“Relations”, The SANAA Studios 2006–2008: Learning from Japan: Single Story Urbanism,

October 21, 2009

Oedipus and Kronos never reached Japan. For in this country it is not inevitable that a young
architect instantaneously commits patricide upon leaving his master, nor is it given for a master
to impair his “renegade’s” prospects. The opposite is more likely. Japanese architecture can be
characterized as a series of continuous flows. Concepts and attitudes are not copied blindly, but
adapted, developed, reinterpreted, and modified. The relationship between master and
apprentice generally remains respectful and the exchange occurs over time. A collective sense
of responsibility toward the profession inspires Japan’s architects to feed an ongoing stream of
ideas, passing on knowledge, influence, and interest from one generation to the next.
One such stream springs from Kunio Maekawa, himself an apprentice of Le Corbusier and
Antonin Raymond, Frank Lloyd Wright’s associate in Japan. An early master of the postwar era,
Maekawa is primarily known for his attempts to develop an approach that synthesized
Modernism and Japanese tradition. Kenzo Tange, who worked in Maekawa’s office for four
years, continued this effort. Tange, a vital force in Japan and abroad, returned to the spatial
concepts and modular proportions of tatami,1 used textures to enliven the omnipresent
concrete and steel, and integrated gardens and sculpture into his designs. He established the
Tange Laboratory where young associates such as Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, and Arata
Isozaki met and exchanged ideas. Isozaki continued the Corbusien tradition and then turned
toward a further exploration of geometric shapes and cubic silhouettes. He fused Western high-
technology building concepts with typically Japanese spatial, functional, and decorative ideas
to create a contemporary personal style. Traces of this geometric fusion of international
influences with Japanese sensitivities continue to be visible—albeit modified—in the work of
Isozaki’s disciples, such as Jun Aoki, who worked at Isozaki’s office from 1983 until 1990.
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa are part of a comparable flow that has Kiyonori Kikutake at
its source. Kikutake graduated in 1950 from Tokyo’s Waseda University with a strong interest in
the use of advanced technology to inform architecture and urban design. Three years later he
established his own firm. The completion of his personal residence, the Sky House in Tokyo in
1958, made him famous. The house is a single volume elevated on piers. Arguing that the
components most likely to change should be designed for ease of replacement, he distributed
the service spaces around an open living space. When asked about her influences, Sejima
mentions that as a child, coming across this house in a magazine drew her into architecture.
Kikutake became a figurehead of the Metabolist Movement, launched at the World Design
Conference in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of worldwide explosive urban growth. The
Metabolists initiated a new chapter in Japanese architecture, in a reaction to the “Eurocentric”
CIAM. This movement explored the “symbiosis of diverse cultures, from anthropocentrism to
ecology, from industrial to information society, from universalism to the age of symbiosis of
diverse elements, from the age of the machine to the age of the life principle.”2
Between 1965 and 1969, Toyo Ito worked in Kikutake’s office. Upon starting his own office, Ito
adapted and redefined his master’s exploration of the cross-fertilization of new technologies,
urban life, and “nature.” He recognized a post-identity city where boundaries such as
inside/outside and private/public were becoming increasingly porous. Illustrative to his thinking
is the Pao for the Tokyo Nomad Girl project (1985), which introduces the vision of an “urban
nomad,” immersed in the bubble of booming Japan. The performance of the building’s skin as
an ephemeral interface between building and city inform his explorations, illustrated for
instance in his project Tower of Winds (1986). Similar to Kikutake in the sixties, Ito, through his
investigation of the border between the virtual and physical, devised an answer to a novel
condition; that of the contemporary Asian metropolis in its transformation by popular culture
and information society. Ito’s practice, like his master’s, educates a long lineage of talented
designers. One of them is Kazuyo Sejima. After working there since 1981 she started her own
office in 1987, at the height of an economic boom that would soon turn into a bust. Tokyo’s post
bubble landscape craved for a shift in direction. Surrounded by the pompous artifacts of a
deflated era, Sejima commenced on a search for a more restrained and personal architectural
language. Yushi Uehara, a Japanese architect based in the Netherlands, who assisted both Ito
and Sejima during their projects in that country, describes Sejima as model of the Tokyo Nomad
Girl who appears in Ito’s work: “A new generation that is more personal when imagining
space.” Uehara continues: “The architecture of SANAA is like your favorite furniture: Space that
has less complication. Space that is as it is, not abused by any bigger manifesto: No obsession,
no polemics but therefore expressing fresh aesthetics.”3 Although momentous architectural
obsessions and spatial complexities inform SANAA’s work, these are indeed freed from an
overarching dogmatic approach. Sejima moved Japanese architecture to a more personal, non-
doctrinaire realm. Suddenly it can seep into the smallest alleys of the city and in its flow
overtake gambling halls, fashion stores and tiny urban lots. Sejima soon was joined by Ryue
Nishizawa, a young architect who as post-graduate student had already worked in Sejima’s
office. “I don’t even remember graduating,” Nishizawa once remarked, “it was just a continual
progression.”4 Together as SANAA, Sejima and Nishizawa continued their investigation of the
fluid realm between substance and context. Through conceptual and technical invention they
pushed this quest, nourishing it with new architectural possibilities. Today, this strain continues
as SANAA fosters new breed of its own. Not only in Japan, with architects like Junya Ishigami
or Tetsuo Kondo, but, also elsewhere around the globe because of SANAA’s expansive practice.
As the dense media-infested metropolis is becoming a more ubiquitous condition, the
architectural language that SANAA and their offspring have developed in reaction will gain
relevance for all of us.
Japan is often seen as a society of timeless traditions. The truly timeless quality of these
traditions is fundamental. It liberates them from history and grants eternal validity. They
become ingrained in culture. One such tradition is a dedicated and systematic quest for
progress—a perpetual, almost messianic, pursuit of the new. In this search influences can come
from anywhere. Opportunism and open-mindedness select its source. Throughout history, Japan
