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Yoshiharu Tsukamoto

House & Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo, 2005 Perspective section of the House & Atelier Bow-Wow. The different sizes of the floors are disposed in the continuous vertical/lateral space of the building envelope defined by the local code. Working and living are intertwined.

Void MetabolisM
Since the Second World War, the urban fabric of Tokyo has been shaped by individual landownership and the proliferation of the detached house. For most Japanese architectural offices, domestic practice provides the mainstay of their work. This focus on the single private house, though, also limits the range of possibilities for urban interventions. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow explains how through its development of ‘Void Metabolism’, the studio has been able to turn its focus on the residential into a positive, breaking down the barriers between private and shared space in the city.

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Atelier Bow-Wow has been designing small houses in Tokyo for more than a decade. But even as the practice is joined by most architects of the same generation, who also predominantly design small single-family homes, it has realised that with each housing unit averaging a floor area of just 80 square metres (861 square feet) within this enormous city of over 30 million inhabitants, this pursuit would have little effect on the city itself. Looking back in history, Japanese architects have worked feverishly on the different housing types of Tokyo, while the area in which these houses were built has shifted over time. Architects such as Junzo Yoshimura or Kazuo Shinohara worked on houses in the suburban developments that preceded the Second World War, while the following generation of Toyo Ito and Kazunari Sakamoto, working in the 1970s, were designing homes for the second wave of suburban developments that had already begun in the 1960s. So Tokyo’s single-family homes designed by architects during the 20th century were mainly part of new suburban developments. Compared to these previous practices, architects today are more involved in the process of regenerating the existing residential areas. There are two areas where most of the current regeneration is taking place. The first is the so-called ‘wooden rent-house belt’ surrounding the central core of Tokyo. Characterised by small wooden houses and narrow winding streets, it was built during two large migration movements following the destruction of the old city centre by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and later by the US air raids in 1945. The other development area lies within the first generation of suburbs, which are now undergoing property subdivision mainly as a result of high inheritance tax. The houses Atelier Bow-Wow has been designing fit within these contexts. It could be argued that the current generation of architects has facilitated the urban metabolism through their housing designs. The word ‘metabolism’ made its first appearance in architectural discourses at the ‘World Design Conference 1960’ in Tokyo as part of a manifesto by architects Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Fumihiko Maki and Sachio Otaka, and architectural critic Noboru Kawazoe. Japanese cities have repeatedly experienced huge amounts of destruction as a result of earthquakes and air raids. While by the 1960s the city had rapidly recovered, it was still relatively unsustainable and fragile. Against this backdrop, the Metabolists group established a new concept of the urban environment as a changing and dynamic city. This was a historical value-shift in the realm of urban and architectural theory. In a sense, Metabolist thinking gave Japanese society an understanding of where it was, and a direction as to where it should go. The Metabolists produced a vast amount of visionary architectures and urban designs, with two elements in particular characterising their projects: a permanent infrastructural core that integrated circulation, as well as the capsules that represented the individual parts of the system. These types of large-scale, urban architectural creations can only occur in relation to the concentration of political power and capital. As a result, the real city has not been developed in the manner in which the Metabolists assumed and imagined. The reconstruction of Japanese cities after the
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Core Metabolism versus Void Metabolism below: The form of contemporary Tokyo is quite different from what was envisioned by the Metabolist movement of the 1960s.

Land subdivision in residential areas above: As conditions stipulate that each section of a divided lot must abut the street by a distance of no less than 2 metres (6.5 feet), flagpole sites and other types of lots have become symbolic of this process.

Core Metabolism

Void Metabolism

Vast continuous urban fabric of detached houses top: Residential sections of Tokyo were developed with a predominance of detached houses, and all available urban real estate has long since been completely exploited.

House demolition in Tokyo centre: In comparison to other countries, the average lifespan of a house in Tokyo is alarmingly short at only 30 years.

Wooden rent-house belt, Tokyo below: Map showing the fire belts – areas with a high concentration of wooden houses – and evacuation sites in Tokyo’s 23 municipalities.

