SANAA. Houses

HOUSES Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa SANAA

MUSAC SANAA ACTAR

HOUSES

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA

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Feeling at home with SANAA.

A conversation between Agustín Pérez Rubio and Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa

44 52 60 66 70 80

Unfinished houses Flower House Garden & House Seijo Apartments Okurayama Apartments Ichikawa Apartments House in China Eda Apartments

110 116 128 134

Finished houses House A S House House in a Plum Grove Small House Moriyama House

167

21 24

89

92

Reinterpreting traditional aesthetic values

Kristine Guzmán

175

SANAA in dreams

Luis Fernández-Galiano

181

Radical practices in constructing relationships

Yuko Hasegawa 190

Biographies

With the aim of facilitating our approach to the most recent artistic creation, the Junta de Castilla y León offers, through the programme of MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, an exhibition line that helps convert this centre into a reference within the contemporary artistic scene.

Kazuyo Sejima+Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA is the first retrospective show in our country of these Japanese architects’ firm. The publication of this book achieves coherence from this exhibition that traces a great part of the trajectory of this unique pair in the current architectural scene.

Through graphic documentation and the essays that accompany it, this book allows us to know the work that these architects have undertaken in their investigation on forms, structure and the important role that architecture plays in society.

With these premises, the book Casas SANAA that we now present, gathers a wide selection of the most important housing projects that Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have developed either individually or together throughout their careers, most of which are present in this important show that MUSAC has presented.

Silvia Clemente Municio Councillor for Culture and Tourism

This book means the final contribution to the exhibition project that MUSAC has undertaken with the group of architects, SANAA. It deals with an approach to the very unique contribution that they have made to the domestic architectural world.

The house, in each of their projects, acquires new elements that manage to enrich the basic concept of the origin of architecture, the science that was born on the day that some of our ancestors decided to put a third horizontal pole over two vertical ones, thus creating a new space that may give them shelter. In the dawn of the 21st century, the conceptual proposals of SANAA have come to revitalise this original idea and to propose new means, despite so much history and so many other thousands of millions of accommodations already created by the human being throughout time.

The house, as metaphor of life and happiness, recovers through light and the fascination for transparency and openness, a component of approach to the natural, in a way forgotten by the contemporary tradition of accumulation and speed. In this way, this architecture is exponent of a certain new humanism that is present in the more daring artistic manifestations of contemporary creation, through which the human being is offered new channels charged with an optimism that goes in par with new technologies. In the magnificent exhibition at MUSAC that includes plans, projects, scale models and design objects, the mock-up on a 1:2 scale of the Flower House project stands out, where a great part of their architectural proposals can be found present. Architecture detaches itself from the conventional wall and traps in biological, and even irrational elements at the same time. Places which are meant to be habited, but also places with which to bind oneself to with humanity capable of drawing out new arris into light and shade, geometry and biology, rational and oneiric. With this publication from MUSAC, we bring an end to the project initiated with the exhibition and with which we intended to put into manifest the contributions of SANAA to contemporary architecture as well as to call attention to the broad and global form of understanding creation. In SANAA, we can observe a great creative arch that deals with the most simple decorative elements up to the urban planning of a whole city, all within the same concept of understanding space and its use.

The work of Kazuyo Sejima y Ryue Nishizawa, their firm, especially Sam Chermayeff, and the pampering that Agustín Pérez Rubio and Kristine Guzmán have put into the exhibition as well as in this publication, have made the link of plastic arts and contemporary architecture possible in a natural and clear way.

Rafael Doctor Roncero MUSAC Director

Feeling at home with SANAA.

A conversation between Agustín Pérez Rubio and Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa Tokyo is the perfect city to understand that living in the future is also possible. That’s why filmmaker Andrei Tarkovski filmed its roads and highways for Solaris , as an idea of a trip into “another” world. Every time I come back to this city I get the comfortable feeling of being on a different planet that is familiar, but where the effort required to make yourself clear is compensated by the subtle satisfaction provided by the comfort and security that this country offers its visitors.

I remember the day I first arrived to Tokyo, more than ten years ago. It was in April and night was falling. I was gradually entering the city from Narita Airport, heading for Ginza. The sun set completely during the trip and I was fascinated by the sparkling lights under the heavy rain. When I entered the great avenue I had a view from the top, because the highway surrounded a mass of buildings and the route descended, so the avenue appeared at the level of my eyes, illuminated, wet and speaking a different language. I had the same feeling as years before when I saw Blade Runner, where huge publicity screens displayed traditional Japanese icons to advertise Coca-Cola. I will never forget this feeling of fear, fascination, and loss.

Just like then, today is also rainy. In the morning I have visited places loaded with memories, and I have also seized the opportunity to visit some of the important buildings that Sejima and Nishizawa have completed in Tokyo in recent times: HH Style Store and Dior on Omotesando. Later I was more interested in visiting houses like the Plum Grove House or Moriyama House, places I had never been before, because in the meeting I had with them yesterday, over more than 2 hours, we decided that the book should be about their idea of the architectural process in relation to domestic spaces and also because of the mock-up that we are doing of their new project, Flower House, that will be shown internationally for the first time at the exhibition to be held at MUSAC. One of the things that most shocked me about the visit to those houses was that their owners, the clients, besides their kindness, are very special people. People who are already living in the future with a global idea of the present, people with a musical and aesthetic richness, who are critical and supportive, whose daily lives and habitats are part of their attitude towards life. This couple of architects and this city have once again given me a lesson in humanity as well as an aesthetic insight.

This afternoon, before meeting Sejima and Nishizawa, I meet Sam Chermayeff under the rain and the wind in an area of Shinagawa close to the studio. He is a young architect from New York who is working at SANAA on various projects and with whom Kristine Guzmán and I are liaising for the exhibition to be held at MUSAC. He brings me more information I need for the exhibition and details to finalize the project. Later we come to the studio, a building that doesn’t stand out and that looks more like a warehouse or any other type of company. On the first floor, right from the top of the

stairs, the studio divides in two spaces, one for offices and work, and the other for projects and models, though there’s also a mezzanine where we find Ryue Nishizawa’s Office. The most impressive thing is the surrounding white chaos produced by the models and mock-ups lying everywhere.

When I come in, I see that Sejima and Nishizawa are having a meeting with seven people from the studio, all seating around the same table where we are going to hold the interview later. On that table there is a model of the Louvre Lens project, which they are now working on full-time. I understand they are busy, and Sam kindly assigns me a place to sit in the office. As if I was one of them, I continue working on somebody’s desk with my iBook.

After discussing and studying the project together for more than an hour and a half, they decide to finish the meeting, but not before ordering some pizzas that they serve up on the very same table that the model of the Louvre Lens has been removed from.

Sejima warmly offers me a seat and, along with somebody from the studio, we start gathering the energy necessary to begin the interview.

Nishizawa arrives after the great dispersion that occurred a minute before, just after the end of the previous meeting, takes some pizza too and both apologize for being late. It doesn’t really bother me because I know this team works until 2 or 3 a.m.

I can bear witness... After the last bites, drinks, napkins and Sejima’s constant cigarettes, I ask them if they are ready. Both look at Sam and agree with a wink and a nod. Everything is OK.

pian idea to share the same space, to have three offices in one. It is more than a family relationship.

RN Of course there are some private spaces for models, tables… these are unrelated. We want to feel the models, we want to feel people talking, this is very important. From the architectural and design point of view, people often divide the space very much according to function: the kitchen has to be separated, the bedroom has to be separated, and so on… but this sometimes brings too much division, too much organization, too much definition. We like the feeling of mixture, this feeling of not knowing what is happening. Another consideration is that the feeling of high ceilings is very important.

APR An important aspect of your architecture is the relation, it is an architecture of relation, the use of the building and the use of the space is not related to the shape, the important thing is the use people make of the space. I could be using this office we are in to work or to have dinner, this is a very simple idea of your architecture but I think other architects want to make a taxonomy, they want us to know the function of the shapes or objects, nothing to do with your multifunctional idea of spaces.

Kazuyo Sejima (KS): We often use the same table for different purposes, we use it for models, meetings, etc. By dividing the table, we can use it for a single function or for different functions at the same time.

APR I think it is very interesting that this kind of thing happens in the studio, because it reflects your idea of how to distribute or organize space in your architectural projects. So I would like to know about the domestic spaces, because I don’t know what your idea of family is, if there has to be a father and a mother or if it can be you and a friend, or you and two cats, this kind of nuclear relation, the closest relation you establish. So do you think that the spaces where you were living in your childhood influenced your later ideas of housing, or was it the opposite, you didn’t like the spaces you were living in and dreamed about different ones? What is your idea of a domestic space? Is it more an idea of private space?

KS I never really thought about it, but a couple of times people who know me have said that the house I grew up in influenced my design. I grew up in a company house.

I was born in Hitachi, where there is a big company, Hitachi Electrics. The company made five types of houses. They were modern independent houses, very different from the traditional Japanese house. The company houses were based on repetition, with a hospital, supermarket, post office, playground and all the facilities in the same area. It was very convenient, but there was no nature or wooden houses in the surroundings. I remember a wooden house outside the company perimeter.

That house didn’t have glass windows, just wood and paper panels that they would close at night. As a child I used to wonder if they weren’t cold in that house. However, when I was a child, there were still many people living this way.

APR So do you think that kind of things influenced you?

KS Yes, maybe… For example, in Japan we have low tables, but when I was a child I

● Rec

Agustin Pérez Rubio (APR): It is very interesting to see how you work here in your office, not only because of the architectural process, but also because you give different uses to the studio space, which is a common space where different actions take place at the same time.

Ryue Nishizawa (RN): We both think that it is very important to have three offices close to each other so that people can move around from here to there in five seconds or so. We have the Sejima office here, part of the SANAA office here, the Nishizawa office there and another part of the SANAA office over there. We have the studio space in one building and we think this is very important. Another idea for our studio is having one room allowing people to be together, though acoustically it is not always ideal – sometimes you hear someone speaking very loud or discussing. However, we understand it is important for the people who work here to be connected to the other projects that do not relate directly to them. That’s one of our ideas for the studio.

APR So the relationship between people is a kind of a work process for you.

This is a bit unusual, are you aware of that? Some people could consider it a Uto-

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never used one, because I was living in a modern company house. But this traditional table has many uses: we eat on it, we study and do homework on it, etc. So this atmosphere might have influenced my design.

APR And did the place where you grew up influenced you, Mr. Nishizawa?

RN Yes, the atmosphere should have influenced me. People grow up in different ways in different atmospheres. I think there must be some big influence. He became very tall because he is from Manhattan- [Sam Chermayeff was present during the interview]-. I am very Japanese because I grew up in Japanese society. I grew up in public housing, not in a company house. In the 50’s and 60’s the Japanese government created millions of units to bring in the new lifestyle and almost everybody living around Tokyo lived in this kind of housing. When I was 10 or 11 years old I moved to suburban Tokyo to have an independent house. It was crazy, thousands of independent houses lined up in a grid. I couldn’t identify which one was mine, all of them looked the same. They created a huge amount of them, all brand new, no history. I lived there for a long time.

APR When you were children or teenagers, did you have the idea of creating spaces?

Not becoming an architect but this feeling kids have of creating different worlds, did you feel like that?

RN I drew very much, I just made drawings.

KS In some periods I was very interested in making plans, because my parents decided to make their own house. So suddenly I found myself making plans to propose things. Also, when I was about 10 years old, I used to play with my friends in the fields near my house. We used packaging to make houses. At that time every family was buying black and white or colour TVs or washing machines, because the Japanese economy was growing. We used the wooden frames of the packaging of all those new electrical appliances for making houses in the park. I also made dollhouses.

I grew up in that atmosphere. Sometimes I also made books or tables for the dolls, housing stuff, not just the house. I grew up and I threw all that away but I kept the dolls, they are very important to me (laughs).

