Description

As intended here, housing as ‘infill and puntal interventions’ represents at least two kinds of site conditions and two different basic housing types. The first site condition involves the infilling of a prescribed street layout or similar infrastructural armature as new development with a succession of housing units, either completely or partially across the site and where the repetitive infilling may have one or more sequential orders. The second site condition, engaging ‘intervention’, usually implies redevelopment rather than infill de novo and takes place within an existing context of buildings not necessarily of the same vintage. ‘Puntal’ in this terminology essentially means singular, as in a single building or building complex that can be easily referenced and otherwise understood as a particular point in an urban circumstance from which certain expressive or spatial qualities flow to otherwise reinforce or contradict prevailing urban-architectural situations. In the case of specific houses, such interventions may be responses to different space-making conditions or requirements such as: one house replacing another; one house beside others, with the implication of shared or different contextual features; a house literally within the framework of another; a house that gives the appearance, rather than the thorough reality of other houses; and even a house under other housing, again with an element of disputation about the expression involved. Over time, puntal interventions may multiply within an urban area to more thoroughly transform it away from an existing condition or, indeed, to reinforce the existing condition still further. Such transformations may also involve regulatory and economic processes that are fundamental to physical outcomes and the kinds of dwellings that replace others on sites. Throughout, the two basic types of housing involved are row or terrace houses, usually on the order of three storeys, sometimes with additional floors and basements, as well as mid-rise unit ensembles of various kinds. Taller structures, such as ‘pencil buildings’, could also qualify, although they are more usually in the category of tall buildings. In today’s contemporary circumstances, especially under the broad rubric of urban intensity, housing as puntal interventions is of more interest than housing as de novo infill.

Precedents: Infills, Unit Ensembles, and Intervention Processes

The American row house of the nineteenth century was often built as the more or less coterminous infill of street, block, and lot layouts comprising new sections of cities. The Back Bay of Boston, for instance, was an early version of a public-private joint venture in which the street layout and infrastructure, along with land reclamation, was provided with public support and the neatly-aligned rows of housing came at the hands of private developers. Typically, the row and terrace houses that were built were three storeys in height with additional half basement level and roof dormer accommodations on relatively narrow lots that stretched back to rear gardens and a service alley. In planar arrangement, stairs and services were usually concentrated in the middle with well-made rooms to the front and back, particularly on the piano nobile which was largely dedicated to reception, entertainment, and contact with the outside world. The front and sometimes the rear façades of the row houses often bowed out, giving rise to the appellation of ‘Boston bow fronts’, to secure more prominence along the street grid so as to admit more light and air into the dwellings.
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Raised stairs from the street to the piano nobile were also a part of the typology, creating gracious entry into the houses.

Mainly built in the 1860s through 1880s, the row offered varied architectural inflections and decorative programs on the façades, reifying particular figural tastes of the time. Similarly, row houses in Philadelphia, built somewhat earlier, show similar conformations, although with more sober façades. Also, the ‘brownstones’ of New York, built mainly towards the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries and even later, followed suit with respect to the basic row house type, but often with well- modeled façades and entry stairways, again reflecting architectural tastes of the time.
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Among cases of infill housing in the form of singular or puntal interventions, one of the most unusual is the ‘house under a house’ known as Maison de Verre in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district of Paris in France. Designed and built by Pierre Chareau in collaboration with Bernard Bijvoet between 1927 and 1932, the Maison de Verre became one of the icons of the modern movement in architecture. Located in a courtyard owned by the Vellay family, the apartment with a doctor’s office included was a wedding gift to their daughter on the occasion of her marriage to Dr. Dalsace. However, a renter above would not move out. Hence, the building at the back of the courtyard, facing the entrance, was gutted out below the recalcitrant renter and the Maison de Verre inserted.
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Three stories in height, the lower floor included the doctor’s office, the entrance, and the stairway leading to the apartment complex above. The second floor structured around an airy double-height space was fashioned in a manner that emphasized highly diagonal views and a Japanese sensibility of depth, or oku, popular at the time at least in well-informed architectural circles. The third floor housed the family quarters, with a deck overlooking a well-landscaped back garden. The obvious features of the house were the glass block façades that were cast in place on the ground and lifted into place. These were products of the Saint Gobain glass company and highly experimental at the time. The screen-like lighting effects, during both day and night, including outside illumination, dramatically lend both a sense of privacy and a capacity for looking out to the apartment complex.

