From the Studio Apartment to the Historic House: Kengo Kuma on the Ten Kinds of Japanese Home

The title of A Theory of Ten Houses (《十宅论》) plays on A Theory of the House (《住宅论》), the book that made the home sacred; its contents pay tribute to Marcus Vitruvius's The Ten Books on Architecture. It is not only a book about architecture. Through architecture it sets out a Japanese system of signs, one that puts great weight on context, and the symbolic meanings behind it.

About the author:

Kengo Kuma is one of Japan's best-known architects, principal of Kengo Kuma & Associates, a professor at Keio University, and the designer of the main stadium for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. He leads Japanese architecture today and is held in unusually high regard abroad. His style joins the classical to the contemporary; his major works include the Japan Pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale. He has close ties to China as well, where he has designed a number of well-known projects, among them the Bamboo Wall House at Commune by the Great Wall, The Opposite House, and Sanlitun SOHO. Kuma has won many awards at home and abroad, including Finland's Spirit of Nature Wood Architecture Award (2002), the Architectural Institute of Japan's Tohoku Charter Design Award (2000), and the Architectural Institute of Japan Award (1997).

Besides his work as an architect on the international stage, Kuma lectures at all kinds of public institutions and writes; several of his books have been bestsellers. The Simplified Chinese edition of his best-known book, Defeated Architecture (《负建筑》), came out in 2008 and drew wide attention.

About the translator:

Zhu E is a well-known graphic designer, publisher, and curator who has devoted himself to introducing Japanese designers and the newest currents in international design. The books he has published include Kenya Hara's Designing Design and Kengo Kuma's Defeated Architecture.

Book excerpt:

Chapter One: The Studio Apartment School (excerpt)

1. A Spatial Invention of the 1970s

The "studio apartment" appeared in Japan in the 1970s, and it is a spatial invention worth singling out. It was only five or six tsubo — about 17 to 20 square meters. Within that cramped concrete space, the unit bath, a prefabricated module combining toilet and bathroom, became the emblem of the urban single-person dwelling. This ranks among the handful of major "spatial events" in postwar Japan. The studio apartment did away with fussy partitioning and was called a rational "one-room space." But once you subtract bath and toilet from a total of five or six tsubo, how much space is left to divide? Urban housing built for single people was nothing new, in Japan or in the cities of Western Europe. Japan had long had cramped wooden-frame student lodgings, but those, built for students alone, fell far short of what a single adult needs from day to day. Some rooms had no bath inside; others had no toilet. That alone makes the point: what single people needed each day had already outgrown what their own rooms could supply. But to judge housing by whether the toilet sits inside the room or outside it is only a modern prejudice. Student lodgings in fact put the toilet outside so that the small rooms would not feel too stifling. And because the buildings were wooden, and wooden walls insulate poorly, both sound and air passed freely through them. Modern architectural theory always marks such rooms down, yet it is the physical properties of a wooden house that freed the tenant from any sense of confinement. In this way, even a small space could be lived in comfortably. And the "studio apartment"? There the toilet, the bath, and even a small kitchen are all stuffed into that little space, so a person's whole life is confined to the one combined unit. The structure is concrete — concrete above, below, and on either side — and even the corridor is shut off by a soundproof steel door, which makes the whole thing a sealed room in the fullest sense. New York, too, has urban housing built for single people, known as the "studio": likewise a concrete box fitted with bath, toilet, and kitchen, only a different size from Japan's "studio apartment." And what sort of place a single person lives in has nothing to do with how much money they have. In New York it is perfectly ordinary for someone single and short of money to find another single person and share a room; what they will not find is a sealed room the size of a Japanese "studio apartment." This has nothing to do with salaries or rents. It is purely a difference in the consciousness of space. So why did Japan produce this particular spatial invention in the 1970s?

2. The Hotel Room as Spatial Model

There is no such thing as a wholly original spatial invention. There is usually some existing spatial model whose use we alter, and that is what we call a spatial invention. People took the great baths of Rome as their prototype, for instance, and invented the large station halls of the modern era. The prototype of the "studio apartment" is the hotel guest room — specifically, the single room of a business hotel. You come in along a narrow passage, with a unit bath combining bath and toilet set to one side, and at the end of the passage a room of about six tatami mats. This is almost exactly the plan of a business hotel single. What is more interesting is that the "studio apartment" does not merely take the hotel room as its prototype; it goes out of its way, by every available means, to stress the resemblance — by playing up the unit bath, for example. In Japan the unit bath is itself a metaphor for the hotel. Blow up a wide-angle gravure photograph of a "studio apartment" interior as far as it will go, and what you see is essentially a hotel single: first a bed, leaping out at you, and then a young woman sitting on it. Change a few words on a "studio apartment" flyer and you have the brochure for a business hotel single. So why exactly does the "studio apartment" take the hotel as its spatial prototype, and why does it insist so stubbornly on that resemblance?

3. The Metaphors of Travel and Sex

There is a clue here. Keigo Okonogi has pointed out that the "hotel-style family" is one of the typical ways a Japanese family exists. In a "hotel-style family," he argues, members come home only to sleep and rest, so each member's bedroom does much the same work as a hotel room. The "hotel-style family" is the mainstream form of the Japanese family. Families whose children have finished middle school, or are still in it, show the traits of a "hotel-style family" to one degree or another. It is fair to guess that children raised in such families will, once on their own, still choose to live in something like a hotel room.

Because they no longer live with their parents, their independence is an established fact. But why, once independent, do they still shut themselves up in a space like a hotel room? Okonogi's "hotel-style family" theory cannot explain that on its own, since his account says only that they choose a hotel-like space in order to be separate from their family. For people living in a "studio apartment," there is no longer any need to dodge the family. So what is it that draws them toward the "hotel"? For them the hotel carries two symbolic meanings — or, put another way, it is a metaphor for two things: one is travel, the other is sex.

