made with super-fresh ingredients, to the difficulties of getting a reservation. We’ll still look into eating there, but it was the architecture–by Kengo Kuma–which first caught my attention.

Kengo Kuma and Associates [kkaa.co.jp, such a big browser window for such little pictures]

A report from the Herzog & deMeuron-designed Prada store in Tokyo’s Minami Aoyama neighborhood. I have some good news and some bad news.
First the bad news. It was reported earlier that the store smelled like feet cat urine. It appears this is no longer the case. The white carpets seemed freshly–and repeatedly–shampooed, which may explain the lack of odor.
Also, I saw no evidence to support reports that the windows were cracking and popping out, and that the clothes were fading at an excessive rate.
Worst of all, it’s actually quite nice, much nicer than the Rem Koolhaas fiasco, anyway.
Now the good news: we were the only customers in the store during the entire time we were there. Also, the kid’s all-terrain stroller left calligraphic trails in the untrodden carpet.
Prada Tokyo images at Dezain.net
previously: “damn, but that company pisses me off.”