APR When you became architects, both of you worked for a while for Toyo Ito. What do you think you have in common with Toyo Ito’s idea of housing? And what are the differences? I read in a previous interview that you, Ms. Sejima, questioned Pao II, that you didn’t understand why he did this at that given time.

RN I never worked for his office. I remember I helped out there for one year and a half, as a student.

KS Ito’s work has changed. It is very different now from the time I was working there.

I worked with him at the time he built Pao II. I was project architect for that project.

I thought the project was fine, but I did not agree with the shape. That igloo Pao II shape was a little too strong for me. But now his work has changed a lot.

APR But sometimes you say that your architecture has no relation to traditional Japanese architecture. Don’t you think that (not now because you have become more international and you have many projects abroad) maybe the reason why for Western coun-

tries your architecture is perceived as very Japanese is because the projects were done in Japan, the client was Japanese, the environment was Japanese? Many architecture critics abroad write that SANAA represents the Asian or Japanese tradition in architecture and, on the contrary, you say your architecture is not related to that.

RN We are very much influenced by Japanese architecture. We have just never tried to quote directly from the Japanese past.

KS We cannot avoid drawing some influences from Japanese tradition.

RN It is not an option we can take.

APR And specifically talking about houses, habitats, etc. what kind of elements can you identify in your architecture relating to Japanese traditional architecture?

KS The thickness of the walls is so different. In some countries, for example in Holland, I was surprised by the thickness of the walls and the insulation. And the weight of the doors. Not only in homes, but also in public buildings in Europe, sometimes the doors are really difficult to open. In Japan that would not be allowed.

RN Our feeling regarding dimension is maybe different. We use 1.8 by 0.9 meter panels as a traditional standard module. All houses are thought about in relation to this measure, which is a little bit smaller than 2 by 1 meters. There is a very nice Japanese architect whose name is Osamu Ishii who I think is using meter measurements to create a feeling of larger spaces different from Japanese traditional standard dimensions.

APR Do you feel comfortable working with this background, the traditional Japanese dimensions, when you do projects in Europe or America?

KS Abroad we always use meters.

RN In the US they use inches. 100 inches are 2.5 meters.

KS But we often design houses using meters, or using 1.8 by 0.9 Japanese standard, so it is not a big problem. Once I had to rent a traditional house for the weekends.

I was surprised. It was the first time for me, because I grew up in a modern house.

It was a different model, with smaller dimensions. And I felt comfortable.

APR Do you think that the Japanese way of building houses influences the relationships these houses create between the people who share the house, the family relationships? Is that the reason why Western people feel your architecture as being more connected to the people? What about the Moriyama House?

KS For example, the Plum Grove House. I think European people could not live in it.

I also think some normal Japanese people could not live in it. But this family is very special, and they really enjoy the house. Here it is not so common, but in Europe it could never happen.

Both the Moriyama House and the Plum Grove House are very particular projects, so it is difficult to extract general conclusions from them. I am interested in how to make the borders. I started twenty years ago and I always try to make different types of borders. Sometimes I use an interstitial space that goes around, or in Onishi there are just different relationships to the landscape and the surrounding build depending on where you are. So, the space always has different feelings, sometimes you arrive

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KS We think about the function but we also like to think about a degree of freedom from that function.

RN We use the function to create the building, but also the building creates the function. It is a very dynamic relation: the building creates the program, the program also creates the building. This has to be mutual.

APR Do you realize that this kind of thing is not very common in traditional architecture?

RN Carlo Scarpa changed a castle into a museum to create a masterpiece, so this kind of thing happened not in traditional but in great architecture. Le Corbusier transformed the rooftop in his house in Paris.

APR One of the most important ideas in your work is the process, how you develop the process, and especially how you develop the models. I know for example that for Kanazawa Museum you asked all the staff in the studio, so I would like to know how you feel about this process.

RN One of our basic rules is that, in the study stage, every option must have a plan drawing and a model. People here create a few options each day and we make models. That is why the number of models becomes so great. We also make many drawings, but they are on the computer. If you printed them, you would be surprised how many options are created. I think that if different options are not realised, the project doesn’t exist and you have to guess. It is important to see it before completion. So we use many different materials to imagine what is coming, what is arising. The plans are one of the viewpoints to understand the appearance of buildings, then the models give you different points of view; these are the angles to see the project which doesn’t exist yet.

APR But you not only make models, sometimes you also make mock-ups?

RN Yes, but this has never happened while we were working on Japanese projects.

When we go outside Japan we are surprised to hear that almost all European and US clients say: “let’s make a one-to-one mock-up (laughs). I don’t want to imagine anything before we see the one-to-one real building”.

APR So this is a concession to the client?

KS No, of course we like it, but in Japan the client says: “you are professional architects, you should be able to see it without a mock-up”.

APR So do you think that if the building is not built, if the project doesn’t exist yet, is it not architecture or is it already architecture?

RN This is architecture, even if the project doesn’t exist on the ground yet.

APR But from my point of view, architecture is also the things you can imagine or how you want to connect people…

RN I always try to imagine what happens when this kind of architecture is embodied in the world, that’s why we often use models and drawings.

APR How is the process when you start making one model after another? Your approach is to select which is best. How do you make this selection?

RN Our feeling decides (laughs). Feeling is very important, but we also have a lot

here and you can feel you are almost involved with the other side. In every project I like to think about the border; not strong borders, but connections.

APR Regarding these two projects (Plum Grove House and Moriyama House) but also the other houses, you always say that for you the process is very important, the development of the project, but you also have to keep in mind the budget and the wishes of the client, so it is very symptomatic that in these two houses, in the Plum Grove House for example, the client wanted a unique large space, and in the case of Moriyama House your first vision was a more nuclear house. However, at the end, both projects are completely different: the Moriyama is not a nuclear house, and the Plum Grove is… So how do you combine all these factors, because at the end the client is very happy with the results. Where is the balance between your clients’ wishes and your own wishes?

RN Their wishes inspire my studies, and we create a solution that we hadn’t realized before and then the client gets another impression, which becomes a new wish. And this new wish inspires me to find another solution. It works like a conversation. There are some initial conditions, which are then modified to create new impressions.

APR And regarding not only these two houses, in the case of M House, Small House, House A or Kamakura House, what is the impression about this idea?

RN I think the conversation between the client and the architect is the main thing that drives a project. If we didn’t have a client it would be very difficult to produce.

APR So you create an environment, an atmosphere especially for one person, like high-couture fashion…

KS No, no. I like to make things that are special for particular people, but I also like to introduce elements for people to think about them, to share them as a prototype.

APR Now you are working on a new housing project: Flower House. Is it the first house you do outside Japan, isn’t it? To me, this house is very related to other buildings you did, like the Kanazawa Museum or the Glass Pavilion in Toledo. So, how was it possible to mix a public space in a private space?

KS I prefer that in public spaces people can find some private spaces, and also in a private house I like to find a certain public feeling.

RN The Moriyama House can be used as a kindergarten, kids can use it as a school.

There must be some development going through museums, libraries, houses or stations. We are architects, so we deal with shapes and geometric forms, but other people might imagine very different things on the basis of the specific shapes created by the architect. Some people that visited the Kanazawa Museum said that the building could be used as an elementary school. There is no problem in changing the program, this kind of thing happens sometimes. Buildings make you start thinking about the way you can use them. If it is a very wonderful space, people who visit it start to imagine how can they use it. People often move to warehouses and change them into spaces to live in, this is the idea.

APR I think your buildings are not restricted spaces.

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of discussion. It depends on who is in charge of the project. We discuss very much with the architects in our office to give a direction.

KS We try to find a fit based on drawings, models, etc.; these are all materials for discussion. Sometimes we have very good communication and we find a very nice way, but sometimes we finally select a different way. It depends on the team, not only our team, but we also work with independent consultants, and clients…

RN At the beginning of our study, we might consider that we have a round option or a rectangular option. We compare, and wonder which must be taken. There might be many reasons to take the round one. This is not so difficult, because there is a clear difference between both options. But once we choose the round option, for instance in Kanazawa, we face a situation with thousands of different options that look almost the same. This brings different qualities we have to choose from. You saw the exhibitions, where there were many, many models that looked nearly the same.

What we do during the study process is to try to create local rules or ‘regulations’ to define the building. For instance, for Kanazawa, we created many models, and gradually we found the idea of having a long visual connection that penetrates the building from one side to the other to give a feeling of transparency. At some point somebody found this idea, that we must have this kind of penetration. We create many ‘small regulations’ that also include visual impressions. We might decide that we will have five shapes repeated. This is the kind of thing that happens during our study to define a direction.

KS In Kanazawa we decided the building would be almost round. But round has many positions. Then we make small changes, until we reach a final model with more details.

RN We don’t know who might find the new ‘regulations’. Sometimes Sejima-san finds them, sometimes it is someone else in charge of the project. For example, in the Lausanne project, somebody suddenly said we must have this patio right in front of the top of the hill, so the people standing at the top of the hill can see the lake through the patio and also the roof behind the patio, to give a very dynamic spatial shape. If the others are convinced by the ‘regulation’, it becomes a standard.

KS Then everyone can do what they like, but they must adhere to this ‘regulation’.

Then, at the next meeting, we find more ‘regulations’, which are adhered to.

APR In the case of the Flower House, why did you select this shape?

RN This happened at a very early stage of the study period. We chose a flower shape, and not a round one because…

KS The design is not so big. The other option was more spread out, but in the end we felt we needed something more compact, but that at the same time provided an opportunity to be in touch with the outside. The shape of the site is a bit strange.

RN The client didn’t want an option that was spread out. We also presented a different option with many pavilions connected by corridors, and the building spread over the entire property. The client felt it looked too big. We came up with the idea of having a volume in the middle of the property. There was one given requirement

about the garden. They wanted to have an inner garden that was not inside the building, but intimate. They wanted to be surrounded by the building, to be outside but feel a little enclosed. That is why these shapes happen.

KS At the beginning they said they would like to have a garden with a house, not a house with a garden.

APR Speaking of gardens, Which is your relation with nature? Do you always try to give people a chance to be in touch with nature?

KS Sometimes it’s the city; not only nature, but the city.

RN In the case of Moriyama house, one of the trends that is happening in downtown Tokyo is that architects don’t think about the relation between the city and the building. They just make buildings within the regulations to create the maximum volume. Buildings in Tokyo are getting more and more enclosed. They don’t believe in the outside, so they try to do everything inside. This kind of tendency creates very big opaque volumes on the street. This gives the street very dark shadows, which make the street even worse. If the streets get very bad, people will want more enclosed houses. This kind of vicious cycle is happening. This is something architects must be aware of. You are living in the atmosphere, not in the building. You are living in the building, but with the atmosphere. In Moriyama we created something different. I think all our architecture has a very intimate relation with the atmosphere.

We are always trying to find the way to relate. There are no buildings that have no relation with the atmosphere.

APR Is it important for you that people in the city have a relation with the surrounding atmosphere? In this project of Flower House, are you also planning to do the landscaping?

KS The existing conditions already gave some atmosphere. There are a few different views. We will add some big trees to create some shade and to give the client more privacy. In some part we will make a flower garden or a vegetable garden.

APR One of the Flower Houses’ main features is its transparency. What is important to you about transparency? I imagine it is not only seeing the inside from the outside, but also a play on reflections. Is it about opening up?

KS Mainly we think about borders. A reflection is not a real wall, but it signals a different space. The meaning of transparency is to create a diversity of relations. It is not necessary to always see through. Transparency also means clarity, not only visual, but also conceptual. There are so many relations.

RN I don’t think that, for example, Moriyama House looks super transparent. I think at some points you can feel transparency, but at most points you feel opacity. You don’t know how many people are in the house. It is more opaque than transparent. But I thought it would be nice for the people in the house to feel the atmosphere that surrounds them. The inside of the building coming outside creates a relation between the project and the surrounding atmosphere. This is the idea I like.