As another example of infill and singular intervention, the Elektra House in London of 2005 by David Adjaye brings a contemporary appearance to a narrow site in a mews setting.
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Rising two storeys in height, this house is integrated into its surroundings by being literally built within the foundations and outer walls of an earlier dwelling. The new metal framework and cladding, inserted in the space provided, contrasts strongly with neighboring structures to left and right, while poetically projecting a minimalist aesthetic in the dwelling’s interiors, topped by skylighting and some side lighting. As a result, this ‘house within a house’ becomes an experimental essay in the movement of light.

Other juxtapositions associated with singular infill interventions include ‘houses beside houses’ in a manner that evokes architectural qualities of immediate context without replicating or literally emulating them. Juxtaposition can also extend to unexpected and unusual contrivances, like the projection of ‘houses that are not there’, in order to meet historic heritage or similar requirements within a residential neighborhood. An example of the first category of a ‘house beside a house’ is 302 Station Street or the Biles Residence in Melbourne, by Graeme Gunn Architects of 2003, constructed on a site sandwiched between old original terrace houses from the nineteenth century and a block of modern flats.
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The resulting terrace house, typical in overall form of local two-storey terrace house types, reflects expressive conditions to both sides through a fenced-off garden on the front, parallel in dimensions but not in material with its older terrace house neighbor; a second floor protrusion picks up the materiality of the block of flats but comes across as a decorated pediment in the manner of the older terrace house. Neither reference is literal. Rather, the two façade assemblages are roughly equivalent to the older house, but in material qualities and in their lack of decoration they resemble the block of flats. In essence, what is presented is the form of the figure of the old terrace house, not its literal equivalent. In the second category, another example in Melbourne serves as an illustration. At the behest of heritage officials, the glass garage door at the front of a new bungalow dwelling in an old neighborhood built on a vacant site was inscribed with the image of the old bungalow that used to be there. Apparently of interest to the officials was less the building per se than some semblance of the original streetscape of the neighborhood.
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Moving on to ‘unit ensembles’ and ‘processes resulting in puntal interventions’, Space Block in the 36
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District of Hanoi, Vietnam, takes on a challenging site in a dense inner-city area. Stretching along a narrow site on the remnants of what was once a strip of irrigated agricultural land, six dwelling units were to be inserted, resulting in a very high dwelling density on the order of 1,000 people per hectare. In collaboration between Tokyo University’s Engineering School and local partners, a prototype was constructed in 2001 on the grounds of Hanoi University.
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Using a methodology involving computer-generated parametric simulation and shape design, shade and ventilation conditions were optimized with functional layout requirements, starting with a four-storey monolith covering the whole site. What emerged were units on the order of 45 square meters in livable area, combining home-office configurations and communal courtyards allowing light to enter the complex from above. Generally, the architectural expression accentuated the play of light and shade across plain white stuccoed walls in a pleasing manner, with sheer glass infill where necessary. More pervasive still, a piece-meal redevelopment and renovation scheme was implemented in Tsukishima in Chūō-ku, Tokyo, beginning in the late 1990s.
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Of concern in this neighborhood, with a street and land structure dating back at least to the Meiji Restoration period of the nineteenth century, was the legality of housing and other structures on at least two counts. One was the narrowness of the lanes, or roji, which were less than the minimum of four meters required by Tokyo’s code. The other was earthquake resistance and material vulnerability to fire. A substantial incentive to change existing circumstances lay in the difficulty of transacting property that did not meet code. What transpired was the redrafting of regulations for the affected areas of Tsukishima, reducing the minimum lane width to 3.3 meters, or the width required for two firemen carrying a fire hose.
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Some bonuses were also included to allow expansion upwards in height, with appropriate setbacks. Under this new regulatory framework, which also included stipulations about building materials and structure, property owners were encouraged to legalize often dilapidated dwellings by moving their street alignments back along the lanes and constructing with appropriate materials and techniques in the interests of public safety. Over time, this process of incremental adjustment and building transformed areas of Tsukishima but without detracting from the environmental ambience of this otherwise traditional area of Tokyo.

