IE = HOME at the Embassy of Japan
In Japanese, the term home is signified by a Chinese character, and is made up of a roof combined with a pig. It reminds us that home is a flexible and historically specific term – in this case it signified a building shared with animals.
The Japanese language does not translate directly into English, and the meanings of its characters are often more specific that words in English. By using architecture however, the participants in this exhibition aimed to convey the term in more subtle ways than language.
Five young Japanese architects all living and working in London, chose a site and designed a home, setting their own brief and creating their own imaginary client. Working in the evenings and at weekends (all have day-jobs working for established firms such as Stanton Williams and Sheppard Robson) they produced a series of beautifully detailed models and drawings to explain their ideas.
Akira Kindo sited his house on the top of Primrose Hill so that it could benefit from maximum exposure to the light. In Japan the edges of a house are often ambiguous and public/private are not such clear concepts: hence Kindo’s house is open to the public as a café during the day, and only at night is it closed.
Nest by Hiroki Kakizoe is a house for a family that lives and works at home. Located on Shoreditch High Street it occupies the site18th century terraced house. Where a conventional English house would have a solid front wall of brick with openings, Kakizoe’s house has a translucent façade etched with the pattern of the original. Inside privacy can be found in a series of floating nests, which accommodate functions such as sleeping and bathing.
Tokuichiro Oba was another to explore notions of public and private. His ‘Small House inside a Ruin’ provides a home for an artist located in the former Wiltshire Brewery in Bethnal Green. Sliding doors open up the walls so that a large studio space becomes a public gallery.
Masaki Kakizoe aimed to reconnect the city dweller with nature with a home entitled Ephemeral Gardens of Light. Located in south-east London, the house has a deep plan and is organised around a series of square courtyards which allow light to penetrate all the rooms. A roof garden above is covered with vegetation and reflects seasonal changes.
Michiko Sumi’s proposal points to a key difference between life in Japan and Britain. Her house ‘Connecting the Opposite Shore’ takes the form of a bridge across the Grand Union canal in Camden Town and is a home for three generations of a family. In the UK, as Sumi points out, ‘There is an unspoken consensus that is unreasonable for adult sons and daughters to live under the same roof as their parents’. She chose the canal as a metaphor for the physical and mental boundaries between relationships within an inter-generational home. This thoughtful and beautiful project takes discussion about housing into new territory that questions assumptions about how we live and our attitudes to caring for parents and grandparents.
Embassy of Japan, 101 -104 Piccadilly, London W1J 7JT, 7th June – 30th July