APR But this concept is innovative for a private house. How did you deal with this idea with the client?

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RN Transparency was a requirement from the client. He wanted to have transparency in the house.

KS It is the opposite of where he is living now. He is living in a very old preserved house, so he really wants to live in a transparent house.

APR Perhaps in Japan it is common for people to have more exposed relations.

When I talk to other people from the art world, we all love the Kanazawa project, but outside Japan it would be impossible because people are very curious and they would be peeping into the offices all the time.

RN The client of Flower House does not want to expose his privacy, but he still wants to live with transparency.

KS The thing is he can choose: he can open it completely, or he can close it.

APR Going back to the idea of process and selection. In architecture you consider so many options to reach a single realised project, but at the end, the realised project does not reveal the process. In fashion, with the work of Martin Margiela or Yoji Yamamoto or Rei Kawabuko, in the final clothes you can see the process because they leave clues or references. In your buildings no one can imagine the process. As a Utopian question, would it be positive to be able to see this process in architecture.

KS More or less.

RN If you can present the process of study in a real building in a creative way, it would be very nice. But if the result is just messy, I can imagine the client does not want to have such a suffering architect in his house. For instance, in House A you can see the foundations of a bathroom in the patio, which was not built. I think it’s ok to have it there. The design changed in the construction phase, but I felt it was nice to leave it.

APR Talking about process, we are finally (nervous laugh), finishing the production of your show in MUSAC. It is sometimes difficult for people in the art world to organise architecture exhibitions. (Sejima “We cannot do 1:1”). SANAA exhibitions always have certain particularities. In MUSAC we are presenting this mock-up. Brightness is important for you. Why this obsession with light? We will also be presenting three dimensions in one room and two dimensions in another. Why do you like to present your work in a similar way in different places?

KS The difficulty in having exhibitions on architecture is that we cannot present the real work, so architects use drawings and models to explain their real work. For me this is one point of view. It is important to explain the real work. At the same time, it is also important to forget it, and for the drawings and models to appear just as drawings and models. This is another idea behind this exhibition. We like to show the models as a kind of sculpture and the drawings as a kind of painting. We use a very generic material to try to generate a spatial feeling. It is important to create a balance to generate this spatial feeling.

APR One of the aspects that I like about this show is that you are presenting not

the real architecture, but the objects. You also design objects, seats, chandeliers, mirrors… What is your relation with design? When you design a house, would you always like to design the content?

KS Of course sometimes design is very important for a building. But it’s not always necessary to do the entire design. We select if possible. We are very interested in different scales, from the small scale to the big scale. For us the paper models are a kind of sculpture.

APR Are you following up your work with objects? Any specific projects?

KS Not for the next exhibition, but now we are designing furniture and cups and lighting fixtures and candleholders.

APR Are you also working on patterns?

KS Yes FUROSHIKI for Agustin’s mother.

Otsukaresama deshita!!!!!

▪ STOP

The interview finishes with a mixed feeling of happiness and exhaustion. And I am absolutely delighted with their kind gesture: they have given me a furoshiki . I felt really comfortable with them, and the meeting on this all-purpose corner of the table has been amusing, trying to communicate in a language which is neither mine nor their mother tongue. I look at the ashtray close to Sejima and I realise that I have smoked all of her cigarettes during this couple of hours... It’s hot in the studio. Sejima stands up and heads for the window to open it and let in some fresh air. She rolls a small blanket up around her waist, as if it was a skirt, in order to avoid the cold. They both say goodbye in a very kind way, Sam and I share a look of complicity... Everything went ok, but we have to hurry, otherwise we won’t be on time for the Chicks on Speed concert at Unit they have arranged to take me to. However, I take one last look at Sejima’s table to say bye once more before opening the door and, as if by magic, she’s not there. I can’t see where she’s gone, she has disappeared, vanished. I stand there for a second just to see if she had ducked and stands up, but nobody comes out from under her table. It strikes me again that this culture and this house are full of mysteries that I’m slowly getting to know better.

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Unfinished houses

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Flower House This is a project for a house in a small town in Europe. The site is on a mild slope, overlooking apple orchards. The client is a couple whose children have recently grown up and moved out. For this new phase of their life, the couple wishes to settle in a small house in their garden, tailored to their needs and with a lot of light. In fact, they emphasized that it should be a garden with a house - not a house with a garden.

This led to our design of a fully transparent house, with the garden flowing through.

The program they required included a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a bedroom, a guestroom, an office and a gym. We placed all different functions in ideal positions in relation both to the site and to each other, according to the living habits of the couple and the dimensions of their furniture. We then drew a shape that enclosed and connected these functions, while establishing smooth transition between outside and inside. The relationship between the spaces results in two internal patios – fragments of garden inside the actual volume, softly dividing functions and allowing multiple circulation patterns around the house. A guest room requiring distance from the other functions was placed in an independent volume, shielding the house from the neighboring buildings, while at the same time forming a protected garden.

Since the site slopes gently, the entire floor plate of the house is stepped, to be on the same level as the surrounding garden at all points. The roof repeats the same slope. As we wanted to provide maximum possible transparency, to allow the house to blend into the landscape, the entire facade is made of acrylic, the most transparent building material. The acrylic also serves as the main structure, in an entirely columnless building, leaving the thin roof hovering.

Garden & House This building, in a high-density district near Tokyo station, comprises both living and office space. The clients are two women editors who require an office, shared living space and individual bedrooms. The site is 8 x 4m, and buildings more than 30m tall surround it on three sides, making it much like a small dark valley surrounded by mountainous construction. Since the site is very small, we wanted to avoid further reduction of usable area that would result from using a standard structural system. As a result our concept was to make a building without walls. The final composition comprises only horizontal slabs, each floor composed of a room and a garden. The room on each of the four stories is smaller than the footprint, allowing it to be shaped and dimensioned according to its particular function. As a result the relationship between garden and floor plate shifts appropriately as you ascend the light, well ventilated residence that nestles into the dense urban fabric.

Seijo Apartments These apartments are composed of 20 small buildings, shifted to relieve their potential impact on the nearby houses. In this way, the project could be interpreted as an apartment building or as an assembly of detached houses. Each apartment spans multiple buildings that are connected to form an organic whole that masks the position and extension of each unit from the exterior. The individual apartments do not have the oblong plan typical to town houses. Their scattered arrangement generates a variation of multi-directional rooms with flexible lighting, ventilation and individual character. As a result of the shifted blocks all of the units have gardens or roof terraces, connected to form a sequence of communal spaces.

60 Location Europe Work 2006– Persons Husband and Wife Architect Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA Structural engineer SAPS Structure Acrylic Energy consultant Transsolar Site area 2.500 m2 Building area 250 m2 Floor area 305 m2 Floors 1 storey, 1 basement

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Location Tokyo, Japan Work 2006– persons 2 Architect Office of Ryue Nishizawa Structural engineer Structured Environment Structure Steel frame Energy consultant Takehito Sano and Akiko Sano Site area 37,89 m2 Building area 18,89 m2 Floor area 63,21 m2 Floors 4 storeys, 1 basement

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Location Tokyo, Japan Work 2005– Units 14 Architect Kazuyo Sejima Associates Structural consultant Taisei corporation Structure Reinforced concrete Site area 1397,09 m2 Building area 419,89 m2 Floor area 1468,75 m2 Floors 3 storeys, 1 basement

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Okurayama Apartments The project is an apartment complex building near Okurayama station about 10 minutes by train from Yokohama. There are 9 units, each about 50 m2 on a 450 m2 site.

Approximately 2 people will occupy each of the apartments. We sought to create a layered and stacked series of homes. Gardens and rooms intermingle with each other comfortably. Bedrooms, living-dining rooms, bathrooms, terraces and gardens for each unit interact with the surroundings on all sides. Each unit has a bright and open atmosphere, collectively connecting to surrounding gardens, spreading the activities of the residents evenly across the whole site.

Ichikawa Apartments This design for an apartment building located near Tokyo is three stories tall and accommodates six dwelling units. The basic structure is composed of curved walls that undulate in both the perpendicular and horizontal axis, dissolving the rigidity of spatial arrangement that often characterizes apartment blocks. As a result, three unit types were integrated: three-storey, maisonette and flat type. The space within each unit appears to expand and contract according to the function of the space, establishing an independent rhythm through each of the dwelling units. The distortion of the walls through the full height of the building allows each unit to contain volume as necessary: for example, a unit with a smaller ground floor can obtain a larger space on the upper level and vice versa. This amorphous interior within a simple cubic volume allows the building to sit subtly among the row-houses which surround it, while establishing maximum diversity and flexibility within the apartment house typology.

House in China This is a design for a house within a vast residential compound in the outskirts of Tainjin City in China. Occupying a corner of a development master-planned by Riken Yamamoto, this detached house has a total floor area of 600 square metres. In an attempt to realize the potential of so expansive a residential space, activities that would have to be overlaid or omitted in a small house were cemented in the plan: a gallery, basketball court, hothouse, tearoom, vestibule, breakfast room and study. These weave through the house, punctuated with courtyards, establishing a diaphanous relationship between interior and exterior space. This project provides a framework for a horizontal lifestyle that permits an unconstrained system of circulation within a mesh of diverse activity fields. Furthermore the rooms are distributed within a grid system, permitting continuous views through the building. As a result, the house, despite its size, appears to rest lightly on the site, framing views of the landscape beyond.

Eda Apartments This is a collective housing project comprising of 100 units. The site is on a residential district in the suburbs of Tokyo characterised by rows of low-rise houses. Its major characteristics are its railway frontage and the height differences across the site. The building is raised one floor above ground level by means of piloti, creating a sheltered area that provides access to each of the units. In order to shelter the apartments from the station, the apartments are lit and ventilated from internal courtyards, subtly manipulated to avoid conflicting sightlines between residences. Light passing through the irregularly shaped courtyards animates the open space below the building volume and establishes it as a dynamic communal space. The design incorporates several grids into the plan, grids that run parallel to the surrounding roads, the railway lines and the train station plaza respectively. These various grids are integrated with curved and winding lines and give rise to units with diverse individual forms, independence and privacy.

Location Okurayama, Japan Work 2006 Units 10 Architect Kazuyo Sejima Associates Structural eng. SSC / Sasaki Structural Consultants Structure Reinforced concrete Energy consultant Morimura Sekkei Site area 457.77 m2 Building area 207,20 m2 Floor area 553.11 m2 Floors 4 storeys

Location Ichikawa, Japan Work 2001– Units 4 Architect Office of Ryue Nishizawa Structure Steel frame, reinforced concrete Site area 327,30 m2 Building area 100 m2 Floor area 268,50 m2 Floors 3 storeys

Location Tanguu, Tianjin, China Work 2003– Architect Office of Ryue Nishizawa Structural eng. Plus One Structural Des. & Eng. Firm Structure Reinforced concrete Site area 233,33 m2 Building area 609,61 m2 Floor area 627,25 m2 Floors 1 storey

Location Yokohama, Japan Work 2002– Units 100 Dwelling unit area 24–102 Architect Office of Ryue Nishizawa Structural eng. SSC / Sasaki Structural Consultants Structure Steel frame and reinforced concrete Energy consultant Kankyo Engineering Site area 3.195 m2 Building area 2.162 m2 Floor area 8.860 m2 Floors 4 storeys, 1 basement

Flower House  Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA

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building in site model

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1:2 model, produced by MUSAC

1:2 model, produced by MUSAC

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1:2 model, produced by MUSAC

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plan and section, scale 1:200

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models for consideration in Tokyo

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reflections inside the house and view to the adjoining orchard

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1:2 model, produced by MUSAC

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maqueta 1:2 model, a escala produced 1:2,byproducida MUSAC por el MUSAC

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Garden & House  Office of Ryue Nishizawa

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section, scale 1:100

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plans, scale 1:100

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illustrated plans, scale 1:100

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Seijo Apartments  Kazuyo Sejima & Associates

model in section

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plans, scale 1:400

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80 study models

A living room connecting two courtyards

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two rooms connected at their corners

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Okurayama Apartments  Kazuyo Sejima & Associates

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site plan, scale 1:300

activities taking place throughout the building

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Ichikawa Apartments  Office of Ryue Nishizawa

plans and section, scale 1:200

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one living / dining room

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House in China  Office of Ryue Nishizawa

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plan, scale 1:250

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basketball court in the middle among other functions

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diagrammatic plan. all spaces can be specifically programmed

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Eda Apartments  Office of Ryue Nishizawa

building elevated and closed to the outside

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ground floor plan showing staircases and piloti space, scale 1:600. apartment plans showing various points of reference, scale 1:600

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view up through courtyard

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Finished houses

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House A This house in central Tokyo is located on a narrow site that stretches along a northsouth axis. It is lit primarily from the south, where the dense urban fabric opens onto a vast empty plot. The shape and size of each of the required rooms was decided upon according to the function and furniture layout required and then distributed along the site as blocks, shifted along the short access to establish a fragmented edge that allows light to penetrate to the centre of each space. Given that the client lives alone and requested that the design allow for entertaining guests and having friends spend the night, we looked to create a predominantly social environment.