Contemporary Cases: Single Houses and Ensembles of Units

The phenomenon of small-scale block infills and redevelopment of small sites is probably most commonly found in Japan where the real estate market has been defined largely by countless small landholdings. A result of the strong private property rights and an inheritance policy of keeping the land within the same family across generations by subdividing it, these lots have typically been maintained by the same household or small businesses in the same location over time. Moreover, as documented by Atelier Bow-Wow’s “pet architecture”, the Japanese have found creative means of maximizing these minute and often unusually shaped parcels, transforming them into a variety of commercial, retail, and residential purposes. Much of this boom in small housing, whether in the form of single-family detached dwellings or collective configurations, occurred after the burst of the ‘bubble economy’ of the 1980s, gaining traction through the growing attention paid in architectural journals and popular magazines, as well as other types of media. With the dramatic drop in real estate values after the ‘bubble’ period, some of the relatively larger properties were sold by subdividing them into smaller lots to facilitate the sales, thereby encouraging the proliferation of these small and narrow homes, or kyōshō jūtaku. In fact, slightly more than half of all the land transactions in Tokyo between 1991 and 1996 following the burst of the ‘bubble’ entailed parcels of less than 100 square meters.
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Working within these tight spatial constraints, homeowners keen on having a comfortable place in central Tokyo rather than a more capacious house in the suburbs were able to hire talented young local architects open to tackling these small homes innovatively. These well-designed, compact houses thus no longer cater to just the budget-conscious, but in fact to clients from all walks of life who seek refined living spaces, even within limited quarters. The Japanese cases of interest here are drawn primarily from the Setagaya ward in Tokyo, one of the major residential suburbs with a population of more than 800,000, well serviced by subway and commuter rail.

Two of the four single-family detached houses showcased here were designed by Atelier Bow-Wow, which seeks to engage with what the architects term ‘lively space’ through their architecture, while working within the pockets presented in a hyper-dense urban environment.
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Following on from their earliest deliberations on the kyōshō jūtaku as materialized in the Mini House of 1999 to their own House & Atelier Bow-Wow of 2006 are the ACO House and the Sway House completed recently in 2005 and 2008. Occupying a modest corner lot in a low-rise neighborhood composed of single-family houses, the ACO House was designed for a couple working in the music industry. Working within the building regulations of having a maximum built area of no more than 70 percent and a building height of no more than 12 meters, the architects settled on a building footprint of a modest 35.51 square meters on the 51.26-square-meter site. In reflecting and amplifying the corner location of the house, the façade adjoining the two straight edges of the house is divided into five segments of equal length extending across the full height of the building and tracing the site perimeters, somewhat analogous to the traditional Japanese folding screens or byōbu that were used to enclose private spaces. These white, wooden folding panels are punctuated by windows stretching laterally across one or two of the segments at different elevations, allowing views out to the nearby trees and street, as well as permitting adequate light into the interior. A total of five floors with varying ceiling heights and room proportions were accommodated within this 10-meter-high envelope that would conventionally have yielded just three storeys by introducing a stepped section. Within this split-level configuration, Atelier Bow-Wow were able to fit in a sound-proof studio spanning part of the first and second floor, conceal the restroom under the staircase leading from the second to the third floor, provide storage space under the lower floors, and deploy an open space concept for the kitchen-living room complete with two-meter-high windows to let more light into this communal space. In addition, to maximize the floor areas, the vertical circulation is maintained along the outside walls. The arrangement of the rooms also reflects a consideration for the privacy of the owners, moving from the semi-public entryway to the library, the kitchen-living room, and finally to the bedroom and a secluded outdoor terrace.

At the Sway House, Atelier Bow-Wow had a larger site of 78.08 square meters to work with but found themselves in a tight alley sandwiched between houses from the earlier post-war era. To be able to fit a parking lot on the site while also maximizing the solar insulation to this dense pack of residences lined along the alley, the architects bent and tapered the southern and western outer walls of the house, forming an incline and creating a ‘sway’-like appearance in the building envelope. In doing so, they were able to maximize the house’s overall capacity and at the same time comply with the city’s sky exposure regulation to ensure adequate sunlight to the street. The building footprint thus occupied a modest 39.14 square meters, or just barely half the site area. Built of wood and metal, the house is wrapped by horizontal panels of white, galvanized steel, and its slender form is further accentuated by several narrow, rectangular windows of various sizes dispersed in a seemingly random manner on the façades for natural lighting and ventilation purposes. As in the ACO House, a stepped section was employed to create floors and rooms of optimal heights, including a compressed kitchen and dining area of just 1.92 meters in height, and more commodious work and living areas ranging from 2.23 meters to 4.12 meters in height. The clients are a young couple in the art industry with the flexibility of working from home while taking care of their children, and thus it was important to have a clearer segregation of functions, with two nooks allocated as work spaces for each of them, and a living room as well as a children’s room on the top floor that are relatively more open with the elimination of internal walls. Storage spaces are cleverly hidden under benches in the living and dining rooms, while the incorporation of a spiral stairway located at the outer wall further increases the available floor area. Unlike the ACO House where the bedroom was located on the upper level, here the bedroom is situated on the ground floor just beyond the husband’s work space, while the rooftop terrace was reserved for an outdoor bathtub.

