Makoto Tanijiri, the Designer Who Will Build 'Anything From a Doghouse to a High-Rise,' Says Ideas Start With 'Abandoning Bias'

Makoto Tanijiri: "The hundreds of projects I've done are my experience."

As a child, Makoto Tanijiri wanted to be a construction worker. He became an architect instead. Since founding Suppose Design Office in 2000, he has completed more than 400 design projects — buildings, interiors, landscapes, installations, furniture — including more than 100 finished houses.

His inventive work has won him a long list of prizes, among them the Japan Commercial Space Designers Association Award and the Japan Residential Environment Design Award. "Prolific" and "high-quality" are the words people reach for when they describe him. But try to boil his work down to a single style and you run into a problem: every project surprises you, and no two surprise you for the same reason.

On March 17 Tanijiri came to Shanghai for the Design Republic Design Festival, where he raced through nearly 20 projects in under an hour. Beyond architecture, he has started a real estate company and a construction company, an attempt to cover the whole building process "from zero." He has also pushed into wider territory: he opened a canteen called Shashokudo inside his own office and made it open to the public, and he plans to open a hotel.

Tanijiri never seems to tire of new things, and his appetite and invention appear to have no limit. In an interview with QDaily, he said the secret to staying creative is "abandoning bias." He doesn't care whether a job is big or small, glamorous or not. His firm's website says so plainly: anything from a doghouse to a high-rise will do.

In Japanese architecture, where degrees and connections count for a lot, Tanijiri is an outlier. He graduated from Anabuki Design College in Hiroshima and never trained formally as an architect. He then spent six years at Motokane Architects, a local Hiroshima firm. With some experience behind him, he founded Suppose Design Office in 2000; Ai Yoshida, from the same school, joined a year later as his partner.

In the early days every job came from a friend, passed on by word of mouth. Most of the work to be had in Hiroshima was private houses, and he turned none of it down.

"Experience means not running away from problems — doing a lot of projects, doing them without stopping," Tanijiri says of how he arrives at an idea and gets it built. Taking on almost anything in those early years trained him to react to a problem fast.

House in Bishamon, finished in 2003, was the project that first got him noticed. It sits on a slope in Bishamondai, in the hills of northern Hiroshima; the client wanted a family restaurant with living space built into it.

The slope was a poor place to put a house, and when Tanijiri took the job he was stuck. Then he walked around to the other side and found that from there you could see the whole town. That gave him his answer. He worked with the terrain, driving six angled steel columns into the slope and running a walkway to the building from the flat ground above, so that the columns carry the entire structure. The building has two levels; the stair is tucked to the side nearer the flat ground, and the interior has no extra columns. The ground-floor dining room does away with walls, using floor-to-ceiling glass instead. From a distance the upper floor looks as though it is floating.

House in Bishamon first caught the eye of the Japanese design magazine Casa Brutus, which mentioned it in an issue on traveling in Hiroshima. Japan's major media followed, and for "turning a disadvantage of the terrain into an advantage" the house won that year's Good Design Award.

His childhood taught him to look at problems this way. Tanijiri was born in a small village called Miyoshi, in Hiroshima Prefecture, and grew up in a traditional Japanese nagaya — a long, narrow row house where a single passage links every room.

To a small boy the nagaya was full of inconveniences: "If it started raining in the middle of a meal, you had to put up an umbrella to walk to the dining room."

He used to envy the neighbors' handsome houses. But the longer he lived there, the more he felt the nagaya's charm. Recalling it for QDaily, he described having nature inside the house as "a lucky thing to grow up with."

At 13, the boy who wanted to be a construction worker helped renovate the family house, a job that took six months. Afterward he tried giving his own bedroom a new shape every week — moving the sofa to the other side, turning the bed around, hanging a new picture. Doing this "renovation" in a small room, he found a kind of freedom inside constraints.

Ten years after House in Bishamon, Tanijiri got another house on a slope. Facing much the same handicaps, he was no longer content to solve the problem; this time he tried to make the problem produce a surprise.

House in Hibaru, in Minami Ward, Fukuoka, stands near a large reservoir surrounded by thick greenery. There was only a small patch of flat, buildable ground, and it had to hold a family of four.

Tanijiri wanted the building and the landscape to become one thing, and his method here was unusual. Following the slope, he first "hid" the house under a single pitched roof so that it wouldn't jut out. On the street side he left only an entrance the size of a Japanese tea room, deliberately using the bulk of the house to block the reservoir from view. Inside, the space opens up. It is divided into three levels, with a gap left between the walls and the roof and filled with glass, for light and a sense of openness. The reservoir, hidden a moment earlier, appears all at once. By staging the contrast between closed and open, the house makes the water look more alive than it would have if you had seen it from the street.

Tanijiri calls architects "doctors of the city." Good architecture, he thinks, is like a successful operation: it treats the actual complaint and cures a problem the city has.

With Onomichi U2, a cycling complex finished in 2014, the problem was how to give a small city some pull — how to make people passing through stay the night.