Each room has the character of a living room and the hierarchy of domestic space is established primarily by the relationship between double and single height spaces clustered along the site.

S House This private house, located in the suburbs of a provincial city four hours from Tokyo by train, houses parents, two children and their grandparents. The client requested that this cohabitation of two families be reflected in the design, while a large living and dining room be integrated to allow all inhabitants to have dinner together and to encourage communication between generations. The two-storey cube is composed of a residential core surrounded by a double height corridor. The bedrooms are located at ground level and the single space that serves as both living and dining room is above it. The corridor can be termed a “semi-external space”, with sand on the floor and corrugated polycarbonate walls. This passageway connects each room at ground level and at the same time acts as a buffer zone that mediates outdoor temperatures.

The partitions between the corridor and rooms are folding doors at ground level and comprised of louvers on the floor above, permitting a flexible relationship between spaces. All of the rooms are gathered at the center of the house, but because each is connected only by means of the surrounding corridor this spatial intimacy is experienced as physical distance and establishes privacy between rooms.

House in a Plum Grove This is a small house for a young couple, two children, and their grandmother. The site is located within a quiet residential quarter on the outskirts of Tokyo. The family requested a house that would feel like a single connected space and preserve the existing landscape, characterized by young plum trees. In response we have minimized the building volume and located it in the center of the site, preserving the periphery and its trees. As a rule residential projects tend to have a fixed correlation between the number of occupants and number of rooms. In this project, however, each function was given its own room, independent but overlooking one another. The building is neither a cluster of many small rooms, nor one big room, but establishes something in-between. The experience is a unique combination of connectivity and privacy.

The walls between rooms are structural steel plates minimized to a thickness of 16mm. The exterior walls use the same 16mm structural panel with insulation and gypsum board, their total thickness only 50mm. Thin walls are a prerequisite for this design, both functionally and experientially: they consume the least space and allow for multiple openings to be carved out, without the walls themselves expressing physical presence.

128 Location Tokyo, Japan Work 2004–2006 Persons 1 Architect Office of Ryue Nishizawa Structural engineer SSC / Sasaki Structural Consultants Structure Steel frame Energy consultant Takehito Sano and Akiko Sano Site area 123,30 m2 Building area 71,70 m2 Floor area 89,50 m2 Floors 2 storeys, 1 basement

Location Okayama Japan Work 1995–1996 Persons 3 Architect Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA Structural engineer O.R.S Office Structure Wood Energy consultant System Design Laboratory Site area 131,32 m2 Building area 86,85 m2 Floor area 142,39 m2 Floors 2 storeys

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Location Tokyo, Japan Work 2001–2003 Persons Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, Grandmother Architect Kazuyo Sejima Associates Structural eng. SSC / Sasaki Structural consultants Structure Steel plate Site area 92,30 m2 Building area 37,20 m2 Floor area 77,68 m2

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Small House This house, as the name suggests, is situated on a micro-sized plot in one of the most attractive areas in downtown Tokyo. The family that commissioned the house had a clear vision of the program, which we divided into four main functions. Each was allocated a floor slab of appropriate size and these were stacked on the site. The open stair core is the main structural element and is also used as a soft partition to further subdivide the four main spaces: a bedroom, space for the child, living/kitchen/dining, and terrace with bath. Shifting the centre of gravity of each of the floors and its relationship to the core is enough to have a major impact on the character of the spaces.

These design decisions were fine-tuned in relation to several additional parameters: the relationship between interior and exterior, parking and the need for a small terrace at basement level. The total form results from using sloping walls to join the shifted slabs and determining the position of windows in relation to the various forms of adjacent outdoor space.

Moriyama House Moriyama House is located in a traditional part of Tokyo where daily life continues in a typical urban structure. There are more than ten volumes on the site each accommodating different requirements. These volumes are independent from one another and are scattered across the site creating a series of connected individual gardens, open to the surroundings. All of the buildings might some day be used by Mr. Moriyama.

Currently some are rented creating a small community of little dwellings. This group of individually proportioned buildings establishes an independent landscape and atmosphere all its own.

Location Tokyo, Japan Work 1999–2000 Persons Mother, Father, and Daughter Architect Kazuyo Sejima Associates Structure SSC / Sasaki Structural Consultants Site area 60,03 m2 Building area 34,51 m2 Floor area 76,98 m2 Floors 3 storeys, 1 basement

Location Tokyo, Japan Work 2002–2005 Units Variable 1-6 Architect Office of Ryue Nishizawa Structural engineer Structured Environment Structure Steel plate Energy consultant Kankyo Engineering Site area 290,07 m2 Building area 130,06 m2 Floor area 263,08 m2 Floors 3 storeys, 1 basement (various)

House A  Office of Ryue Nishizawa

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the house in morninng light

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retractable roof creates indoor / outdoor living room

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illustrated plan where every space has the ability to function like a living room

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section, scale 1:50

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model in elevation, eastern facade

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S House  Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA

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plans, scale 1:100

polycarbonate faรงades seen from across the street

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House in a Plum Grove  Kazuyo Sejima & Associates

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a prefabricated wall being brought into the house

study model in development (from top left, clockwise) roof garden, tatami room, double hieght master bedroom, double hieght study, bedroom, and bathroom. In actual construction the bathroom and bedroom have switched places and the roof garden is covered over with sod.

daughter’s rooms

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son’s bedroom

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ground floor, scale 1:60

model showing door leading to part of the plum grove

living / dining room

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Small House  Kazuyo Sejima & Associates

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detailed section, scale 1:75

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Moriyama House  Office of Ryue Nishizawa

one building seemed too big, as such, we divided the program into separate units

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east and north elevations, scale 1:250

A view from the building previously located on the site. the red roof in the foreground to the left was demolished to make way for the new house.

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neighborhood

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division map

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a radically different option that was not taken

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cardboard model shown in exhibition at the 21st century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

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planting study in early design option

under construction

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ground floor plan scale, 1:200

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view out of kitchen into Moriyama’s courtyard

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a playground in the neighborhood

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Northeastern edge of house

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Reinterpreting traditional aesthetic values

Kristine Guzmán

In 1950, when Mies van der Rohe built the Farnsworth House, the whole world was left aghast before those nude glass panels opening out onto the forest. Supporters of Mies saw an architectural revolution in that work, the apex of his philosophy of “less is more” —an abstract theme on structure, skin and space—; while many others criticized the lack of intimacy in an architecture that is highly private, in an era where the prevailing International Style was considered a “threat to the New America.”

Several decades later, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA) create an architecture defined by visual lightness, in a way, an echo of that house

by Mies in the middle of the American forest. However, unlike the old German master, these very characteristics of lightness and transparency that have given SANAA international recognition did not arouse any controversy, not even in their native Japan where clients’ demands are rooted in tradition and customs carry most weight.

“Japan-ness” The Japanese architect Arata Isozaki wrote a book entitled Japan-ness in Architecture, where he analyses how some modern Japanese architects try to create something uniquely Japanese, rooted in tradition but from the perspective of modernity. This Japan-ness arose from an external gaze created by the West, “not more or less than a revolution in the way of seeing of the Europeans,” as written by Edmond de Goncourt in the pages of his personal diary on April 18, 1884. A notion of Japanese taste materialized from typical objects normally collected by the Europeans, as expressed in pictorial motives, ornamental backgrounds or the flatness of figures in the pictorial space: all considered exotic to the eyes of the West. The concepts related to their production thus arise from here: simplicity, modesty, purity, lightness and sophisticated austerity. “While Japan had its peak in the sixteenth century and subsequently lost that height of perfection as its culture struggled to come to terms with the most rapid period of industrialisation any society has known.“ In the 20th century, with the country’s modernization, exchange with the West and the security that resulted from prosperity, Japan adopted Western modernism in its architecture, while it looked for ways to express some of those earlier sensibilities in a contemporary manner. This search inspired architects such as Kenzo Tange and later Tadao Ando, champions of integrating the aesthetic values of traditional Japanese architecture within a modern architecture. According to the architect Kisho Kurokawa, the archi

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Pawson, John, Minimum (Londres: Phaidon, 2003), p.11.

tectural past is inherited through the expression of invisible ideas, aesthetics, ways of life and historic memories behind historic forms and symbols, “manipulated intellectually, creating a mode of expression characterized by abstraction, irony, wit, twists, gaps, sophistication, and metaphor.”

The Traditional Japanese House The house is the basic element in the local community; Japan’s sociological unit is the home, not the family. Xavier Roca-Ferrer’s notes to the Tale of Genji , the great masterpiece of Japanese literature, illustrate the values of Japanese culture and their adaptation to architecture: “The houses where Genji and all the aristocrats who swarmed the court of Heian lived were of the type known as shinden. This type of construction, of a totally Japanese character, elevated above ground by posts in the manner of trowel constructions to stave off humidity, interlocked or covered with wooden silt ceiling beams, is distinguished by the lightness of its appearance. They are usually on a single floor and their average dimensions are approximately two hectares. Each mansion consists of a number of independent rectangular constructions connected by covered corridors or sanded pathways (...)

When the weather is fair, the rooms of a Japanese house open up completely to the exterior, becoming totally integrated with the garden (...)

The Japanese like to live in close contact with nature and the structure of their homes bears proof to this taste.”

Transparency Transparency is an ally of light, which in turn is an “agnostic instrument to describe the spirituality and otherness of architecture.” It is perhaps the word that best defines SANAA’s works, since they frequently resort to that which is extremely light, or to an interplay of reflections that often obscures orientation within a building.

However, this transparency not only refers to the effect obtained by the use of glass – or any other transparent material – although this has almost become their hallmark, present in many of their commercial, institutional and residential projects. What SANAA is searching for is “some kind of transparency without transparent material (…) through for example some kind of planning method.” On a constructive level, by eliminating the usual structural elements such as columns and transferring their supporting functions to those other indispensable elements in design, they generate open spaces or create a diversity of relations through elements that visually or conceptually connect spaces. The honesty in the expression of structure is such that in the Small House (Kazuyo Sejima, Tokyo, Japan, 1999–2000) and in the Plum Grove House (Kazuyo Sejima, Tokyo, Japan, 2001–2003), the structural elements have been transferred onto walls reduced to their minimum thickness, producing a great impact on very limited construction areas, and suggesting lightness with their multiple perforations. However, in the Y House (Kazuyo Sejima, Katsura, Chiba, Japan, 1993–94) as well as in the Gifu Kitagata Apartments (Kazuyo Sejima, Gifu, Japan, 1994– 2000), the large windows and openings penetrate the whole width of the building, insinuating visual continuity with the urban landscape.