If the two projects by Atelier Bow-Wow project a sense of distinction between the public and private realms in terms of how the houses relate to the street, then House NA by Sou Fujimoto, completed in 2010, arguably represents their antithesis, blurring the boundaries between outside/inside, public and private. Constructed on a 54.47-square-meter site in the quiet neighborhood of Suginami, this three-dimensional matrix of suspended glass boxes stands as a daring, unconventional take on the kyōshō jūtaku. To presume that it was intended as an exhibitionist piece, however, misses its attempt to engage with its environment through the play on transparency. Designed for a working couple in their forties, the house was conceived of as a tree, with the functional spaces extended out from the trunk like branches. According to Fujimoto, this tree is thus akin to “a large single room” devoid of any walls and composed instead of 21 individual floor plates or branches that are situated at various heights, allowing the clients to “live like nomads within their own home”.
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The floating plates are arranged in such a way as to allow for free movement through the loosely defined programs of the house, akin to the tatami mats used in traditional Japanese houses in rooms that assumed a range of functions depending on the time of the day or the occasion. At grade, the house is entered through a foyer that branches down towards the guest room, and up towards the kitchen and an attached dining area. The rest of the second floor is composed of different-sized plates to accommodate various living areas, including an adjacent loft floor that is raised, doubling up as a work space when one is seated or perched on the lower branches of the living area. Ascending further up, one finds the library which is adjoined to the master bedroom and the dressing room, before culminating in the bathroom right at the very top of this volumetric assemblage. In-floor heating is installed in some of the horizontal platforms, while electrical outlets are discreetly concealed in the main areas, with other utility areas such as the heating, ventilation, air conditioning, plumbing, and storage located at the rear end of the house. In keeping with the sense of lightness imbued by the extensive use of glazing and the disaggregated floor plates, Fujimoto connected these pieces together with a white, steel-frame structure with bracings no more than 55 millimeters in width. The cool, minimalistic composition is softened by potted plants placed on the multi-level terraces, as well as the use of wood paneling framing the doors and windows. Despite the project’s transparency and openness, this vertical transition from public to intimate spaces reflects an implicit desire to preserve some semblance of privacy. Both in the day and at night, drawn curtains serve as temporary partitions but also as screens defining the personal realm of the household. When the delightful glass boxes are fully revealed, inhabitants are afforded views out to the surroundings while seated within this contemporary interpretation of the Japanese house and the urban landscape beyond, symbolizing a co-existence between architecture and the city, nature and artificiality.
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Lucky Drops or Skin House No. 7 by Yamashita Yasuhiro from Atelier Tekuto is another single family detached dwelling, also located in Setagaya-ku. With a building footprint of merely 21.96 square meters, this extraordinary project epitomizes the kyōshō jūtaku and the extreme conditions under which these puntal residential insertions are created. Designed for a young couple who had purchased a small plot of land of 58.68 square meters in area and were working with a limited budget, the house maximized the depth of the site, extending up to 19 meters in length to the maximum allowed on the site. The slender, trapezoidal structure tapers from 3.2 meters at its entrance, to a modest 0.7 meters at the back, while the height is correspondingly reduced from 2.5 storeys above grade at the front to 1.5 storeys at the rear end. Apart from taking advantage of the unusually long site, the architect and his team sought to maximize the livable space by extending underground which was not subjected to the same setback regulations in place above ground. As such, what would have been an extremely compressed space was overcome by generating three levels within the house. The upper level accommodating the bedroom and closet space is composed of steel mesh grids adjoining the white-painted steel members that framed each of the drop-shaped panels; the ground floor opens up to a 1.5-storey void with stairs leading to the basement where the rest of the living/dining areas are held, including the living room, kitchen, and bathroom. Given the tapering form of the house, the primary living areas such as the bedroom and living room were stacked at the front where the structural width is the widest, while service areas like the closet and bathroom were tucked away to the back. In addition, to maintain a comfortable passageway through the basement, the service functions were lined up against the eastern walls. Instead of typical glass or wooden exterior walls, fiber-reinforced plastic panels were used to clad the house above grade, thus bringing soft natural light into the deep and narrow interior while maintaining the inhabitants’ privacy. Again, white was the predominant color, enhancing the luminosity of the thin exterior skin as well as the visual spaciousness in the interior. At night, the house lights up from within and glows like a jewel box, transforming this thin sliver of a structure into an alluring sight to behold.

