Description

This project description is an excerpt from the longer article “Infill and Puntal Interventions”. For a comparative analysis and further data on this and all other categories including accompanying graphs, please see the article “A Turning Point”.

Besides these standalone architectural gems, small-scale infills can likewise occur through the aggregation of dwelling units into collective housing. In Setagaya-ku, the Seijo Townhouse or the Garden Court Seijo United Cubes completed in 2007 by Kazuyo Sejima is an instance of an experimental undertaking not just by the architect but also by the developer that sought to offer an alternative way of providing condominium apartments within the dense urban fabric of Tokyo. The private developer had organized a competition in search of an architect to design a collective housing project that would attain a “site-specific atmosphere” as well as relate to the city. [1] With a site area of 1,197.6 square meters, which is several times larger than a single-family plot, Sejima was able to propose a large-scale garden in the belief that this agglomeration within a broader environment would be able to generate an urban atmosphere for the city.[2]

The outcome was a complex of cubes that were assembled and stacked in an assortment of sequences, interspersed with intimate alleys and communal courtyards and, in essence, constituting a microcosm of the traditional neighborhood communities. This notion of a ‘house as a city’ was first explored by Sejima’s partner, Ryue Nishizawa, in the Moriyama House of 2005 composed of 10 white cuboids of various sizes stacked and arrayed seemingly randomly to form five compact rental apartments with gardens and pathways in between. In this subsequent elaboration, the Seijo Townhouse deployed 20 interlocking block units to form 14 apartment units, with a network of shared interstitial spaces recalling the traditional roji in between. Constructed of thinner and longer light-pink bricks laid with white mortar, the complex is visually warm and inviting, and immediately distinguishable from the sea of grey and black pitched roofs. Each of the cubes is adorned with giant windows and is intentionally positioned such that none of the windows are situated directly opposite each other. Apart from letting in plenty of sunlight, this clever offset allows these windows to remain open to the views outside, whether into a private courtyard, communal garden, or alleyway, enhancing the sense of an outward-oriented spatial appreciation intrinsic in the Japanese acumen. Inside, each of the cubes contains a single programmatic function and is linked to the rest of the unit by a hallway, bridge, or courtyard, generating a high degree of unit variation contrary to the standardized types commonly found in Japan’s condominium housing market. Unlike the Moriyama House though, this complex is walled and gated, preventing free access by non-residents and retaining a semblance of privacy as well as exclusivity within the community.

---

Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.