I once heard a funny story from Atelier Bow-Wow. On comparing same-scale plans of a small residence of theirs with one designed by a European architect, they found that their entire house would fit inside one room of their Western counterpart. Granted they tend towards small projects, it surprised even them. Although in retrospect, it clearly places the work of Atelier Bow-Wow within the special context of Japan -hence some explanation of the history of postwar Japanese architecture would seem in order. American fire and atom bombs in World War II devastated Japan’s major cities. Virtually everything had to be started again from the ground up. Come the 1960s, however, and the so-called Era of Rapid Economic Growth, urban development proceeded at an amazing pace.
The 1964 Tokyo Olympics fired the starting gun for constructing the monumental concrete Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway system, and as if timed with Osaka Expo 70, the Senri New Town development outlying Osaka became the real attempt to introduce principles of modernist urban planning. These signalled the beginning of irreversible change for the face of Japan's cities. The members of Atelier Bow-Wow grew up around this time - Yoshiharu Tsukamoto was born the year after the Tokyo Olympics and Momoyo Kaijima the year before Expo 70-so already for them there was no “nostalgia of place”. War and redevelopment had long since scrapped any visions of “quaint old Japan”.
Through the 1980s, when the two of them studied architecture, the euphoria of Japan's “bubble” economy saw a rash of postmodern buildings go up all over Tokyo. Fiercely idiosyncratic architects insisted on bold ornamentation, brash colours and eccentric shapes. Many foreign architects were invited to Japan. Even ones like Peter Eisenman with few actual buildings to their name abroad were able to realise projects. There was plenty of work, with abounding commissions even for younger hands; it was a dream come true for architects. However, in the early 1990s the “bubble” burst. Just as Atelier Bow-Wow was starting out on their career, the ladder was kicked away and they found they had to apply different strategies from those used by the generation immediately before them. They had to take a good look at Tokyo as it was. Bridging university department activities with extracurricular interests, they began observing the city and publishing their findings not in scholarly papers, but in the form of “pop” guidebooks.
In their “Made in Tokyo” project, begun in the 1990s, they examined hybrid constructions that might appear totally haphazard but actually make effective functional use of their respective sites. For example, the roof of one supermarket is used as an automobile driving school. High land prices in Tokyo give rise to some very strange buildings. This research is often compared with Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas, but is probably closer in concept to the programmatic approaches of Rem Koolhaas and others. The erstwhile “extremes” of Bernard Tschumi's programming theory are already reality in Tokyo. As if to beg to differ with the ostentatious high profile architects who gave full play to their own “signature statements” during the “bubble years”, Atelier Bow-Wow has been re-evaluating B-grade buildings by unknown architects.
In the “Pet Architecture” project, they surveyed anonymous vernacular forms that have cropped up in gaps in the urban fabric, makeshift constructions somewhere between architecture and furniture. One real estate office, for instance, occupies a space scarcely 0.8m wide by 10m deep, a so-called “eel's lair” with less-than-minimal frontage that clearly reflects the endemic shortage of land in Tokyo. This research led to exhibitions that travelled abroad and garnered considerable acclaim. As a matter of fact, the images they present faithfully correspond to what Westerners want to see as the chaotic and postmodern symptoms of Tokyo.
This was diametrically opposed to the ideas of Bruno Taut who came to Japan in the 1930s and “discovered” a beauty in the Ise Shrine and Katsura’s Detached Palace paralleling modernist simplicity. Or perhaps theirs was just an inverted orientalism that arrived 60 years later. Since 2000, Tokyo's architectural scene has visibly polarised. On the one hand, relaxation of regulations has seen an all out push towards massive redevelopment; while on the other, a new boom in small dwellings for people returning to live in the city centre is now all the rage in popular magazines. Policy towards home ownership has muddled along unchecked since the war with never any attempt to create quality urban-style collective housing.