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.
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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.
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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.

Another collective housing sharing similar unit variation and individuation is the Umegaoka Cooperative Housing ROXI completed earlier in 2003 by Satoshi Sasaki from SGM Architect & Associates.
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Commissioned by a cooperative with households of differing needs, the architects set about customizing each housing unit within a formally cohesive whole. Located along a main road, the white, reinforced-concrete project crowned with a galvanized steel roof rises up four storeys above grade, setting itself apart from its neighboring residences. Spanning a site area of 417 square meters or the equivalent of nearly four single-family detached units length-wise, the northern façade is relatively closed and sombre, interspersed with several small steel-framed windows and a 1.5-storey screen of steel bars defining part of the G- and K-Units. In contrast, the southern façade is much more playful, with its mosaic-like façade of full-length windows of various shapes and sizes and unadorned white concrete expressing the highly-specialized living conditions and the unit variation within. In fact, seen from afar, the southern façade looks like a section cut through the building, although once further up close, the three-dimensional forms of the projecting balconies and roof terraces reinforce the sculptural effect of this concrete structure with a total built area of 910 square meters. Inside, the project houses a collection of flats, maisonettes, and lofts, with a total of 11 unique units: Units A, D, H, and J were designed by Naoko Tarao from Tarao Hiiro Architects; Units B, E, F, and I were designed by Higa Takehiko from Takehiko Higa Architects & Associates; while Units C, G, and K were designed by Yamamoto Yūsuke from Atelier-YY. Of the four units done by Naoko Tarao, the maisonette in Unit A was for a couple in their forties and can be accessed directly from the main road on the first level as well as from a stairway leading down to the basement terrace court.
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Unit D was for a couple in their fifties who also had a dog. As the husband works as an illustrator and receives many guests in this live-work apartment, the maisonette is spatially divided into two distinct public and private realms. Unlike the minimalistic, white walls and wooden flooring of Unit A, the interior of Unit D reflects the personalities of its inhabitants with its bright, colorful washes, and playful curved surfaces and slanted lines. In addition, each room is endowed with its own character with unique wall colors and finishing.
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Unit H located right above Unit D was for a couple in their thirties who desired a small home office environment. Within the apartment, all the service and storage functions are arranged along the walls to create an open space in the center, with continuous lighting and ventilation provided by configuration as a double-height loft.
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The largest unit in the house, Unit J, was for a couple in their thirties with two young boys and designed with the children’s sightlines and movements in mind. More notably, the space under the roof was meant to be flexible, anticipating the future needs of the growing children.
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One final infill project that serves as collective housing is the Alfonso Reyes 58, situated in a vastly different context of the Colonia Condesa neighborhood in Mexico City. The dense residential neighborhood itself is an up-and-coming area with an assortment of restaurants and nightclubs popular amongst the young, white-collar professionals, artists, students, and intellectuals. Designed by Dellekamp Architects and completed in 2003, the complex houses seven units with commercial space and parking on the ground floor on a relatively small site of 390 square meters. Located at the edge of a perimeter block comprising traditional Mexican-style row houses, the reflective, aluminum-clad building of stacked boxes rises six storeys above grade. While this contemporary, rectilinear composition might at first glance seem like a stark contrast to the colorful plastered façades and effusive roofs of the low-rise row houses lining the secondary street, it in fact helps to give shape to the arterial road of Avenida Alfonso Reyes, much in line with the bright-red five-storey shophouse and the high-rise commercial building it is sandwiched between. Plan-wise, the architects retained the perimeter block nature of the site, creating a C-shaped structure enclosing a modest courtyard, buffering the high levels of noise emanating from the busy street. Starting from the ground floor, the variously sized boxes are overlapped at various points, creating rectangular and L-shaped voids on the sides as well as along the street façade, separating the apartments while creating interior patios and terraces. All the units are elevator-served and accessed via a central lobby; the four units on the third and fourth floors are configured at mirror opposites of each other, both vertically and horizontally, while the three units on the fifth and sixth floors are each unique in plan. In each of these units, the service spaces are pushed to the back, freeing up the space closer to the street fronts for living areas and allowing for ample light and air to enter through the slim bands of clerestory windows. Façade-wise, these apartments are also materially expressed with dissimilar finishes to their aluminum external cladding, differentiated by the two shades, and either smooth or corrugated surfaces. The floor-to-ceiling height extends 3.2 meters, with the cladding functioning as a screen wrapping around the boxes to retain the internal privacy as well as to block out the noise of the city, punctured occasionally by a few small windows. Overall, this urban insertion deploys a similar strategy to Sejima and Nishizawa, where disaggregated blocks can be assembled in a manner that reflects the individuality of each of the units, attaining a high diversity of unit types in a housing typology that has conventionally been associated with mass production and standardization in the modern age.