has absorbed the “higher” culture through total and instant immersion, shifting suppliers from
China to Europe and then America. Advancement is immediate. By merging the freshly
absorbed with relics of the previous, a new condition is achieved. In his introduction to a book
on Japanese contemporary graphic design, Tsuyoshi Hirooka writes: “We have always adopted
ideas and materials from overseas, always superficially because of a lack of interest in
understanding the background of other countries. But we have developed those ideas according
to our own interpretations and brought them to a completely different destination from the
original ones.”5 At SANAA the raw ingredients have been perfectly absorbed. Asked after a
lecture about a possible relationship between prewar German architecture and SANAA’s
contemporary work Sejima replied: “Generally, we do not refer.”6 SANAA’s almost encyclopedic
knowledge of the entire Modernist oeuvre is rooted so deep that it has become part of the
office’s collective subconscious. Similarly, when pressed on any relation to traditional Japanese
sensitivities in the work, such suggestion is typically deemed superfluous. Nishizawa makes
this clear in El Croquis 139: “Well there might be some relationship, but I have never thought
about it. There must be some relationship between our architecture and Zen, but actually I
don’t know how they relate.”7
Through immersion, adaptation, and rigorous study SANAA generates new models out of an
amalgam of influences. In dissecting this blend, elements of history and culture become visible,
but other traces linger as well. Much has been said about the graphic, diagrammatic qualities in
their work. This aspect of their architecture has often been discussed in relation to Japanese
popular culture. Artist Takeshi Murakami tried to characterize this condition—contemporary
culture in Japan at the end of the twentieth century—through introducing his idea of Superflat.
“Society, customs, art, culture: all are extremely two-dimensional.”8 Murakami coined the term
to position his work within Japanese culture at large. “Consequently Murakami’s statement has
drawn attention from critics and scholars due to its connotations: ‘devoid of perspective and
devoid of hierarchy, all existing equally and simultaneously.’”9 Although SANAA certainly gives
extensive attention to the graphic composition of their designs, it is not solely what they are
after. The architectural plan is in fact an organizational tool. Not merely in its conventional way,
as spatial organizer of the program, but as a carefully crafted script for human
interrelationships. It’s a loose script, one that includes multiple and open-ended scenarios. The
user/actor is offered a free range of options and trajectories, passing through realms of varied
degrees of activation. The plan operates as a freely defined board game, with an internal set of
rules and reasons. While traversing the plan the objective is to discover and examine its
relationships. The building is the extrusion of a systematically and rigorously optimized plan.
Material and color are neutralized to become the canvas for the act. Yuko Hasegawa—who
commissioned SANAA to design the Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art—
claims: “SANAA adds chronological elements such as events and actions to their architectural
structures”10 Describing the SANAA method, she continues, “The process is a game, a dialogue
of which the outcome is unknown, the concept is given, but as programs develop over time, the
game is about accommodating all different needs … The architectural design reveals itself in
time and is given its wholeness through the relationship with the people who use the building
and the surrounding environment.”11 The games SANAA instigates are local, they end at the
perimeter. They can be playful, as the sets of rules and relationships do not represent a
blueprint for an all-encompassing utopian system. One often mentions the permeable nature of
SANAA’s facades, but these will not allow the game to escape into the world. They are
transparent to seduce people to enter. The more participants, the more fun the game yields.
Looking at a SANAA building is like looking at a pool on a hot day.
Similar concepts of the event, the open-ended outcome, and the need for users or audiences to
participate have been ascribed to the work of a group of artists who gained recognition during
the 1990s. Nicolas Bourriaud, a critic and former director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, has
theorized the work of this group of artists—which includes Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno,
Carsten Höller and Pierre Huyghe—within his concept of Relational Aesthetics.12 The artists in
this group take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human
relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space. Works, many
of which operate on the scale of a room or environment, produce inter-subjective encounters
through scripts of which the outcome depends on the participation of the audience. The work
moves away from the individual aesthetic object to a more ephemeral, situation-based
environment. It steers clear of a singular theoretical approach to embrace the mutability of
meaning:
The ideas of diversity, potentiality, fluidity and simultaneity inform the work […] which opens
itself onto the world, eschewing introspective critique in favor of engagement, activation,
entertainment and seductions. At the heart of these varying practices is an impulse to merge
experience and its representations […] the work is less about social interaction than a
deliberate activation of the social, meaning that the viewer is drawn into the aesthetic
experience to become an integral part of the process of perception and cognition.13
In conceiving ideas, Sejima likes the analogy of the park. She sees the park as a place where
multiple and diverse activities take place concurrently. Paths, trees, and shrubs form soft
separations between zones of accommodation. The user can roam freely between these
different zones and see people enjoying their surroundings. A park only succeeds as an
environment through activation by its user. Projects such as the Kanazawa 21st Century
Museum of Contemporary Art and the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne operate in such a way.
Ambiguous circulation spaces, places of density and lesser definition, realms of overlap and
interference. Not unlike SANAA’s renderings these projects without their people and furniture
would merely seem a collection of reflections and multiple shades of white. Similarly in smaller
projects, such as Moriyama House, with the space between the volumes, or Onishi Community
Hall, where the town’s main pedestrian route is incorporated in the plan, the work is activated
by its users. The essence of these projects lies in fostering (not forcing) and exposing relational
systems. The strongest analogy between the arts movement and SANAA’s practice occurs in