Onomichi U2 stands in Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture, near a 70-kilometer coastal bike route, the well-known Nishiseto cycling road, which draws crowds of riders every year. Onomichi is small, pressed between mountains and sea, with steep hillsides and lanes of old wooden houses. But visitors hurried through it without ever taking the town in.

Tanijiri's proposal was to reuse the warehouses on the waterfront and turn them into Onomichi U2, a complex of nearly 2,000 square meters holding a hotel, restaurants, shops and exhibition space — Japan's first mixed-use building made for cyclists. If you want to, you can ride your bike into every corner of it. You can ride straight into the hotel and park the bike on a rack in your room. You can follow the cycling route and pick up food and drink along the way without dismounting. There is also a Giant Store, which sells, repairs and rents bicycles.

The hotel inside Onomichi U2 is called Hotel Cycle. "Cycle" carries three meanings at once: the bicycle, the recycling of an old building, and the cycle of the environment. Because machinery couldn't be brought into the aging warehouse, Tanijiri had to build by hand with lightweight steel; that, plus the care taken over energy use, won the project the gold prize at Italy's International Sustainable Architecture Award.

In the past few years the big brands have come to Tanijiri for commercial spaces. He has designed several stores in Hiroshima and Tokyo for the Japanese eyewear brand J!ns, each one different from the last. He built Starbucks an all-white pop-up in Tokyo, lining the walls with white acoustic panels to suggest a snowfield. And when the French brand Le Coq Sportif wanted to turn itself into a lifestyle label, it hired him for its new Harajuku store, spare and fashionable.

Book and Bed, which opened in 2015, is the recent project people talk about most. Taking his cue from Murphy's bookshelf in the film Interstellar, Tanijiri pitched the real estate listings site R-Store on a bookstore you could sleep in.

The first Book and Bed opened in a building in Ikebukuro, a busy Tokyo shopping district. It blurs the line between hotel and bookshop, and the promise of "reading until you fall asleep without noticing" pulled in crowds of book lovers who wanted to see it for themselves. The design is not complicated. Guests arriving first see a wall of large shelves holding more than 1,700 books; the narrow capsule beds are hidden behind them, close enough that you can pull back the curtain and reach a book without getting up.

Tanijiri borrowed the idea of a picture frame: put the beds behind the shelves, so that all you catch through the gaps is a corner of someone's sleeping space. After the hotel opened, plenty of guests noticed exactly that, and took to wedging themselves half into the shelves for photographs to post online. Book and Bed became a place people go to be photographed, and three more branches followed — in Asakusa, Fukuoka and Kyoto.

As more people came to know his ideas, Tanijiri began stepping outside the architect's role and taking planning and consulting jobs. People kept asking him the same question: what should we build in a place like this?

Yasuharu Ishikawa, president of the Japanese apparel brand Stripe International, had a version of that question, and hired Tanijiri to design the company's newest flagship. The site was in the crowded Shibuya shopping district, and the store was meant to demonstrate a new kind of retail that mixes clothing, food and living, while drawing in young people and visitors from abroad.

Tanijiri's answer was a shop open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, called Hotel Koe. Unlike a clothing store that shuts at eight in the evening, this one has a hotel folded into it, which keeps it open around the clock.

The finished building has three floors. The ground floor holds a café and the clothing store. The second has a broad run of wooden steps that can be used to sell goods or as a hall for events. The third has a modern tea room and a lounge, along with the hotel's 10 Japanese-style rooms. A clothing store with a hotel inside it holds people longer, and the proposal went over well: Ishikawa said the idea would be extended to other stores.

The other side of "abandoning bias" is "putting up no walls." Talking to all sorts of people is how Tanijiri picks up what he knows. He is interested in a great deal — piano music and electronic music, painting and art.

Since 2011 he has run an interview column, "Makoto Tanijiri's Architecture of Delusions," in the Japanese magazine Modern Living. Architecture is the nominal subject, but the interviews let him talk with people who make things in every field, and they have become his main way of meeting them. His subjects have included the screenwriter Kundo Koyama, the actor and director Yusuke Iseya, the DJ Shuya Okino, the basketball player Yuta Tabuse and the botanical artist Makoto Azuma.

In 2012 Tanijiri published his first book, 《1000%的建筑——我在不断试错中成长》 (1000% Architecture: How I Grew by Getting It Wrong). The next year he collected the column's interviews into a second, 《谈谈妄想》 (Talking About Delusions).

Tanijiri calls these free-running ideas "delusions," and his job is to realize them one by one. He describes the moment an idea arrives as a flash. During the interview he wrote the word 閃く (hirameku, "to flash") on a piece of paper and explained, in no hurry at all: "You open the door, you let someone in, and that is how an idea is born."

Images from: Suppose Design Office

Cover image: House in Hidaka; Shashokudo

About the Design Republic Design Festival: the event ran from March 16 to March 25, 2018. Its aim was to use the strength of the design community to give fresh meaning to design's openness, its willingness to cross fields, and its capacity to invent. The festival made "cross-disciplinary collaboration" and "community" central to the program, reinforcing Design Republic's character as an inventive, varied platform — one that argues for bringing together the four basics of life, clothing, food, housing and mobility (as culture), in search of a better way to talk about how we live now.