ANTI-OBJECT
Flowing Out: ‘Water/Glass’, Atami, Shizuoka, 1992–95 The site I was given was next to the Hyūga Residence and had a similar topography, being set on a cliff by the sea and accessed from a road on a higher level. I liked the descending approach. Walking down to a building is very different from walking up to one. A building on a higher level is seen against the sky; you have to look up at it and acknowledge its presence as an object. A building on a lower level, on the other hand, is difficult to see. In extreme cases, you may be right on top of it before you know. Walking down to the Hyūga Residence, you come across a garden with a pleasant lawn that juts out towards the sea. Beneath this lawn is a narrow, dimly lit space containing an addition designed by Bruno Taut. There is no outward hint of the existence of the space – the architecture is made to disappear, far more effectively than any conventional basement. Moreover, there is no lower vantage point from which you can look up at the building, so precipitously does the land rise from the sea. Nor does the access road on the upper level reveal its presence; from there all you see are the trees growing on the cliff. The Hyūga Residence is hidden from view from both higher and lower levels. It is doubly absent. The conditions were the same in the project I call ‘Water/Glass’. The building is visually shielded in nearly all directions. The only place from which its exterior is visible is the garden of the Hyūga Residence – a gesture made out of solidarity with, and as an act of homage to, Taut. To make a building without a display exterior, as such, the architect must relinquish the use of forms and abandon the idea of making an object. This does not mean
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FLOWING OUT
closing the architecture off from the outside world. In ‘Water/Glass’ the architecture is made to disappear, even as the building opens itself to the outside world. In this there is no contradiction. Architecture can never be closed off completely. That is the premise of my work. One may enclose space with walls and bury it underground, but architecture is always situated in – and connected to – the world. More precisely, architecture is a device mediating between the subject (i.e. mankind) and the world. The goal of this project was to reconfirm that fact. Establishing the relationship between the subject and the world happens to be the goal of the intellectual occupation we call philosophy. That being so, the goal of this project can be said to be an engagement in philosophy through architecture. There are two forms of connection between subject and world: the frame and the floor. A typical example of a device for visually framing the world is a window punched into a wall. For the device to function effectively, there must be a certain distance between the subject and the world. The frame selects some particular element of the disordered environment while screening out all other elements. Through this process of elimination, it generates an object – an object summoned from the outside world. Thus the frame form is another name for objectification. The world regulated by or perceived through the medium of the frame form is a world of objects. Before the advent of modern architecture in the twentieth century, western buildings were masonry structures, constructed of courses of brick or stone. Window openings in massive masonry walls had to be relatively small. From the Renaissance, western paintings (apart from murals) were also premised on frames and isolation from the surrounding environment. Photography, which regulates vision by means of the In the traditional Japanese viewfinder, emerged in the nineteenth house, perception of space century as an extension of that frame is controlled by the floor.
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