In order to understand the configuration of the typical Japanese house, one must have a basic knowledge of their culture; a culture that has been shaped throughout history by religious beliefs and philosophic principles, as well as by Chinese constructive ideas, from which they inherited the typical wooden pillar and beam construction. Thus, spirituality might become the key element of any construction, adapting everyday life to concepts and orders preserved over the centuries.

SANAA builds the world over. Their architectural solutions are largely indifferent to localization, culture or history, creating a contemporary global architecture, much like the International Style established by modern architects such as Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. However, SANAA’s architecture may signify a new constructive vision of tradition itself, subtly and perhaps unconsciously applying features of traditional Japanese architecture, an aesthetic created in any case by stereotypes marked by the West and carried through to the present.

Harmony with Nature In these urban landscapes, nature and the surroundings always have their place. Beauty may be discovered in the random occurrences of nature as well as in the forms perfected by man. The simultaneous cultivation and conscious superposition of both can be found in the right angles of a rice paper panelled door frame, a veranda that surrounds an entire house, or bridges with crafted view points that serve to best contemplate a group of rocks, a tree weathered by time, a lake or a relaxing waterfall. The Japanese have a close relation to nature due to shintô practices, and this constant infiltration – or penetration – of architecture into nature, and vice versa, is one of the characteristics of SANAA’s work.

Perhaps this idea has a lot to do with the engawa , the covered elevated platform that serves as the traditional Japanese house’s porch or veranda.

Kurokawa, Kisho, The Philosophy of Simbiosis . (Tokyo: Tokuma Publishing Co., 1987), p. 59.

Shikibu, Murasaki, La novela de Genji (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2005), p.133, note by Xavier Roca-Ferrer.

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Pawson, John, Minimum (Londres: Phaidon, 2003), p.14.

Zaera, Alejandro, “Una conversación” included in El Croquis 77 (Madrid, 2001), p.17.

sociological behaviour. In most cases, these spaces look out onto the exterior, such as in the N-House (Kumamoto, Kumamoto, Japan, 1991-92) or onto interior gardens such as in the Weekend House (Gunma, Japan, 1997-98), in a call to meditation, to the contemplation of the flow of time itself, without necessarily referring to any religious considerations. SANAA’s architecture, as in Buddhist thought, evokes the spirit through the formal transformation of art as a medium to influence the human interior.

In SANAA’s case, this idea has been reformulated to create spaces that are exterior and interior at the same time, such as the lattice-covered corridors of the M-House (Kazuyo Sejima, Tokyo, Japan, 1996-97) —external corridors that connect interior spaces—, or the semi-exterior gallery of the S-House (Kazuyo Sejima, Okayama, Japan, 1997), planned as an interior perimeter corridor and, nonetheless, treated as if it were an external space, with the use of a natural sand floor finish and walls that flood the house with light.

Both in urban areas with limited plots and on sites in the middle of forests, SANAA have an almost sacred respect for nature. They demonstrate this by preserving the trees that surround the Plum Grove House (Kazuyo Sejima, Tokyo, Japan, 2001), or maintaining a landscaped environment around the Moriyama House (Ryue Nishizawa, Tokyo, Japan, 2002–2005). However, it is in the House for the Practical Exhibition on Architecture in China (SANAA, Nanjing, China, 2004– ), where they have most subtly intervened in the environment, with its undulating forms that sometimes touch the ground and are slightly elevated because, “the space of Japanese architecture is a space that is given by nature (…) is not that which is based upon a human will to three-dimensionality.”

Mono no aware In the same way, this formal transformation finds its meaning in the Miesian principle of creation that is “aimed at liberating things from their isolation and transposing them into an ordering system that imparts a higher meaning to its otherwise disparate elements. By means of this building order an architecture of spiritual references emerges.” Perhaps, the essential meaning of architecture is based on this, in providing “the horizon to understand and confront the existential human condition (…) granting us an experience of ourselves as corporal and spiritual beings.”

The same building philosophy may be appreciated in SANAA’s architecture, where the simple gesture of a line may unite environment and edifice; or where the apparent signs of human activity may create a spatial rhythm that liberates architectural elements from their respective limitations, always changing and renewing themselves with the active participation of nature and people.

At the same time, this transcendence can be seen in the passage of time, with the natural ageing of things and with the sense of materiality, although the materials normally used by SANAA do not tend to incorporate a temporal dimension. If transcendence cannot be appreciated in the very materiality of architecture, the process that brings about its realization —SANAA’s very working procedures, that imply continuous and repetitive programs with complicated solutions that gradually evolve until they become something simple— may seem like a process of purification, of reduction, until they find the essence of things.

Ma: Space and Time Jun’ichirö Tanizaki, in his book In Praise of Shadows (1933–34), analyses various characteristics of Japanese culture, where the essence lies in capturing shadows. Tanizaki maintains that shadows —or darkness— affect not only space, but also time. This interdependence between space and time has a fundamental impact on the nature of the arts and architecture, as Sigfried Giedion established in Space, Time and Architecture.

The experience that SANAA intends to achieve depends on intermediate spaces; spaces that occasionally act as stimuli for activity. This idea comes from the concept of the park, a place “that offers something for everybody and can absorb different generations, people of different social backgrounds, individuals or groups.” Public buildings are limited by predetermined norms and functions, and SANAA intends to create a certain liberty, letting the users stroll or carry out any other activity at will, aside from the space’s formal uses. In this way, through architecture, this space is produced in time.

In domestic architecture, SANAA creates numerous spaces and openings that provide their inhabitants the freedom to generate new relationships or

Emptiness “The Japanese way of sensing space, in which depth comprises layers of planes without regard to graduated perspective”10 is due to the ancient Eastern notion of omnipresent emptiness. The process of emptying space starts with an investigation on technology, when the smallest detail has

Tange, Kenzo, “Gendai Kenchiku no Sôzô to Nihon Kenchiku no Dentô (Contemporary Architectural Creation and the Japanese Architectural Tradition)” included in Shen-kenchiku, June 1956.

Feiress, Kristin, “An Interview with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa” included in Feiress, Kristin (Ed.), The Zollverein School of Management and Design , (Munich: Prestel, 2006), p. 62.

Neumeyer, Franz, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe Building Art (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991).

Pallasmaa, Juhani, Los ojos de la piel (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2006), p.11.

10 Isozaki, Arata, Japan-ness in Architecture (Massachussets: MIT, 2000), p. 8.

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been reduced to its essentials through an intense process of simplification and reduction, a formal and, at the same time, conceptual depuration.

It is the result of the omission of the superfluous, an emptiness that is not “something vague and inexistent, but an eminently dynamic and active element.”11 According to the architects, “in order to think about the information society there seems to be a relationship to the idea of dimension or the effect of the mass or the volume on us.”12 The wall is reduced to its minimum, to eliminate the hierarchy that exists between structure and partition, in a way that the weight of materiality of each of the elements —plan, door or wall— may be the same. In other cases, unnecessary interior interferences are totally disregarded in order to open up the space to perception, as in the case of the Small House (Kazuyo Sejima, Tokyo, Japan, 1999–2000), where the main structural system is to be found in the stairwell, or in the Moriyama House (Ryue Nishizawa, Tokyo, Japan, 2002–05) where the grouping of independent —and nonetheless interdependent— structures reminds us of the plurality of communicated independent constructions of Heian Houses. Hierarchy is also obliterated in the A-House (Ryue Nishizawa, Tokyo, Japan, 2004– ) where all rooms have the same dimension, thus not assigning a space’s function according to its size. As Arata Isozaki explains in his book Kukan-e , “the traditional Japanese way of sensing space teaches us this. The spatiality of kawai and kehai (sign, or a not-yet-manifest indication of something), where demarcation remains vague and in-flux —here is an origin of an imagination that countenances an undifferentiated, intuitive space going well beyond any mere mechanistic articulation—. This is reemphasized by the condition of contemporary space filled with continuous and invisible electronic impulses trafficking and communicating with one another.”13 This link between the idea of information culture and certain notion of flexibility is explained in the book Blurring Architecture by Toyo Ito, where he reflects on space in 21st century architecture based on the Modern Movement, and says that an architecture that serves as a bridge between a biological and an electronic body must have “a floating nature that allows for changes over time (…) because in today’s floating society it is absolutely essential to do away with borders based on simplified functions and establish a relationship of overlapping spaces.”14

11 Cheng, Francois, Vacío y Plenitud , (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 2005), p. 68.

12 Zaera, Alejandro, “Una conversación” included in El Croquis 77 (Madrid, 2001), p.16.

13 Isozaki, Arata, “Method of Urban Design”, included in Kukan-e ( Toward Space ) (Tokio: Kajima Shuppan Kai, 1997), p. 118.

14 Ito, Toyo, Arquitectura de límites difusos (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2006), p. 28.

Traditional Values in a Contemporary World If it is true that “there is a lot about SANAA that is specifically the product of their Japanese roots,”15 the continuity of tradition linked to the evolutionary process of culture itself and the adaptation of other concepts of habitation have paved the way for a plural and hybrid architecture, extracting fragments from historical forms and simplifying them, in order to apply them freely later on, unconsciously adapting them to some contemporary global necessities that are the results of an exhaustive study of each program. These programs are based on functions that create the building, but at the same time, it is the building itself that can dictate new functions.

In the same way that technological advances have changed our life and attitudes towards the value of time, SANAA’s houses are capable of transforming a person’s way of life, or the relationships between its inhabitants.

Through their architecture, they question the concepts of intimacy, new family structures, the demarcation of public and private space, or the very physicality of a structure. They provide us with what is essential to live at the same time they create “prototypes” with solutions that are outside the conventional concepts of home.

Five decades have passed since the construction of the Farnsworth House.

In this time, the world has learned to open itself up to new forms of construction and to experiment what remains to be discovered. SANAA lives in this time, where practical necessities have acquired greater importance than spiritual needs. However, tradition has played an unconscious role in all their works, where they try to find the harmony dictated by opposing poles of light and shadow, naturalness and artificiality, exterior and interior.

Their concern for the human condition in contemporary society has led them to search for creative solutions in accordance with current technology and to discover new configurations, forms and functions in architecture, to the point where they create new domestic behaviours, acceptable to the most conservative of cultures.

15 Sudjic, Deyan, “The Lightness of Being” included in Feiress, Kristin (Ed.), The Zollverein School of Management and Design (Munich: Prestel, 2006), p. 46.

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SANAA in dreams

Luis Fernández-Galiano Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa’s architecture is in the limits. It does not reside in modelled space or in sculptured volume, nor does it rely on articulating elements or on the gravity of matter: it effortlessly inhabits the borders of encounter, which slim down implausibly, becoming nearly virtual; whether they be glass, steel or concrete, the enclosures of their precise precincts aspire to the condition of mathematical surfaces. This extreme abstraction is the ultimate source of the fascination inspired by the Japanese pair’s architecture. Their construction at the limit is essentially architecture in the negative, achieved through a stripping-down: buildings strive to divest themselves of thickness, dispense with inertia, rid themselves of density. The process generates objects with an immaterial appearance, metaphysical in that they transcend the realm of the senses’ standard conventions, and dreamlike in so far as they reside along the vague border between sleep and waking.

A weightless and superficial work that pursues gravity in the air and depth in the skin: the supreme elegance and exquisite refinement of these projects ultimately derive from this slender weightlessness, always on the verge of vanishing. Walls with hardly any thickness and pillars that are impossibly lean, boxes within boxes that decompose intro reflections and cubes stacked in the precarious balance of levity, cells disembodied by their own transparency and random squares where geometrical rigour is subjected to a discipline of disappearance. Against the solar solidity of architectures that play the wise and magnificent game of volumes under light, these ethereal works flaunt the moon-drenched paleness of night spirits and an evanescent fragility that a Romantic sensibility would have hailed as feminine, but today is more readily associated with the ungraspable appeal of fashion, or to that touch me not of an unachievable ghostly luxury.