A hotel is, at bottom, a place that belongs to travelers. Travelers have no fixed home; they are always wandering, and the hotel is the temporary stopping place set aside for them. For single people in the modern city, the ideal is not to settle down but to stay in constant flux. Real life may begin with marriage, or it may begin with landing a job, but one way or another it will begin, and at that point one is forced, for one reason or another, to settle. Before that, during the so-called moratorium, what one wants is not to strive but simply to drift. That is their ideal. So one reason they choose a hotel-like space is that they are drawn to what the hotel's particular feeling of being on a journey stands for. Besides travel, the hotel is also a symbol of sex. In a television drama, a shot of a man and a woman vanishing into a hotel is proof enough of that symbolic meaning. If drifting is the ideal state for the single city dweller, sex is their chief concern. The hotel therefore carries a plain double symbolism, the connotative symbolism of drifting and of sex. The "studio apartment" was accepted within a very short time and took firm hold in architecture. This happened because it used the "hotel" as a spatial model and so met the urban single dweller's ideals and desires about space; and it was precisely this symbolic work that finally let such a small, sealed concrete room exist as a place where people actually lived. Travel, in effect, means an expansion of space, while sex means contact with another person. Together the two let the occupant open a "ventilation shaft of consciousness." The physically sealed room is freed as soon as that shaft is opened. Whether the occupant of a "studio apartment" is in fact a traveler, or has ever made love in that sealed room, does not matter. What matters is that the association can be summoned; then the "studio apartment" is no longer a sealed space, because the occupant's consciousness has already been set free. That is where the power of symbolism lies.

4. Bed, Telephone, Television

The furnishings of the "studio apartment" also broadly copy the hotel's spatial prototype. The basics are a bed, a telephone, a television, and a plain table. The bed is the crucial physical symbol of sex, and it takes up a great deal of visual space, so where it goes and how it is designed — not just the frame, but the bedspread as well — deserve real attention. Even to save space one cannot drop the bed and simply lay a futon on the floor, because that would wreck the hotel atmosphere it took such effort to build.

Besides the bed, the telephone plays an important part. What is the first thing people do after moving into a "studio apartment"? Surveys say that for most, the first order of business is getting a phone installed — a matter counted more important than water, power, or gas. Only the telephone can connect the "sealed room" with the world outside. Telephones come in grades, of course, and one with more advanced features stands for more chances of contact with that world.

The answering machine is no longer anything remarkable, because in the "studio apartment" the telephone has never been of much practical use, and whether it does any practical work hardly matters. The telephone in a "studio apartment" is only a sign that a connection to the outside still exists; it is there to comfort the occupant. So the stronger the sense of enclosure in the "sealed room," the higher the demand for advanced telephone features.

The television does work no less important. Yasuo Tanaka once said that one behavioral trait of "studio apartment" dwellers is chatting with friends with the television on. Without it on, they feel, the mood is wrong — the television, like the telephone, means a link to the outside world.

They leave the television on not because they want any information from it. In a sealed room enclosed by concrete walls and aluminum window frames, a television left running does the same work as unsoundproofed wooden partitions and unsealed wooden window frames: it lets the "sealed room" keep some connection with the world outside.

5. Racket and Skateboard

Things not normally found in a hotel room do not appear in the "studio apartment" either — with the sole exception of the tennis racket and the skateboard, which get to sit in the room in plain view. One reason is that both stand for money and cultivation, but it is not the only reason; by that test alone, plenty of other things would carry the same symbolic weight. Another important reason these two were chosen is that they do the same work as the hotel room itself: both racket and skateboard are symbols of travel, of drifting, and of sex. Unlike jogging or skipping rope, neither tennis nor skateboarding can be done near where you live. Skateboarding goes without saying; tennis usually means a training camp, and a training camp means somewhere like Lake Yamanaka, Karuizawa, or Kiyosato — outdoor camps that cannot help suggesting travel. Tennis and skateboarding are also among the few sports men and women can take part in together — most sports, soccer and basketball among them, are played by men and women separately — and while playing, men and women can enjoy the game together. So tennis and skateboarding are symbols of sex as well. Taken together, it is hardly surprising that the "studio apartment" is decorated with a racket and a skateboard.

6. High-Tech and Postmodern "Deodorizers"

In practice, even a single person cannot live on the few items listed above. A washing machine can be hidden away on the balcony, out of sight and out of mind, but there are plenty of other "daily necessities" one simply does not know what to do with. And necessities that cannot be dealt with properly are bound to bring the "smell of daily life" with them. Once that smell appears, the journey is over, so it is an unlucky smell. Getting rid of it calls for two phrases: "high-tech design" and "postmodern design." The design of daily necessities can be improved through "high-tech design" and "postmodern design," and in this way the "smell of daily life" can be removed. Before "deodorizing," a household object may be merely lowbrow; a little work on its color and form transforms it, and it is reborn as something refined. And once "deodorized," it too can appear in the room in plain view: a refrigerator or toaster with "high-tech design," or a vacuum cleaner with "postmodern design," can likewise become furnishings in the "studio apartment." What matters most is that these objects have been "deodorized"; which method was used is no longer the point. That is, there is no need to improve everything by way of "advanced technology," nor to adopt the Memphis-style "postmodern design" throughout. For the occupant of a "studio apartment," things like "unified beauty" and "a consistent set of values" can be had at any time — but "any time" means any time after the moratorium is over, or, put another way, any time after one can afford to leave the cramped rented room behind. Holding that belief, they remain entirely unbothered, however harshly the outside world attacks these objects, "deodorized" by one means or another, for their lack of unity.

Cover image: Kengo Kuma, from Wikipedia