Animation, Completion, Contradistinction, and Other Outcomes

The purposes and outcomes of houses and housing deployed as puntal interventions can be varied. One set of outcomes concerns primarily the expressive interchange with adjacent or nearby buildings. Another set has to do largely with functional relationships, again within a neighboring context. A third set involves the relative ease of transferability from a very particular set of relationships to other housing and building types to those that are more general. The first set includes expressive purposes like animation, for instance, where a particular housing context is enlivened by the inclusion of a new addition, the appearance of which has reverberations beyond its immediate boundaries. Certainly, many of Tokyo’s small houses described here have this kind of effect. By contrast, another expressive purpose and outcome may be to complete, or sometimes round out, what is already in place, involving direct emulation of the formal and figural composition of adjacent buildings. Many extensions of terraces of row houses in various places have this quality to them. Indeed, the relative ease with which figural aspects of row house architecture can be rather completely changed without interfering unduly with the formal character of the basic housing type makes this sort of outcome possible. Then too, there can be a capacity for contradistinction, whereby sharp differences are drawn with neighboring properties, using basic characteristics that are shared in common, such as materiality, relative openness, and transparency, contemporaneity, or simply style. Again, the row house type can be conducive to this kind of expressive interplay.

A second set of outcomes, involving largely functional relationships with neighboring circumstances, can include facilitation of despecialization over time, where aspects of an original infill of housing become at least partially converted to support, say, storefront activities. This may be very important to the continuing quality of life of an otherwise residential neighborhood, as can conversion in an opposite direction from, say, light industrial to housing and commercial use to loft dwellings. Then, as a corollary to this despecialization of use, entirely new housing types can be introduced, as in Mexico City, with the aim of providing the opportunity to more actively transform a neighborhood. Many work-live arrangements within the broad categories of housing discussed here can have this effect. Provision of higher density is also a functional transformation that can occur with new infill and puntal interventions, as demonstrated in Tsukishima in Tokyo. Further, staying with Tsukishima and other places like it, a function of successive infill projects can be simply to legalize dwelling circumstances through needed construction modifications.

Finally, the third set of aims and outcomes are intertwined with similitude and replicability and concern the degree to which particular kinds of infill and puntal interventions can be made more broadly applicable elsewhere. Often, the sheer specificity of immediate contextual responses, as suggested by the other sets of purposes and outcomes, can limit replicability. Conceptually, replicability requires sufficient similarity between a given set of circumstances and those being potentially emulated. This may take the form of straightforward equivalence and one-to-one correspondence, as in the completion, for instance, of a row of townhouses. In other situations, like the House NA in Tokyo, for example, similitude, in this case concerned with the replication of certain traditional traits in housing, came by way of a certain parallelism and degree of analogy. Rather than a planar conjoint layout of space in the manner of traditional tatami mats, an analogous spatial alignment can be seen to be preserved in plan but disengaged vertically via 21 separate floor plates into a three-dimensional format. Similarly, the alley and court spaces in the Seijo Townhouse complex by Kazuyo Sejima were sufficiently reminiscent in scale of lane life in Edo, or pre-modern Tokyo, to essentially replicate it in a contemporary guise. There was also a flexibility in the interweaving of communal and private space which has a resemblance again to arrangements within the lane life of Edo and early Tokyo.

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