If material divestment and geometrical purity point towards the aesthetic path to illumination through renunciation and link these elusive objects to a mysticism that the Western media is all too keen to tag with the fuzzy term of zen, the works’ translucent levity also bonds their aesthetic progress with the mutating volubility of the contemporary, and with an absence of roots inherent to a culture that oscillates with the flicker of a TV screen. Archaic in its essentialist rigour and cutting-edge in its epidermal levity, SANAA’s work also accommodates a critical approach, where stark divestment can be read as a rejection of the compulsive consumerism that crams spaces and lives with unnecessary commodities, and where an extreme anorexia of all things physical may spell out a deliberate exacerbation of a modern

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dissolution of references and certainties in a weightless virtual labyrinth.

Half way between the penitentiary cell and the glamour showcase, these ambidextrous architectures carry their oxymoronic nature proudly, making a double statement in favour of distance and integration. Whether it be a museum or a private home, each project is governed by its internal laws of laconism, leaving it up to the spectator to decide if it contains an invitation to spiritual improvement through the exclusion of all things superfluous, or rather an incitation to the sophisticated exhibitionism of high-range minimalism. It is certainly tempting to postulate that SANAA intends to improve us through their starkness and represent us with their levity, but it is not so clear whether we can make both statements at once: “the work is austere so as to make us austere” and “the work is weightless because we are weightless” are not contradictory statements, yet they are hard to wed in a creative process, however multifaceted the underlying intention may be.

Kazuyo Sejima entered the history of Architecture with the Saishunkan women’s residence, a dormitory for 80 young female workers that generated a dual shock: one related to the programme itself (a corporate convent where working units are subjected to workshop discipline, patriarchal protection and the permanent supervision of a Foucaultian institution), and another brought about by the profession’s interpretation, which exacerbated the project’s panoptical and penitentiary nature with chilling precision.

Those translucent cells, aligned within a container of icy perfection, displayed the unnerving schematism of a constructed diagram, justifying mentor Toyo Ito’s comparison of Sejima’s insubstantial spaces with virtual videogame architecture, only apt for android bodies lacking in scent and warmth.

Inexpressive and nearly inhuman, the work illustrated the uniformity and anonymity of a society created by information technology, becoming an overnight icon of digital architecture.

At the residence, Sejima was still heightening her indifferent spaces by means of the pastel colours, waves and ovals she had used in her initial experiments with the Platforms (two holiday homes gymnastically elevated like balancing folies that combined Archigram and Ito’s Pao for nomad women with a Memphis aesthetic, the neo-Fifties Koolhaas and La Villette’s deconstructivist Tschumi). These niceties, however, would gradually be purged out of her later works, to arrive at the monochrome homotopias she is known for today. A universe of geometrical rigour and Cartesian cold blood epitomised by her apartments at Gifu, arranged through a freakish isotropic mesh into a slim block revealing both social anomie and the potential transparency of dwellings that are as regimented as the workers’ quarters at Saishunkan: immaterial and repeated lodgings for interchangeable and weightless lives.

The two museums built as a first fruit of Sejima’s association with Ryue Nishizawa (the O Museum in Nagano and the N Museum in Wakayama), as well as the café in the park at Ibaraki, take the divestment strategy to its last consequences. Enclosures progressively disintegrate, the structure is disaggregated into elements of nearly imperceptible dimensions and volumes are dematerialised, either by fragmenting the programme into a spatial network with no corridors (as in the later project for a theatre at Almere, or the recently completed architectural onomatopoeia that is the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio), or by stratifying uses in individual boxes that do not touch the perimeter (as in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art at Kanazawa, their most important project to date). It is precisely this last building –a circular precinct enclosing a number of prisms and courtyards divided by walkways and orchestrated in a way that is random only in appearance–, where SANAA’s complex simplicity is displayed most convincingly. Disappearance here is not achieved by means of shadows or stage-crafted transparency, but rather through the indifferent extrusion of an entirely immaterial ground plan.

Ultimately, the stacks that make up the Dior flagship store in Tokyo (with the elusive expression of the cast edges on the front) or the New Museum of Modern Art in New York (with its displaced metal mesh boxes simulating a precarious balance) seek weightlessness through the dissolution of scale made possible by the use of a variable section. However, this yearning for levity is not as easily achieved in vertical urban projects, entirely different from the low-lying, landscaped pavilions that had previously dominated the studio’s work. The Zollverein School of Design, with its extraordinary cube, may serve as an intermediate example. Here, the variable section shared with the Dior building or the New York museum is not expressed on the exterior, but rather masked by a façade perforated by randomly positioned square openings of varying dimensions. In this case, immateriality is found through the extreme slimness of the enclosures (possible thanks to the use of hot water coils integrated into the façade using a radiating floor technique) and the provocative disarray of openings, which conceal any trace of tectonic logic. The building thus becomes a bold but weightless icon of the Ruhr Valley’s post-industrial regeneration.

The same quest for an airy, atmospheric architecture is to be found in a number of homes designed independently by each architect: Sejima’s airtight and translucent House S, shielded by a polycarbonate gallery; her dazzling construction in a plum grove, where enclosures and structure blend over a number of layers of steel sheet perforated by gaps to provide a theatrical stage that is implausibly weightless for family living; or even Nishizawa’s fragmented Moriyama House, where rooms to let are spread over the plot

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like an orchestra of boxes in the garden. These cells or precincts are so fierce in their purity that they appear incompatible with the haphazard turmoil of everyday life, let alone with the consumerist hoarding of commodities, rags and gadgets captured by photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki in his series Happy Victims, of rooms swamped in brand items and accessories that are the object of their occupants’ compulsive buying; or with the impenetrably saturated chaos of manga and electronics that are the rooms of the otaku , an urban subculture of young people locked in a self-centred cocoon of physical and mental isolation.

Critics such as Hajime Yatsuka have linked the simplicity of SANAA’s architecture and their lack of spatial and semantic depth with the abbreviated representation of manga comics. Their diagrammatic schematics and extreme slimness (“physical slenderness is very important to me,” Sejima was reported as saying in an interview), has been related to Takashi Murakami’s post-modern Orientalism: a pop artist who, saddling both the alternative underground and designs for Louis Vuitton, has given the language of animé and manga a commercial reading through his ‘superflat’ style, developed on the basis of Poku (pop + otaku). However, a bond established solely on the basis of Sejima and Nishizawa’s ‘superflatness’ would not suffice to justify describing them in the same terms of shallow hedonism and deeprooted nihilism that drove Murakami’s success.

If we are to tread the slippery path of cultural connections, I would rather seek them in the other Murakami, who portrays contemporary Japan’s spiritual vacuity, loneliness and consumerism in that primary yet complex language that links Kafka to Salinger or Carver. His exploration of contemporary values through a hypnotic, jovial and surreal cocktail of lyrical levity, atmospheric sensuality and attention to material detail are perhaps a better parallel to SANAA’s architecture. When Haruki Murakami was awarded the prize named after the Czech author in 2006 (immediately after Harold Pinter and Elfriede Jelinek), many posited him as the next Japanese Nobel prizewinner, the third after Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe. It would not be unreasonable to place a similar wager on Kazuyo Sejima who, together with Ryue Nishizawa, has created a body of work so extreme, subtle and representative of our time that it must by now be beeping on the list of the highest distinctions. SANAA’s immaterial and laconic work would hold as a firm link at the very limit of that chain of voices and silences.

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Radical Practices in constructing Relationships

Yuko Hasegawa

Incomprensible Architecture SANAA’s architectures embrace complexities within deceptively simple appearances. The complexities arise from intangible and mysterious elements rather than apparently complex structures and architectural themes.

One needs to go into another dimension beyond three-dimensional and spatial structure in order to understand their architectural creation. Then what is the fourth dimension? It is rather an ordinary idea to add a “chronological dimension” to the three dimensions in space. This fourth dimension is often referred using various metaphors. For example, Harald Szeeman, a curator, said that modernism represents an example of three-dimensional art, based on masculine principles, and four-dimensional art belongs to feminine principles embracing what is not visible.

SANAA’s architecture has many elements that are impossible to understand unless one actually “experiences” it. In contrast with modern architecture, SANAA has many aspects that cannot be revealed in “representative” media such as plans, models, and photographs. In other words, the “representations” of their architectural works, incorporate ambiguity and chronological elements. They are explorations of parallel stories and visions rather than “representations.”

Three Elements In another text, I wrote about SANAA’s flexibility in liberating themselves from conventional architecture language as one of their characteristics and analyzed it according to three elements. The first is their four-dimensional architectural element. SANAA adds chronological elements such as events and actions to their architectural structures. The second is their flexibility, the third is their permeable approach to reality in their “regressive architecture,” working as a reflector to reveal reality and having minimum intervention…like unnoticeable shadows.

All of the above elements are based upon SANAA’s reactions to contemporary society and environment, after being in contact through their “multichannel sensitivities.” Without idealization or criticism, they “slip” into reality and react to it without any prejudice or hierarchy of values. Koji Taki once made a comment on Sejima’s approach that, “one’s body slips into, without 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Previous Opening Event, 2000 report , Office for 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2002, p. 12.

The Encounters in the 21st Century: Polyphony—Emerging Resonantes , Tankosha, 2004, pp. 28-30.

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any resistance, the abnormality of contemporary society.” SANAA has a unique way of relating to their creations: they simply want to place their architecture and observe what will happen rather than predicting and planning what effect it will have on the surrounding environment.

SANAA’s structures seem to be a volume of architecture that has emerged from a drawn scheme in order to transform various functional conditions/ programs into actual spatial forms. Their method consists of persistent studies, looking at life in reality as it is, and creating architecture based on their observations. Such process involves their unique process of “abstraction.” Instead of adjusting actual conditions to conventional architecture theories, they observe reality and immediately connect their observations to their handiworks, creating conrete charts and models. This is, however, intended or not, “creating diagrams with the intention of experimenting to realize the complexities in forms.” Working with visual materials, such as graphics and volume models, SANAA members were inspired to explore more studies. While it can be called a program-oriented architecture, the forms and designs become boldly abstract and decisions are made by leaps and bounds. It is rather close to a sculptor’s intuition, in which materials beg to have their forms chiselled out. Sejima says that she wants to eliminate the boundaries between software and hardware in architecture, or connect the two. The fusion happens in the working process. In the case of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, they made more than one hundred disc-shaped study models. They consider the most detailed requests from curators, city officials, and other staff members to reflect upon the architectural designs, while making no compromises regarding the multiple corridors penetrating the structure or the appearance of sculptural forms of the building.

There were sudden changes, such as keeping several rooms at the same height and lowering ceilings.

They probably proceed with their project without being able to make a simulation of the final/complete space and its spatial experiences. They begin “playing the game” with unknown factors in the program. They cannot possible grasp the “whole” by completing the physical building. The architectural design reveals itself in time and is given its “wholeness” through the relationship with the people who use the building and the surrounding environment.

Kazuyo Sejima; Masashi Sogabe, Koji Taki, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, and Ryue Nishizawa, Special Issue, Kazuyo Sejima and Associates 1987-1996, Kenchiku Bunka No. 591, Shokokusha Publishing Co. Ltd, Japan, 1996, p.50 Koji Taki, Kazuyo Sejima & Associates 1987-1996, Kenchiku Bunka 51 No. 51, Shokokusha Publishing Co. Ltd, Japan, 1996, p. 48

No Man’s Land/No Architecture Land --and flexibility The conventional concepts of architecture are now completely deconstructed. This was caused by the fact that the relationship between the physical individual body and its surrounding environment was largely transformed at the latter half of the twentieth century. There are more ambiguous areas that do not belong to either nature or the artificial world, without any original landscape or cultural identities. Our bodies are also constructed with conventional flesh and “informationalized” bodies floating in the sea of virtuality. There goes traffic beyond physical boundary lines.