Furthermore, exorbitant inheritance taxes have repeatedly encouraged the subdividing and selling of properties bit by bit that has led to the development of small dwelling genres in Japan. Meanwhile, development projects have all gone to general contractors and famous foreign architects, which leaves only small dwellings in the hands of younger architects thus making the rift between the two worlds appear absolute. Atelier Bow-Wow belongs firmly to the latter group. If major developers are busy looking down on the city from the top floors of their high-rise buildings, they are more like dogs with their eyes to the ground. Thus the name of their office, Atelier Bow-Wow, makes sense. Their view of using every quantum of space in the city relates directly to architectural design.
Even when Atelier Bow-Wow designs small houses, they do not restrict themselves to just the residences; they are always aware of the city. While most people typically regard small sites as inferior, they take a positive reading of such conditions. In their Ani House (1997), they question the Japanese convention of situating houses with an open space to the south while virtually ignoring the tight “crawl spaces” on the other sides of the lot. Instead, they placed a compact house in the centre so as to reawaken marginal spatial possibilities on all sides. Furthermore, with Mini House (1998), they took into consideration that coming redevelopment would alter the surrounding area. They decided to do away with the primacy of any one facade and opened all four directions equally, while in Moca House (2000), they made positive use of the narrow strips of “waste space” that border the adjacent buildings. In each case, the balanced assessment of various urban elements from their research informs their design work. Let's consider some of their recent works.
Gae House (2003) is a small Tokyo dwelling that reflects the lifestyle of the writer client who saw no need to fulfill all his needs domestically, opting instead to meet with business contacts at a nearby cafe or go fact finding at the local library. Thus, this three-storey house consists of a brown plywood bookshelf-lined half-basement workroom and galvanised steel sheeted top-floor kitchen connected by an undefined white, almost double-storey space in between. Architecturally, the discrepancy between the oversized roof and the small “box” underneath is curious, but the glass panels which line the underside of the eaves — forming a kind of transparent ledge — let in filtred light along with a sense of the outside world, while the undereaves space is partitioned into a carport by means of a hedge, like the hedges that once were everywhere in the vicinity.
Izu House (2004) is located not in the city but on a slope with a magnificent sea vista on the Izu Peninsula southwest of Tokyo. Not wanting to merely passively view nature, the client asked that the house be situated so as to actively engage the surroundings. Their solution was a terrace that juts out over the sea, bedrooms that descend the slope by steps and a studio aligned with the contours of the land.
Just as in the city, they read the surroundings in consummate detail. Their latest house, Kuroinuso (2004) - meaning “Black Dog House” - comprises a pet space, guest room, bathroom, kitchen and garage, all units of equal size. The young artist Tabaimo will be painting murals over the walls. Atelier Bow-Wow often participates in art events like the Shanghai Biennale, where they share many points in common with the new generation of artists. They have just designed a house for an art magazine editor, and they are good friends with photographer Takashi Homma who took the photographs on these pages. Unlike their elder Kenzo Tange (born 1913), who worked apace with Japan's postwar recovery to design an ideal modernist architecture symbolic of the state rising from the ashes, 1960s-born Atelier Bow-Wow arrived late on the scene. By their generation all the necessary public buildings and infrastructure were in place. The land was subdivided and developed and the suburbs were sprawling beyond any clear demarcation of city boundaries. Therefore, they carefully decode the given environs and determine how to customise it.
Atelier Bow-Wow may be likened to a homegrown Japanese version of Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre's “Dirty Realism” that sought effective uses for ruined places. Of course, this leaves them open to criticism, especially from older generation architects and critics that they are merely affirming existing conditions. Or that they are playing around with details, while losing sight of the big principles. When they first unveiled their “Made In Tokyo” project, I myself felt they emphasised “lite” pop expression at the expense of leveling criticism at society. In more recent statements, however, they claim that this research is merely a preliminary effort towards rethinking the entire city in the near future. Hence, Atelier Bow-Wow is not as uncritical they might at first appear, not that they are utopians seeking to realise a future from the ground up. No, theirs is a Japanese realist grasp on the city with a view to carving out critical reassessment.
First, scan all overlooked corners of our built environment; use what can be used from what already exists. Only at that point does Atelier Bow-Wow inject its own architecture, so as to draw out the potential of each place while inching forward to change the city bit by bit.
