Toyo Ito's Shanghai retrospective explains the architect who builds public space inside disaster camps

Seven years after 3/11, they built 14 Homes-for-All for survivors. Is it a performance, or does it work?

In the seven years since the Great East Japan Earthquake, the Japanese government has been attacked again and again for how slowly it housed survivors and rebuilt communities. The argument has stayed material: the temporary housing the state put up is unsafe; how do you build it cheaper and mass-produce it? Meanwhile a group of architects began putting public buildings inside those temporary camps, hoping to mend the psychological damage. Is that a luxury?

Home-for-All began with the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, who set out to build public facilities — indoor playgrounds for children, fishermen's clubhouses, farm-produce markets — in the three northeastern prefectures worst hit by the earthquake, the tsunami and the leak at the Fukushima Daiichi plant: Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima.

The project appears in "Toyo Ito: On the Stream," a retrospective that opened on April 22 at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. Next to the landmarks of Ito's four decades — the Sendai Mediatheque, the Taichung Opera House, the Baroque art museum in Mexico — Home-for-All gets a single round platform, no models, and a name as plain as they come: everybody's house.

In the Japanese pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale, Ito and three younger architects — Sou Fujimoto, Kumiko Inui and Akihisa Hirata — showed a Home-for-All they had designed for the city of Rikuzentakata: a watchtower on a slope above the sea, ringed by 19 heavy logs about 60 centimeters across, cut from local Kesen cedars killed when seawater turned the soil saline. The pavilion documented, plainly and at length, how hard this one small public building had been to agree on. Of 120 study models, some were vetoed by the architects themselves, others by frowning residents.

The pavilion won the Golden Lion that year, and Ito took the Pritzker Prize the next. It asked a question worth asking: Architecture. Possible here?

People dismissed Home-for-All at the time as "a politically correct performance." It carried on anyway. A nonprofit was set up in 2014, and 14 Homes-for-All of various sizes went up one after another across the three prefectures.

This is not the first time Ito has argued about what makes architecture public. Thirty years ago, in bubble-era Tokyo, he set up an installation inside a shopping mall: Tokyo Nomad Women's Dwelling, a translucent shell holding a bed, a radio, a dressing table and a simple tea counter. The young Kazuyo Sejima was its model. Ito remembers the city then — people ducking into bars after work, the streets still busy once the parties broke up, no taxi to be had. "We were like nomads. Anywhere could be home." He deleted, one by one, the functions a traditional home provides: a single person from out of town could walk out the door and let Tokyo feed him, entertain him and keep him connected.

Thirty years later, the people walking out of evacuation shelters and temporary housing found a reality that had fallen apart. The government's top-down relief and resettlement plan could cover food, shelter and safety, and had no time for the psychological side of putting a community back together. The temporary units were container-shaped prefabs on steel frames, their poor performance a standing complaint; public space was out of the question.

"But what bothers me more is a whole row of houses that look exactly alike, an arrangement with no humanity in it. This egalitarianism, this uniformity, shows up in the temporary housing and also stands for how barren the Japanese spirit has become," Ito writes in 《反建筑》 (Anti-Architecture). "To protect their privacy, households only shut themselves in further. Neighbors on either side, rows in front and behind, may never speak to one another. I'm told a good many people became hikikomori after moving into temporary housing." Official Japanese figures from September 2016 put "disaster-related deaths" at 3,523, counting both those whose health gave way and those who killed themselves after mental illness brought on by years of life as evacuees.

Ito's Sendai Mediatheque "came through" 3/11 — the main structure was untouched — but his team still spent two months repairing the damage inside. During those two months, architects like him walked the disaster zones, the shelters and the temporary camps, looking for some way to limit the man-made disaster that follows the natural one.

Gymnasiums are the usual shelters. People stay a few months at most, then draw lots for a government temporary unit. The last shelter closed in 2012; within a year every survivor housed in one had been moved out. But the "temporary" that came next often lasts years. A Kyodo News survey found that as of February 2017, 123,000 people from the three hardest-hit prefectures were still living as evacuees away from home, and among those who had stayed, 34,000 were still in temporary units. The government's housing reconstruction plan is moving slowly.

Ito has compared the shelters with the government's temporary housing, and the two run on entirely different spatial logic. Shelters are awkward and life in them is hard; small ones are often short of supplies, while big ones, covered by the media early on, tend to receive so much aid that it piles up unused. But a shelter can hold together the village or neighborhood that existed before the earthquake: in a gymnasium, people who know each other can help each other. For the sake of fairness and efficient administration, the move from shelter to temporary housing is decided by lottery. Old ties are cut clean through, people are split up and settled one at a time into "orderly modernist space." Ito's objection is that this logic, identical to that of a studio apartment in the city, does nothing to encourage residents to talk.

