ANTI-OBJECT
Making a Connection: The HyŪga Residence by Bruno Taut It all began one hot summer’s day, with an unexpected encounter on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. I had gone by train to Atami, a well-known resort in Shizuoka Prefecture, where I had been commissioned to design a small guest-house on top of a hill. Following my map, I took a narrow path up from the station and after ten minutes I arrived at the site. I walked around, checking views of the sea and of the mountain that rose inland. Then, as a courtesy, I called on the neighbouring house to inform the owner of the impending construction work. This house was modest and compact, with a look typical of prewar domestic architecture. Two storeys high, and made of timber, it blended in with the carefully tended pine trees in the grounds. It did not much look like the work of an internationally famous architect, yet it turned out to be the Hyūga Residence, designed in part by Bruno Taut, who lived in Japan from 1933 to 1936. The Hyūga commission was for an addition to an existing structure, an ordinary timber-frame house with white stucco walls and a blue-tiled gable roof. At the back of the house was a veritable hanging garden – a lawn supported by concrete columns and beams jutting out over a steep, seaward slope. The client had the idea of creating a basement within this structure, and asked Taut to design the interior. Though the basement could be equipped with windows to let in light, there was no opportunity to design an architectural form as such. The concrete structure was in place, and even the outer boundary of the room was already fixed. This was not the sort of commission one would normally expect a professional architect to undertake, let alone one with an international reputation. No doubt some local carpenter could have performed the
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MAKING A CONNECTION
job quite satisfactorily. Taut not only took on the project, but expressed his satisfaction with the result in a letter he wrote to a friend in Berlin.1 To understand the reason for Taut’s pride, we must first examine the idea of architecture as an object. Ordinarily, a building is considered an object – an independent material object distinct from its environment. The public perceives buildings to be objects, and that is also the perception of most architects. When one speaks of a beautiful work of architecture, one generally means the work in question is a beautiful object. By an excellent architect one generally means an architect with the ability to design beautiful objects. Taut questioned such a conception of architecture. He abhorred objects, believing that architecture was more a matter of relationships. The Hyūga project gave him a rare opportunity to experiment with the relationship between architecture and the environment. The basement is half-buried in the ground and connected to its surroundings. It is incapable of being perceived as an independent object. One might even liken it to a parasite, living off its environment. It is an anti-object. Taut did not begin his architectural career thinking that architecture was about relationships; he arrived at this idea only in a roundabout way. His experience in Japan, particularly his well-known visit to the Katsura Detached Palace, represented a final, decisive stage in the evolution of his thought. However, before discussing that visit, we need to consider the origins of his abhorrence of objects. Taut was troubled from the beginning by a deep inner conflict that was a reflection of the times in which he lived. He referred to the nature of that conflict in a talk he gave at a retrospective of his work held in Turkey in June 1938, just six months before his death: Professor Fischer 2 gave me the job of restoring a small gothic church and constructing a turbine hall for a steel factory. The two tendencies apparent in these works – conforming to an old architectural tradition and resolving
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