their smaller installations. Their design for relational aesthete pur sang Hans Ulrich Obrist,
whose Rumor Machine, part of the Mutations exhibition in Tokyo in 2001 consisted of layers of
white cards, inscribed with rumors, on a low platform encouraging visitors to spread them
throughout the city. A second project, Field Party, which Sejima undertook with her students,
consisted of a 12m x 12m grid of approximately one hundred barbecues set up on a large field
in the suburban outskirts of Tokyo. Each barbecue offered only one type of meat or vegetable
(some nodes offered drinks). The inhabitants of this sleepy suburb roamed the field to taste the
different dishes while encountering their neighbors along the way. “The party looks
disconnected, but people share the coming dusk together.”14 One could argue that this interest
in community and interaction fits within Japanese cultural values of conviviality. Similar
interest in issues of participation can be seen in Japanese contemporaries such as Atelier Bow-
Wow, for instance, with their White Limousine Yata project. But rather than making actual art,
SANAA resolves their relational tendencies primarily within the realms of architecture. Projects
are conceived through overarching concepts that are so versatile they can accommodate radical
change and sudden programmatic omissions or additions as a result of external forces.
Sometimes the work is wrongfully depicted as a series of beautiful objects, but it is the
regressive (not minimal) qualities of these architectures, the programs they accommodate, and
the potentiality of the spaces in between that make up the work.
Although there are few visual commonalities between the aforementioned artists and SANAA,
the sensibilities that generate the work are similar. Both are responses to a new social space
that has emerged with the rise and proliferation of virtual society. In art, this has prompted a
desire for more physical and face-to-face interaction between people on one hand, while on the
other it inspired artists to adopt a do-it-yourself approach and to model their possible
universes. SANAA also tries to define answers to this novel condition. Sejima herself has said:
“In an age of non physical communication by various means, it is the job of the architect to
provide real spaces for direct communication between people.”15 Without being literal (the fold,
the field) the framework SANAA sets up with their designs addresses new types of spatial and
mental navigation the information age has introduced. One browses from space to space in a
non-hierarchical, non-linear manner, to encounter and connect.
The focus on community and participation within architecture as a response to a new social
paradigm interested the architects of Structuralism. Aldo van Eijk, the Smithsons, and Lucien
Kröll, for instance, dealt with similar concerns. As in the art world, the main difference between
SANAA and these historical movements is the shift in attitude toward social change: “instead of
an ‘utopian’ agenda, today’s artists seek only to find provisional solutions in the here and now;
instead of trying to change their environment, artists today are simply learning to inhabit the
world in a better way; instead of looking forward to a future utopia, this art sets up functioning
‘microtopias’ in the present.”16
The introduction of new communication technologies in Japan has lead to isolation, a sense of
loss, and the erosion of traditional social structures. SANAA’s work is not trying to preserve
these old structures, but react to the loss of community by proposing new, contemporary
alternatives, in which open, non hierarchical, and ever shifting relations take form. SANAA’s
work is not Superflat. It achieves social cohesion through open-ended, continuous spatial
containers that allow for accidental moments of exchange, gently held within a permeable
membrane. The political aspect of the participatory project lies not in a move away from the
spectacle to an “unmonumental” staging of community or in the claim that mere physical
activity would correspond to emancipation, but in a faith in human’s individual ability to invent
their own stories. “Unattached to a privileged artistic medium, this principle would not divide
audiences into active and passive, capable and incapable, but instead would invite us all to
appropriate works for ourselves and make use of these in ways that their authors might never
have dreamed of.”17 SANAA’s work is transparent only to a degree. Upon further exploration,
their buildings only give minor cues, dispersed in a field of ambivalence. This deliberate
ambiguity turns each individual into a creator.
[…]
We live in times in which, as a result of financial and environmental crises, reservations about
the project of Modernity begin to resurface. This gives us an opportunity to shift its focus.
Connectivity and “smart” ecological and geometrical design, while well intentioned, seem to
push architecture further into a techno-centric realm. The faith in technology as focal point of
the profession should be considered with some reservation. Society’s systematic relocation to
the virtual is greatly affecting a traditional sense of social space. Where in a pre-network
culture, architecture shaped the social realm; accumulating in memory to form historical
significance, it risks becoming the frictionless, temporary carrier of the virtual. As the modern
driver of the architectural project, the program, evaporates, it will turn the entire world into the
gigantic lounge (with Wi-Fi!) where people can do “whatever” as we now socialize, research,
shop, play, and have sex online. This shift delaminates “value” from the physical world.
Allowing this value to flow and mutate freely has recently left us with millions of acres of
boarded up homes, dead malls, rejected icons, shrinking towns, and piles of expired “value-
carriers.” In and against this milieu we should conceive of an architecture with intrinsic value.
SANAA’s intentional “scripting” of activities shows us how our architectural intelligence can be
employed to reinvigorate our sensibilities in the physical world. Rather than an architecture of
the virtual—the graphic, the explicit, the temporary, the sterile, the mechanic—we should
explore an architecture of the “new” real. An architecture that is spatial, sensory, and
multivalent.
In the short movie Shaking Tokyo (2009), director Bong Joon-Ho imagines how a hikikomori
(shut-in) after ten years gives up his voluntary solitary imprisonment. As he leaves his
overgrown house he notices the total absence of human beings in the streets. We all have
withdrawn from the real world into individual isolation and life online. During his search for a
physical encounter, a sudden earthquake hits, violently forcing people out of their rat holes.
Resentfully, they enter the derelict streets; the obese, the fearful and weak, in their tracksuits
and slippers, scared and distressed, like newborn albinos thrown into the merciless sunlight. It’s
time for architecture to get seismic before this scenario plays out.