The standard temporary unit the Japanese government rolled out is a steel-framed prefab with eaves 30 centimeters deep. When Ito talked with the people living in them, he noticed there was nowhere convenient to do it: you stand on bare gravel, or in a narrow passage. The layout does not invite conversation. People told him, "If we had a veranda I could play chess with someone," and "under the old veranda you could stack firewood." Almost every complaint about the space they had now carried a memory of the social life inside a traditional wooden house — even if what they missed would be a fire hazard. "Standing in front of these people, I really could not say anything like 'the modern four-sided box is the better building,'" Ito said. He is not naively asking for a return to tradition; what is wrong with the camps is that strangers living side by side have nowhere to gather and talk.

That is where Home-for-All came from: a public space for the people in post-disaster temporary camps.

"Why can't architects design temporary housing? Why aren't architects asked to take part when a city's reconstruction is planned? Might the problem lie in how architects themselves have behaved until now? I have a sense of crisis about this: if we don't put the question to ourselves, architects will still be exactly what they are now in one or two hundred years."

The first Home-for-All came out of a program called Kumamoto Artpolis: Kumamoto Prefecture helped Miyagi Prefecture build a public facility, supplying timber and money and choosing a suitable architect. In 《那天之后的建筑》 (Architecture After That Day: Toyo Ito's Post-3/11 View of Architecture), Ito describes how delicate such offers of help can be. Many local governments turned the gift down. It was a hot potato: a public facility built in one place would look like favoritism and breed resentment elsewhere, and once built it needed staff assigned to run it, which was a headache of its own. Miyagino Ward accepted its Home-for-All in the end.

As Ito sees it, what a government means by "public" and what an architect means by urban structure and public life are very far apart. In practice, officials, the wider public and the residents each carry a different picture of the space. Bureaucracy is only the first round of negotiation. Once a site is settled, the architect has to answer the next question: what kind of public space do the survivors actually want?

Akihisa Hirata was one of the main hands on the Rikuzentakata project. He still remembers his teacher's warning: "The first thing you have to do is forget your design language and your personality, and listen properly to what everyone needs. Because if you let out endless ideas and can't finally agree with the other architects and the local residents, you are back where you started."

His first scheme for the seaside slope was a fully open dome. Residents objected; they wanted somewhere they could sit on the floor, out of the wind and rain. It took nearly a hundred models and schemes to arrive at the two-story watchtower everyone could live with.

In 2013, a local nonprofit in Iwanuma and an IT company in Tokyo launched an agricultural revival plan together, and the Home-for-All designed for it became a base for sustainable farming. It takes after a traditional Japanese farmhouse: a high interior ceiling and comparatively low eaves give it depth. Local farmers can sell produce on the spot and online, and can use Skype and the like to see friends far away and tell them they are all right.

In February 2015, Klein Dytham Architecture and Ito finished a Home-for-All that is an indoor playground, giving children aged 0 to 4 in Soma somewhere to move around free of radiation, since they can no longer play outside. The structure looks like a parasol held up by trees.

Zhao Yang, a young Chinese architect, was chosen in 2013 as an architecture protégé in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, mentored by Kazuyo Sejima, and designed a Home-for-All for fishermen on the shore at Kesennuma. He still remembers that his first scheme made room for the Japanese habit of taking off your shoes indoors — and that the locals told him this piece of modern city etiquette was beside the point in a space where fishermen gather.

On Omishima in southern Japan, Ito folded Home-for-All into a more ambitious plan to revive the island, with students from his Ito Juku school taking part. They turned empty houses into Homes-for-All and rebuilt a seaside schoolhouse, abandoned as the population aged, into a comfortable inn. Because getting around the island was difficult, the plan also worked up new ways to travel, bringing in Yamaha's concept electric vehicles, the 05GEN and 06GEN, in preparation for tourists.

Ito and his team plan to start a winemaking industry on Omishima's citrus groves, which no one farms any more. Planting began in 2014, using a climate close to the Mediterranean's and plenty of sloping ground — the first attempt at wine in the Seto Inland Sea. The first phase of the Omishima vineyard is due in 2019. It sounds like one more architect's version of rural revival, after the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the Setouchi Triennale.

As Toyo Ito, Shigeru Ban, Alejandro Aravena and others have collected prizes for socially minded work, one line of doubt asks where the limits of an architect's social exploration lie. Its best-known objector is Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects: "What I would rather see is architectural innovation that helps solve and advance urban development and restructuring, which moves the discipline forward — that is what a jury should weigh... I worry the criteria have shifted toward political correctness, so that people who break the rules, like Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au or Peter Eisenman, can no longer come through."

The worry that architects are riding a politically correct wave is not baseless. And the same questions still cannot be dodged. Where is architecture possible? Are there really places off-limits to it? And if it is possible, how?

Cover image from Home-for-All