SANAA explores different flexibilities from the physical flexibilities of Modernism, in which the framework stays the same and the inside of the framework can be freely changed. Their flexibility is produced through new situations caused by intangible elements, such as information. For instance, Sejima thinks of the radical possibilities to transform the frameworks of architecture, considering the elimination of architecture itself. She also accepts the situation where users add flexibilities to buildings built without any physical flexibility.

In SANAA’s architecture, the relationships between private and public spaces represent relationships of independent and open systems, as well as solitary and relational elements. There, both individual and communal aspects are emphasized. SANAA transforms conventional families, couples, and communities to equal relationships without hierarchies. They offer bold and interesting solutions in each project. The first proposal came through with Saishunkan Women’s Dormitory (1997), which was critiqued as a “jail” because of its shelter-like individual rooms and boldly-designed communal space. House in a Plum Grove in 2003, designed by Sejima alone, is a private house for a couple with two children and an elderly mother. The relationship between individual and communal spaces is designed with humor and unpredictability. Every room has windows that can be viewd from every other space, making the inside of the house one large space. It is designed so that the children’s rooms will be collected and absorbed back into the whole when they grow up and leave the house.

In the building for 21st Century Museum of Coontemporary Art, Kanazawa, you become unable to separate the physical space of the building you are in from the landscape surrounding the building. Elements such as the room you are in, the corridors, and the cars seen outside of the windows, form multiple layers of vision.

“The transparency (of the architecture) depends on the comprehension of the person experiencing it. On the other hand, it would be boring if one could understand it without experiencing it. It is like discovering how to relate to the building through experiencing it. One receives suggestions from

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the buildings up to a certain point, but after that, one discovers the building oneself so that one can freely walk around it.”

SANAA’s buildings confuse people when they enter them for the first time.

The process we go through from the initial confusion and then to being forced to discover how to move in the building offers a “shelter/therapy” to us, whose imaginations have become poor through constant exposure to enormous amounts of one-way information. We are impoverished through the problem of “being bored,” with the insecurity of not being able to see the “story” we are part of.

Having ambiguous elements in the building, you can make your own understanding and find ways of using the building in the process of “getting used to” it. The architecture provides suggestions and instructions to a certain point, but then one is left alone to make decisions. The structure is, however, created with the precondition that one can always find one’s position in the whole. “Transparency” is a compass/Tool to help the user in the process of exploring flexibility. The transparency is a suggestion of relationship and the implication of solid boundaries.

Through boundaries of transparency, an enormous amount of information flows through. It is up to each individual to take in, imitate, or ignore.

The physical body cannot move over the boundary, however, the “informationalized” body already shares the space beyond the boundary. Varieties of actions, reactions, and observations assist the process of trial and error in using the architectural structure.

After being used by individuals, the architecture is now given the names of programs that were missing at the beginning. Each individual user guides a different program. Each program reveals a different flexibility.

New Language for constructing Relationships – curvature and Randomness Curvature and randomness—two features that have characterized the work of SANAA since their design for The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. At Kanazawa, SANAA sought to create spaces in which art viewers explore their relationship with their surroundings through transparent boundaries. The Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art takes this endeavor a step further. Here, the program’s functions—museum galleries, glass-making studios, and a multi-purpose hall—were laid out appropriately, then wrapped in transparent, curving glass to become autonomous spaces. The building’s glass façade and the spaces separating the rooms function as buffer zones for noise reduction and temperature control.

Most impressive of all, however, is the contrast between the harsh move

GA Sejima Kazuyo + Nishizawa Ryue Dokuhon , A.D.A, EDITA, Tokyo, 2005, p. 280

ment of the hot shops, where high-temperature glass ovens are located, and the graceful stillness of the glass collection exhibition, which contains many antiques. These spaces are placed in confrontation by means of glass walls. Viewers, while appreciating the glass artworks, are simultaneously witness to the drama in which silica obtains form and color in the performance-like process of glassmaking. The activities of the spaces in the Glass Pavilion, one thinks, are conjoined in relationships that seem physiological in how one invigorates the other, like heart, lungs, brain, and other bodily organs. Then, the way exterior light and light from the courtyard interplay on the curved glass surfaces to produce a layered visual experience suggests that SANAA is moving toward increasingly sensitive manipulation of light and reflection. The fluidity obtained by using only curved glass with no right-angled corners is enough, in itself, to softly deconstruct the dignified aplomb of the monumental art museum building standing across the way.

SANAA’s early-period working method was to lay out the program in the building plan, then raise the spaces into form on this basis. More recently, however, one can sense in curves and random forms and apparently random orders the process by which they have moved away from a rigid prescription and gradually become freer. That they have is not due to caprice or playfulness but rather reflects their clear commitment to a guiding vision. They are driven by a desire to establish flexible relationships with the surrounding environment and site conditions and bring exterior and interior spaces into interaction, so as to form a relationship of mutual exchange between the building and its surroundings. The composition of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, for example—a stack of boxes of different sizes randomly shifted off axis—displays a simple lightness of bearing. The building is nevertheless informed throughout with subtle devices aimed at imparting variety to interior lighting and spatial character, in a limited urban setting.

SANAA’s design statement—“By stacking the boxes while shifting them and opening them up, we hope to produce an atmosphere of connectivity between art and the city”—is indicative of their moving toward greater fusion of interior and exterior.

The Louvre at Lens, a series of long, narrow volumes placed one connected to the next in a slightly curving arrangement, also took its departure from the concept of creating a building to respond with fluid intimacy to the shape of its site. The size of each volume reflects the dimension and arrangement of the surrounding cavaliers (remnants of railway tracks for old-time mining cars), and the volumes are placed so as to follow the calm slope of the site. The same concept motivates Onishi Hall, a project undertaken independently by Sejima. Here, the volumes of a multipurpose public facility have freely curving, irregular contours that wrap around the

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rectilinear forms required by the program, thus emphasizing the relationship of connectivity among the volumes and responding to the line of the encompassing site.

Zollverein School of Management and Design is the first building SANAA has completed in Europe. The program functions have been placed separately on four floors equal in area (35m2 on a side) but having varied ceiling heights (3.15m–9.8m). To maintain interior warmth, ground water is circulated through pipes passed through the walls. As such, windows of all sizes could be let in the thin façade walls (30cm thick), which required no insulation materials. When viewed after darkness, the randomly placed windows of various sizes, lit by interior light, gleam like stars in the night sky.

In its vertical stack of functions, the building resembles the New Museum, but here, it is windows that symbolize the relationship established between interior and exterior. Looking outward from the interior, the user appears to be encompassed by walls hung with richly colored paintings, due to the minimal design of the window frames. Moreover, each window view looks precisely like the purely perceptual, physical-sensation-inducing paintings of Gerhard Richter, who works from photographs. This effect of a window view coming to perform as a symbol, just as it is, can also be found in Sejima’s House in a Plum Grove, but here, there is a different intimacy.

Elements of the exterior scenery are converted to something like visual signs in a painting, and people inside the building, experiencing the total effect of these windows, become joined in a relationship with exterior scenery of refined metaphysical character. In the way they have let a square aperture into the roof of the uppermost floor, furthermore, SANAA has succeeded in bringing a slice of the sky into the interior, in a manner suggesting a James Turrell skyspace.

If it were only the design of the windows that set this building apart, we could point to other architectural examples. By simplifying all other design elements to an infinite degree, however, SANAA has taken the interplay between interior and exterior into a new dimension. It is, thus, in their ability to creatively “open things up” that their methods strike one as important.

SANAA constructs the basic elements of a design to suit the specific conditions of the project at hand. Of greatest interest in their work, however, is how, by applying curvature and randomness, they establish quietly provocative relationships of spontaneous character between interior and exterior, or else among interior spaces, in order to empower the user creatively as the building’s chief participant. Through radical practice of the aesthetics of “constructing relationships,” SANAA moves us to discover —and participate in— our surroundings.

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Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

KAZUYO SEJIMA + RYUE NISHIZAWA / SANAA KAZUYO SEJIMA 1956 Born in Ibaraki Prefecture 1981 Graduated from Japan Women’s University with Masters Degree in Architecture

Joined Toyo Ito & Associates 1987 Established Kazuyo Sejima & Associates 1995 Established SANAA with Ryue Nishizawa 2001- Professor at Keio University RYUE NISHIZAWA 1966 Born in Kanagawa Prefecture 1990 Graduated from Yokohama National University with Masters Degree in Architecture

Joined Kazuyo Sejima & Associates 1995 Established SANAA with Kazuyo Sejima 1997 Established Office of Ryue Nishizawa 2001- Associate Professor at Yokohama National University Major Works 1996 Multimedia Workshop, Gifu, Japan

S-House, Okayama, Japan 1997 N-Museum, Wakayama, Japan

M-House, Tokyo, Japan

K-Building, Ibaraki, Japan 1998 Koga Park Café, Ibaraki, Japan 1999 O-Museum, Nagano, Japan 2000 Day Care Center, Kanagawa, Japan

La Biennale di Venezia, 7th International Architecture Exhibition “City of girls” Japanese Pavilion, Venice, Italy

PRADA Beauty Prototype 2001 PRADA Beauty LEEGARDEN Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

Garden Cafe at the 7th International Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul, Turkey 2003 ISSEY MIYAKE by NAOKI TAKIZAWA, Tokyo, Japan

Christian Dior Building Omotesando, Tokyo, Japan 2004 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa, Kanazawa Japan 2006 Zollverein School of management and design, Essen, Germany

The Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion, Toledo, Ohio, USA

Novartis Campus WSJ-158 Office Building, Basel, Switzerland

Current Projects Stadstheater Almere ‘De Kunstlinie’, Almere, the Netherlands Extension of the Institute Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, USA House for China International Practical Exhibition of Architecture, Nanjing, China Naoshima Ferrey Terminal, Kagawa, Japan Learning Center, EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne), Switzerland Louvre Lens, France Derek Lam Shop, New York, USA

Exhibitions 1996 Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa 1987-1996 Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, UK

La Biennale di Venezia , 6th International Architecture Exhibition Emerging Voices Giardini di Castello, Venice, Italy 1997 5-D Space on the Run , The Swedish Museum of Architecture, Stockholm, Sweden 1998 Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa GA Gallery, Tokyo, Japan 1999 Fancy Dance, Japanese contemporary Art after 1990 , Art Sonje Museum, Kyongiu, Korea / Art Sonje Center, Seoul, Korea

The Un-Private House The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, Participation 2000 One Hundred Thousand , Nationaltheater Station, Oslo, Norway Recent work of Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa , Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA La Biennale di Venezia, 7th International Architecture Exhibition Less Aesthetics More Ethics , Arsenale, Venice, Italy

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa Recent Projects Aedes Gallery, Berlin, Germany

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa Recent Projects NAI, Rotterdam, the Netherlands 2001 Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa Recent Projects Ministerio de Fomento, Madrid, Spain

Roofgarden Las Palmas Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 2002 Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, USA

La Biennale di Venezia, 8th International Architecture Exhibition

Installation for the exhibition Arne Jacobson - Absolutely Modern Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark

Urban Creation Shanghai Biennale 2002, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China 2003 Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA Recent Projects

Zumtobel Staff-Lichtforum, Vienna, Austria

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA Ampliacion del IVAM Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA Architecture Design Zeche Zollverein, Essen,Germany

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA , Gallery - MA, Tokyo, Japan

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA , N-museum, Wakayama, Japan

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, USA 2005 Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA , Kanazawa, Japan

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA , Basilica Palladiana de Vicenza, Italy 2006 Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA , HTW Chur, Switzerland