1 Japanese dimensional system based on a straw mat, about 91 cm × 182 cm

2
Kisho Kurokawa cited in Cities on the Move, H. Obrist, H. Hanru, Hatje Cantz, 1999, ISBN-10:
3775707271
3 www.zerodegree.com/WRT/WRT_TXT/borderl.htm

4 Interview by Edan Corkill, The Japan Times, January 6, 2008

5 JPG, T. Sakamoto, R. Prat, Actar, 2001, ISBN 978-84-95951-17-5]

6
Kazuyo Sejima, Q&A Columbia University, lecture 2003
7 El Croquis 139, 2008, ISBN-10: 8488386486

8
Superflat, T. Murakami, H. Azuma, Madra Publishing, 2000, ISBN-10: 4944079206
9 “New Sobriety,” F. Idenburg, Idea Magazine #293, 2002

10
SANAA. 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa, Y. Hasegawa, M.
Washida.Toto, 2005. ISBN: 4887062532
11 Ibid

12
Relational Aesthetics, N. Bourriaud, Les Presse Du Reel, 1998, ISBN-10: 2840660601
13 theanyspacewhatever , N. Spector, Guggenheim Museum , 2008, ISBN-10: 0892073772

14
SANAA: Works 1995–2003 , K. Sejima and R. Nishizawa, Toto, 2003, ISBN-10: 4887062249
15 “Kazuyo Sejima,” Hunch 6/7, the Berlage Institute

16
Relational Aesthetics, N. Bourriaud, Les Presse Du Reel, 1998, ISBN-10: 2840660601
17 C. Bishop. OCTOBER #110, 2004, pp. 51–79, MIT Press