Second World War went in the opposite direction. Numerous small landowners emerged as a result of the policy that encouraged individuals towards landownership and, in turn, created the drive they needed to construct their own private homes. Such construction continued and has today reached an unprecedented level within the city. The grain of detached houses forms the character of suburban residential areas, which are connected by train networks. High-rises are appearing only around the stations. This speaks to the importance of the detached house as a dominating type and integral structure within Tokyo, while simultaneously being perceived as the biggest obstacle by politicians and investors who want drastic urban transformation and the commercialisation of real estate in a city of 1.8 million landowners. For them, today’s urban fabric is a negative legacy; they are failing to see the potential hidden within it. What architectural design can do is to establish a framework to show how this urban legacy can be used productively as a catalyst for inventive solutions for housing designs, which, in turn, might improve the quality of the city as a whole. The average lifespan of a house in Japan is 30 years, giving Tokyo a unique rhythm in comparison, for example, with England’s 140-year housing lifespan. Because of this very short cycle, Tokyo is continuously undergoing a process of metabolism – one without cores or capsules, but with voids and small buildings. This ‘Void Metabolism’ is in contrast to the ‘Core Metabolism’ of the 1960s. Directly emerging from the conditions of the city, the first generation of Void Metabolism started in the 1920s with the first wave of suburban developments. Over the course of 90 years, with its average 30-year lifespan, the detached house has experienced multiple cycles of regeneration and reinvention. As such, the small houses that Atelier Bow-Wow is now working on in Tokyo can be understood as part of the fourth generation, providing a better understanding of Tokyo’s urban landscape and allowing for a critical examination of the previous three generations. Society, economy, technology, regulations, materials and families themselves have changed tremendously in the last 90 years. As houses emerge within very different contexts in different periods, and their lifespans vary slightly and regeneration happens seemingly randomly, it seems inevitable that the cityscape is inconsistent in terms of visual order with all of the houses from different generations. The transformation of the house type over this period has resulted in smaller property sizes, narrower distances between buildings, the disappearance of quasi-exterior space (such as engawa and nokishita, where inhabitants could spend time outside of the house), smaller facade openings, and greater isolation for single families. In short, the history of the house in the 20th century is characterised by its loss of generosity and eventual introversion. This spatial structure of the city might affect social issues; for example, a single elderly man might die alone and be discovered only two months later, or domestic violence may increase and go unnoticed. How do we react to this situation? Can we rescue the house from this spiral of intolerance? Is it possible to make a fourth-generation house more tolerant while simultaneously taking advantage of current advances?
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Analogical townscape below: The different types of housing in Tokyo can be classified into three generations, each of which is identifiable by specific characteristics.

Different generations of housing in Okusawa, Tokyo bottom: Due to the short lifespan of housing in Japan, Tokyo’s suburbs consist of a variety of houses from different generations.

Tokyo is a city made of houses, where the residential and commercial elements permeate the highly dense urban fabric as the result of the economic growth of Japan over the last half-century.

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House & Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo, 2005 opposite top, below and bottom right: An example of a fourth-generation house.

Atelier Bow-Wow’s aim is to free the fourth-generation house by combining three premises. First, the house must have spaces where non-family members can engage with the building; to make the house more open and connected to the city, workspaces, studios and shops become relevant elements. Second, the house needs a semi-exterior space where people can spend time, where just saying hello to the neighbours is enough to become a part of the streetscape. When a resident is sick or absent from these spaces for a few days, this will register with neighbours who will enquire whether everything is all right. Third, a more organic spatial relationship needs to be constructed between buildings. The space of the house needs to be redefined with adjacent elements both inside and outside the site. Small gardens in gaps between adjacent buildings can avoid a closing-off of the building from the city, ultimately positioning the lives of inhabitants within the broader territory of the city environment. Tokyo is a city made of houses, where the residential and commercial elements permeate the highly dense urban fabric as the result of the economic growth of Japan over the last half-century. This condition is fragile, though, since it exists as a process of urban transformation, but lacks any analytical framework to be evaluated. It is necessary to clarify the value of this kind of urban fabric. While building typologies, urban patterns and the collective imagery of most cities is relatively fixed (think of the New York of the early 20th century, Paris of the 19th century, and Venice of the 16th century), Tokyo has excelled as a city through its unique condition of embodied changeability. With a better understanding of what is here called Void Metabolism, Atelier Bow-Wow aims to give this exceptional circumstance a theoretical framework, no longer viewing the dynamic of urban housing typologies as a problem, but rather as a potential within which to work. 2

Text © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 88–9, 92(t), 93 © Atelier Bow-Wow; pp 90, 91(c&b), 92(c&b) © Tokyo Institute of Technology Tsukamoto Laboratory; p 91(t) © Manuel Oka

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