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA , Bauhaus Archiv, Germany 2007 Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA , MUSAC. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA & Walter Niedermayr, deSingel, Belgium

Awards 1998 The Prize of Architectural Institute of Japan, Tokyo, Japan 2000 Erich Schelling Architekturpreis, Kalsruhe, Germany 2002 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture, American Academy of Arts & Letters, N.Y, USA

Architecture Award of Salzburg Vincenzo Scamozzi, Salzburg, Austria 2004 Golden Lion for the most remarkable work in the exhibition Metamorph in the 9th International Architecture

Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia 2005 46th Mainichi Newspaper Arts Award (Architecture Category)

The Rolf Schock Prize in category of visual arts, Sweden 2006 Prize of Architectural institute of Japan, Tokyo, Japan

Building Construction Society prize, Tokyo, Japan

Select Publications 1996 Special issue, Kazuyo Sejima & Associates 1987–1996 , Kenchiku Bunka vol. 51 No.591, Shokokusha Publishing Co. Ltd, Japan

Monograph, Kazuyo Sejima 1988-1996 EL CROQUIS, No.77 (I) , Spain 1998 Special issue, Kazuyo Sejima 1987–1999 / Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa 1995–1999, JA vol. 35,

SHINKENCHIKU-SHA Co. Ltd, Japan 2000 Monograph, Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa 1995–2000 , EL CROQUIS, No.99, Spain 2003 Monograph, KAZUYO SEJIMA + RYUE NISHIZAWA / SANAA WORKS 1995–2003 TOTO Shuppan, Japan 2004 Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa 2000/2004 EL CROQUIS, No.121/122, Spain 2005 GA Sejima Kazuyo + Nishizawa Ryue Dokuhon , A.D.A, EDITA, Japan

GA ARCHITECT 18 Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa /1987–2006 .

A.D.A, EDITA, Japan

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA , Yuko Hasegawa, Electa, Italy 2007 Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA & Walter Niedermayr Hatje Cantz, Germany

Kazuyo Sejima & Associates Works and Projects 1998 PLATFORM I, Chiba, Japan 1990 PLATFORM II, Yamanashi, Japan 1991 Saishunkan Seiyaku Women’s Dormitory, Kumamoto, Japan 1993 Pachinko Parlor I, II, Ibaraki, Japan 1994 Villa in the Forest, Nagano, Japan

Y-HOUSE, Chiba, Japan

Police Box, Tokyo, Japan 1996 Pachinko Parlor I II, Ibaraki, Japan 1998 U-Building, Branch Office, Ibaraki, Japan 2000 Gifu Kitagata Apartment, Gifu, Japan

Small House, Tokyo, Japan

Kozankaku High School Club House, Ibaraki, Japan

hhstyle.com, Tokyo, Japan

Koga Park Café, Ibaraki, Japan 2002 Asahi Shimbun Yamagata Branch Office, Yamagata, Japan 2003 House in a Plum Grove, Tokyo, Japan 2005 Onishi Hall, Gunma, Japan 2006 Dentist Office, Tsuyama, Japan

Office of Ryue Nishizawa Works and Projects 1998 Weekendhouse, Gunma, Japan 2000 TAKEO Mihonchou Honten, Tokyo, Japan 2000 Ichikawa Apartment, Chiba, Japan 2001 House in Kamakura, Kanagawa, Japan 2003 Space design for “LOVE PLANET” exhibition, Kagawa, Japan 2004 Funabashi Apartment, Chiba, Japan

Benesse art site Naoshima office, Kagawa, Japan 2005 Moriyama House, Tokyo, Japan 2006 House A, Tokyo Japan

Agustín Pérez Rubio (Valencia, Spain 1972) Art Historian, art critic and exhibition curator, he is Chief Curator of MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. He was director of the Jornadas de Estudios de la Imagen de la Comunidad de Madrid from 2001-2004. Regular contributor in internationam magazines Duch as NU: The Nordic Art Review (Sweden); Art Journal (Philadelphia), Kalias (Spain), Tema Celeste (Milán), Arts Mediterranea (Milán, Barcelona, Paríi), Atlantica, (Spain), Le Journal des Arts (Paris), among others. He was curator of important shows such as Trasvases: artistas españoles en vídeo (Buenos Aires, Mexico D.F., Lima, 2000); Antro-apologías (Valencia, 2001), Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset (Madrid, 2002); as well as BAD BOYS , the official Spanish off-biennale exhibition within the 50th Venice Biennale; Cruising Danubio (Madrid, 2003), and Tobias Rehberger. “I die everyday. Cor I 15,31”, (Madrid, 2005). His work as Curator at MUSAC has brought him to co-curate group shows such as Fusion. Aspects of Asian Culture in the MUSAC Collection together with Kristine Guzmán, or Globos Sonda / Trial Balloons , together with Octavio Zaya and Yuko Hasegawa; aside from curating and editing extensive individual shows of artists such as Dora Garcia, Julie Mehretu, Muntean & Rosemblum, Pierre Huyghe – together with Marta Gerveno-, or the team of Japanese architects SANAA. He was also co-curator together with Octavio Zaya of the Project Rooms of ARCO ’06 entitled Curva de Persecución / Pursuit Curve , not to mention his project Present-Future together with Katerina Gregos for Artissima -Torino´06.

Kristine Guzmán (Manila, Philippines, 1974), is an architect with a Master’s degree in Architectural Restoration from the Madrid’s Universidad Politécnica of and is currently General Coordinator at MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León). She has worked on the coordination of cultural and exhibition projects at Espacio UNO (MNCARS, Madrid) and in the Jornadas de Estudio de la Imagen de la Comunidad de Madrid , as well as on editing and translating for various publications, in collaboration with both national and international institutions. She coordinated the exhibitions, Ofelias y Ulises. En torno al Arte Español Contemporáneo (at the 49th Biennale in Venice) and Apricots along the Street by Pipilotti Rist . Likewise she was co-curator, together with Agustín Pérez Rubio, of the exhibition Fusion: Aspects of Asian Culture in the MUSAC Collection and was assistant curator of the exhibition Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA.

Luis Fernández-Galiano (1950) is an architect and professor at the School of Architecture of Madrid’s Universidad Politécnica. Editor of the journals AV/ Arquitectura Viva, he writes on architecture for Spain’s leading newspaper, El País. A member of the Royal Academy of Doctors, he has been Cullinan Professor at Rice University, a visiting scholar at the Getty Center of Los Angeles and a visiting critic at Princeton, Harvard and the Berlage Institute; and has taught courses at the Menéndez Pelayo and Complutense universities. President of the jury in the 9th Venice Architecture Biennial and in the XV Chile Architecture Biennial, expert and juror of the Mies van der Rohe European Award, he has curated the exhibitions El espacio privado in Madrid and Extreme Eurasia in Tokyo, and has been on the jury of several international competitions. Among his books are La Quimera Moderna , Fire and Memory (MIT Press) and Spain Builds, the latter in collaboration with New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Yuko Hasegawa is a Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT). Her most recent project is Marlene Dumas-Broken White at MOT (2007). She has co-curated media_city seoul 2006 at the Seoul Museum of Art (2006) and Sensorium at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (2006 - 2007).

Other curated exhibitions include The Encounter in the 21st Century: Polyphony - Emerging Resonances , the inaugural exhibition of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2004) and Matthew Barney - Drawing Restraint (2005) in the same museum. She was appointed as Artistic Director of the 7th International Istanbul Biennial (2001) and as Co-Curator of the 4th Shanghai Biennale (2002). She is also the board member of CIMAM and Professor of the Department of Art Science, Tama Art University in Tokyo.

JUNTA DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN CULTURE & TOURISM COUNCIL Councilor Dña. Silvia Clemente Municio Secretary General D. José Rodríguez Sanz-Pastor Director General of Cultural Promotions and Institutions D. Alberto Gutiérrez Alberca

FUNDACIÓN SIGLO PARA LAS ARTES DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN General Director D. Jesús Mª Gómez Sanz Visual Arts Director D. Rafael Doctor Roncero

MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León Director Rafael Doctor Roncero Chief Curator Agustín Pérez Rubio General Coordinator Kristine Guzmán Administration Management Andrés de la Viuda Delgado Comunication and Press Izaskun Sebastián Marquínez Education and Cultural Action Belén Sola Exhibition and Projects Coordination Marta Gerveno Carlos Ordás Tania Pardo Library and Documentation Center Araceli Corbo Register Koré Escobar ACQUISITIONS COMMITTEE D. Jesús M. Gómez Sanz D. Rafael Doctor Roncero D. Agustín Pérez Rubio Dña. Estrella de Diego D. José Guirao Cabrera D. Javier Hernando Dña. Mª Jesús Miján D. Octavio Zaya

This book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA organized by MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain. January 20—May 1, 2007. The 1:2 scale mock-up model of the Flower House (photos on page 3 and 196) was constructed especially for this exhibition.

EXHIBITION

PUBLICATION

Curator Agustín Pérez Rubio

Publisher ACTAR MUSAC

Assistant Curator Kristine Guzmán SANAA Exhibition Design Kazuyo Sejima Ryue Nishizawa Sam Chermayeff Register Koré Escobar Installation Artefacto, S.L. Emacryl S.A. Mariano Javier Román Martínez Roberto Gómez Blanco Lighting Lledó Iluminación Shipping Schenker Deutschland AG Insurance Aon Gil y Carvajal Photo Credit Ramon Prat, SANAA We apologize if, due to reasons wholly beyond our control, some of the photo sources have not been listed.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of copyright holders and of the publisher.

With the support of

Editor Sam Chermayeff Agustin Pérez Rubio Tomoko Sakamoto Editorial Coordination Angela Pang Etsuko Yoshii Kristine Guzmán Design Actar Pro Essays Luis Fernandez-Galiano Kristine Guzmán Yuko Hasegawa Agustín Pérez Rubio Translations Aitor Araúz Sonia Berjer Photography Ramon Prat, Takashi Homma, SANAA, Kazuyo Sejima & Associates and Office of Ryue Nishizawa Digital Production Oriol Rigat, Carmen Galán Printing Ingoprint S.A. © SANAA, Kazuyo Sejima & Associates and Office of Ryue Nishizawa for their works © The authors, for their texts and translations © 2007, ACTAR & MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, for the edition All rights reserved.

ISBN (ACTAR) 978-84-96540-70-5 (Trade Edition) ISBN (MUSAC) 978-84-935356-4-3 (Museum Edition, available only in museum) DL B-16014-07 Printed and bound in Spain

This exhibition has been sponsored by the Program Antoni de Montserrat 2007, summoned yearly by Casa Asia.

ACTAR Roca i Batlle 2-4 E-08023 Barcelona Tel. +34 93 418 77 59 Fax +34 93 418 67 07 info@actar.com www.actar.com ACTAR (US Office) 158 Lafayette Street, 5th Floor New York, NY 10013 Tel. +1 212 966 2207 Fax. +1 212 966 2214 michael@actar.com MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses 24 E-24008 León Tel. +34 98 709 00 00 Fax. +34 98 709 11 11 musac@musac.org.es www.musac.org.es Distribution Actar D Roca i Batlle 2-4 08023 Barcelona Tel. +34 93 417 49 93 Fax +34 93 418 67 07 office@actar-d.com www.actar-d.com Acknowledgements Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa and Agustín Pérez Rubio would like to acknowledge the trust, assistance, support and dedication of the following people, without whom this book and exhibition would not have been possible.

Candice Breitz Francisco Javier Casado Pacios Cristina Díaz Moreno Rafael Doctor Roncero Luis Fernández Galiano Efrén García Grinda Menene Gras Yuko Hasegawa Yoshiko Isshiki Yasuo Moriyama Miyako Maekita Ramon Prat Jesús Salamanca David Villanueva Emilio Villanueva Octavio Zaya