They Designed Tsutaya Books, the Store Everyone Copies. What Do They Think "Design" Is?

Without the part that lies outside design — the part that actually delivers value — design is just a passing spectacle.

In 1988, Mark Dytham, a 24-year-old Englishman, had just graduated from the Royal College of Art. During an internship he worked on the plan for a new town in London, spending his days picking his way through building codes that fixed everything from window heights to the colors allowed on exterior walls in certain districts. All of it bored the young Mark. "London at the time didn't encourage designers to take risks. You could put in a lot of work and still end up with something that looked no different from anything else."

Next to London's dullness, Japan in the 1980s was an arena for designers. The economy was booming, the bubble had not yet burst, and opportunity seemed to be everywhere. Alongside the masters Japan had raised itself, international architects such as David Chipperfield and Zaha Hadid were working there too.

Mark and his then-girlfriend, the Italian architect Astrid Klein, won a study travel grant. Their first stay lasted only three weeks, and they prepared thoroughly for it: before setting off they wrote to ten Japanese architects — among them Arata Isozaki, Kenzo Tange and Fumihiko Maki — asking to visit.

On that trip they also met Toyo Ito, who invited the two of them to design the interior of a barbershop in Ginza. Soon after, Mark and Astrid moved to Japan. This year is their 30th living and working there.

Klein & Dytham Architecture (KDa), founded in 1991, has designed a run of commercial and public projects in Japan and abroad: Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama, the Leaf Chapel in Yamanashi Prefecture, and Open House, the cultural complex that opened in Bangkok last year. On April 20, Mark and Astrid came to Shenzhen for the MINDPARK Creative Conference, where they talked about more than two decades of work in Japan by a firm that is, in their own words, "from England."

"Before the bubble burst, nobody thought about the word 'bubble' — all anyone thought about was growth," Mark told QDaily, describing the boom of the 1980s.

David Chipperfield had only just opened his own studio in the 1980s, and his first project was an Issey Miyake store on Sloane Street in London. Mark still remembers how they got a stack of business cards for Japanese architecture firms out of David. In the years before the internet, many of their letters went unanswered.

"People hear Japan and picture gardens and temples — and of course we love those traditional buildings too — but as a modernist architect, what pulls me in is Japan's modernist origins," said Mark, calling this a small "private preference" of his own.

In a public talk, Astrid described her interest in the Street Observation movement that began in Japanese architecture circles in the 1980s. It grew out of An Introduction to Street Observation Studies（《路上观察学入门》）, published in 1985 by Terunobu Fujimori, Genpei Akasegawa, Shinbo Minami and others, in which people looked at all sorts of "architectural fragments" — odd structures that ordinary citizens had designed themselves on small, irregular scraps of land.

"Japan has always encouraged invention," said Mark, offering his own "collecting habit" as evidence. He has collected close to 150 flavors of Kit Kat: "Apple, pineapple, cherry blossom, sake, even some regional flavors — and all of them come from Japan. In Britain, Kit Kat doesn't seem to have much appetite for changing the product."

Building materials were the same story. For the facade they later designed for Tsutaya Books, they used inlaid panels of glass-fiber-reinforced concrete. Mark called working with the company that made the panels "fascinating": "The moment you mention trying a new material, everyone gets excited. In London, and in most of the West, if something hasn't been used before, everyone's first reaction is to say no." The process was very hard — an earthquake had just struck an area close to the factory as the panels went into production — yet the quality and the finish held. "There was no shock at the opening, no wondering, is this really the thing I designed?"

In the 1980s, Toyo Ito's firm, then on the rise, was still a team of ten, and Mark and Astrid were its only two foreign faces. They spent many days in the barbershop watching the staff and the customers, and in the end designed a stool on wheels with a frame beside it to hold barbering tools; the whole shop got a futuristic interior.

Three years later they left Toyo Ito and started their own practice. With the economy booming, projects seemed to be everywhere. Their first was the renovation of a building — Zaha Hadid was designing for the same client at the same time.

Then the bubble burst. Large construction projects that had been flush with money mostly stopped, and the young firm had to find its own way. KDa went looking for small design jobs, even work that seemed to have little to do with architecture at all.

They once designed for a parking garage, adding backdrop walls at some of the spaces and improving the lighting. "Who wants to linger in a parking lot? The light is dim, the air is stale." After the work was done, people regularly rented the place outside working hours, when most spaces sat empty, to hold pop-up events.

"Looking back now, getting through the years after the bubble burst mattered a great deal to us," Mark said. Every convenience of the bubble years was taken away at once, and architects had to ask what design was really supposed to do.

In 2004, KDa designed the Leaf Chapel for a fading resort area in Yamanashi Prefecture: a shell-shaped, perforated "canopy" set in a wide green lawn. It opens for ceremonies and closes when idle, becoming a sight in itself. The fading resort quickly turned into a popular place to hold weddings.

KDa has taken part in a string of commercial projects, the best known being its 2010 design for Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama. The winning competition entry was unusually resolved, and only 20 months passed between winning the competition and the finished building.

Before Tsutaya Books, TSUTAYA's logo was its signature blue and yellow. Its parent company, Culture Convenience Club (CCC), had launched the blue-and-yellow T-Card points card back in 2003 — good for renting DVDs, buying books or paying at convenience stores — with more than 60 million members. TSUTAYA was the first bookstore in Japan to open a "BOOK & COFFEE" store, selling a slower way of living alongside its books, but "at the time, in most people's eyes, that yellow-and-blue TSUTAYA was still just a cheap video-rental chain," Mark recalled.

"In 2010, when Mr. Muneaki Masuda, the owner of Tsutaya Books, said he wanted to build a bookstore in Daikanyama, we all thought he was mad. Remember, Apple had just released the iPad in 2010."

To change the image of Tsutaya Books, KDa took "T" — the first letter of TSUTAYA's romanized name — as its basic element. The white facade, made by repeating and "weaving" that letter, together with the openness of large sheets of glass, turned the building into a landmark in Daikanyama, and it was named one of the 20 most beautiful bookstores in the world. Before that, the area was better known for Hillside Terrace, the housing complex Fumihiko Maki designed and completed in phases over 29 years.

Muneaki Masuda also brought in Kenya Hara to design a whole new visual identity, reviving the old kanji logo for Tsutaya Books, which had been used during Japan's boom years and was later replaced by TSUTAYA.

At the start, Masuda defined the store's audience as the "dankai generation" (Premium Age): people over 50 who were young when the economy took off and who now keep a middle-class sense of style and demanding taste.

Today, with the rise of bookstore brands such as Eslite, people accept that a bookstore does not make most of its money selling books, and the floor space given to shelves keeps shrinking. But in 2010, Astrid and her colleagues still had to work hard to convince their client that the sofas and benches in the retail space were not "wasting" the store's rent. "We told them how important it is to make a slow kind of space. People aren't stupid — everyone knows the point of a bookstore or a mall is to get you to pay. But please don't 'rush' me into browsing and buying and nothing else. A relaxed atmosphere is what makes people stay."

"But making a landmark was never our aim," Mark told QDaily. In a public talk a few years ago, the two had invoked the Guggenheim effect and said the design of Tsutaya Books did the same work — a kind of "Tsutaya effect," turning a bookstore into a destination through design.

"But people have narrowed what the Guggenheim effect means. A star architect or a landmark building isn't enough on its own to keep bringing people back," said Astrid, describing her mixed feelings about "Instagram check-ins." "On the one hand, everyone loves beautiful things, or the attention economy. But that alone can't produce a lasting experience. If Tsutaya Books is a successful project, design is probably only 50 percent of it."

At MINDPARK the two described an important figure inside Tsutaya Books: the book concierge. Across the store's 12 sections there are more than a dozen "concierges." They are not young and pretty, and they are not there simply to tell customers what is in stock and where to find it; they are veterans of design, music, travel, food, cars and other fields, and they choose the books and decide how they are laid out. The concierge in the literature section used to be a book critic. The one in the music section produced jazz records and helped put on more than 200 concerts. The writer Tom Downey once described meeting a "food magazine concierge" there whom Tsutaya Books had just sent to Berkeley to visit Alice Waters, the figure behind the farm-to-table movement. "For a long time we've used the word 'browse' for the way we look at websites, which seems a little ironic now — what the word really means is exactly what electronic devices cannot replace."

"They're like curators. You can think of the Daikanyama Tsutaya Books as 12 small exhibitions that keep changing. Anyone can get lost in an age of information overload; we need cultural navigators."

After Daikanyama, KDa also took on the design of the Shonan branch of Tsutaya Books. White, densely textured surfaces are a facade KDa uses often; in 2016 the firm rebuilt a beer company's building on the plaza in Tokyo's Ginza, giving the new Ginza Place a skin with a handmade texture.

In 2017, Open House, which they designed at Bangkok's Central Embassy, opened — a Bangkok version of Tsutaya Books. The mall had drawn few customers because its prices kept people at arm's length. KDa rebuilt a whole floor of 5,000 square meters, bringing together 14 restaurants and bars, a gallery, a bookstore, a children's play area and shared space.

"Luxury retail in Bangkok is highly developed, but the climate there isn't suited to walking outdoors. Just as the name says, Open House is an 'indoor public area' we designed for Bangkok, somewhere to walk and to rest."

Unlike many of their Japanese peers, Mark and Astrid concentrate on commercial spaces; they have even built a "toilet gallery" for the bathroom brand TOTO in a terminal at Narita Airport. "A lot of people criticize our buildings for being 'too easy to read,'" Mark said with a laugh, joking that this may be the limit of his Japanese — it is not easy to find the right words to give a building a deeper meaning.

KDa also started PechaKucha, a talk show for designers whose name comes from the Japanese for chattering small talk. Each young designer invited to speak gets 20 images and nothing more, and each image stays on screen for 20 seconds. It is a distilled TED. "For a long time, designers really have talked far too much! Sometimes we even suspect that designers use words to make up for what the design lacks."

"Commercial architecture is probably closer to everyone's daily life. We would rather it 'spoke' for itself, so that everyone can feel it and read it in their own way."

About the MINDPARK Creative Conference: held in Shenzhen from April 20 to April 23, 2018, this year's edition was themed "Future City." Through forums and urban practice projects, it brought together creatives, designers and executives from around the world to think about the patterns and trends running from the individual to the environment, growth to consumption, and brands to industries — to build working models of the future city and look for the key to building future cities in China and elsewhere.

(All images courtesy of Klein & Dytham Architects.)