All these activities around Shinohara in the Continent have recently had a very significant starting point in Zürich, where two volumes issued by the Swiss publisher Park Books were presented on January 24th. One is the long-awaited second edition of “Kazuo Shinohara - 3 Houses”, which first appeared in 2019, published by Quart Verlag. Its editors, the young couple of Swiss architects Christian Dehli and Andrea Grolimund, painstakingly redrew three of Shinohara’s most iconic projects (the House in White, 1966; the House in Uehara, 1976; and the House in Yokohama, 1984), matching the original scales of the construction drawings produced in the Shinohara Studio and offering little-known information. It is in itself a beautiful love declaration, which is not limited to the two authors, but is expressed and expanded by the 219 backers who crowdfunded the first edition. With the second edition, this love can be further shared.
Indefatigable, Andrea and Christian are also behind a major achievement to make Shinohara’s ideas accessible to a larger community: the presentation of “Residential Architecture”, the first complete English translation of Kazuo Shinohara's book “Jūtaku kenchiku” (1964). Even though there has been a sharp increase in books about Shinohara in the West in the last two decades, most of his own texts remain either untranslated or badly rendered in English, so the apparition of “Residential Architecture” is in itself an occasion to celebrate. It's been a long process, plagued with possibly avoidable problems, but Andrea Grolimund and Christian Dehli have come through it with stubbornness and determination, producing a very significant book.
Book interior, Japanese edition. “Residential Architecture” by Kazuo Shinohara.
2. A translation into a Western language of a book in Japanese always has to face two main challenges: Firstly, from the design point of view, Japanese books are always difficult to transpose into Latin script, because they are routinely printed in vertical lines from top right to left. But when the original text, like this one, includes images interspersed in the paragraphs, like slides in a lecture, it becomes a nightmare for graphic designers because it becomes impossible to keep the original layout.
Besides, the first edition of “Jūtaku kenchiku” was rather poorly printed, belonging to a popular and affordable collection aimed at a general public, in a small format typical in Japan (17,5 x 11,5 cm), on cheap paper and with small images using photographs surely taken from other publications. Book publishing in Japan, always very important in volume, has usually been austere in quality, especially in this type of theoretical or literary books.
In this edition in English, editors and designers have taken a bold approach, which probably won't satisfy all readers, but which has its own merits. Using a larger format than the original, thus allowing for bigger letters, they have separated text from images. These can therefore be printed also bigger, and after a careful digital restoration, they look like they were newly produced. This feature alone certainly helps for a better visual analysis of what Shinohara is explaining. But it makes for a syncopated reading, going from text to images and back, which is probably not what Shinohara intended.
Overall, though, the graphic design of this English version, with its careful choice of typeface, the marking of paragraphs, and the meticulous reserve of blank spaces to denote the location of images in the original publication, has to be lauded for its lightness, clarity, and beauty, looking very much like a Japanese well-composed book, typographic mannerisms and all.
Book interior, Japanese edition. “Residential Architecture” by Kazuo Shinohara.
The second difficulty, obviously, is the translation itself, which in the case of the (un)famously intricate expressions of Shinohara is even more difficult. When they first appeared, Shinohara’s texts were, for the most part, poorly translated, if at all. Only with the publication in 2011 of the 2G double-issue monograph dedicated to Shinohara, with texts by the late David Stewart, Shin'ichi Okuyama and myself, were a few of his more relevant articles revised and properly rendered into English. Since then, little else has been done, except for the translations of “The House is Art” (1961) and “Subjectivity of Residential Design” (1964), by Tomoko Sakamoto and myself (2015); or Seng Kuan's “Kazuo Shinohara: Traversing the House and the City” (2021), in which some newly translated texts are included.
The translation into English of “Residential Architecture” has been a joint effort by David Stewart (to whom Dehli and Grolimund dedicate the book), Shin'ichi Okuyama and Kenichi Nakamura, both of them architects and professors like Shinohara himself. It has been a long endeavor that has taken several years of discussions, slowed at the end by Stewart's illness. But after all these efforts, the good news is that the final text feels coherent and is successful, as it is a great introduction for anybody interested in Shinohara's architecture, often believed to be obscure.
In this regard, I suspect that Shinohara wrote in a deliberately complicated way not so much out of literary incompetence but out of a desire to define himself as a deep thinker based on textual impenetrability. In fact, though, his ideas are simple and powerful, so they don't need any intellectualoid complication, but they are written as they are written. And the English text of this translation reads fluently, smoothing out many of the wrinkles of the original. Sometimes a bit too much so, because the harshness of Shinohara’s Japanese is somehow part of his style, but this edition manages to become a reliable source and an instant referent.
Kazuo Shinohara, House in Kugayama, Suginami Ward, Tokyo, 1954. Photograph by Chūji Hirayama.
3. "Residential Architecture" is a key book by Shinohara that, for many years, has been a prescribed reading in architectural schools in Japan. It's not so much a coherent endeavor as it is an amalgamation of several texts, some of them previously published. Its three parts are quite disparate and, in reality, don’t quite conform to the original commission by Kinokuniya Shoten, the original publisher, of a book about residential architecture in Japan.
But that’s for the better, as the editor quickly noted, when the first manuscript that Shinohara delivered, quite academic in tone and based on his research for his doctoral thesis, wasn’t engaging enough. He wanted a more personal approach. That change in tone and aim proved crucial in the future affirmation of Kazuo Shinohara as a thinker of architecture.
The book is based, like so much of Shinohara's reasoning, on dichotomies. Take, for instance, the need he has to differentiate Western architecture from Japanese architecture in the first chapter. In a rather forced way, he brings forward arguments that ultimately, although not necessarily true or sufficiently explained, serve his own purpose as a designer. That is: basically, to embrace architectural traditions in Japan as a counterpoint against Metabolism (another dichotomy), which was starting to go mainstream by then.
Kazuo Shinohara, Tanikawa House, Suginami Ward, Tokyo,1958, floor plan of Kazuo Shinohara Estate.
Rem Koolhaas declared that Metabolism was the only architectural avant-garde not stemming from the West. Shinohara would disagree. For him, it was another form of Western corporate capitalism turned cool architecture. That solitary standing point by Shinohara was perhaps the reason why, in the 1990s, Koolhaas invited him to contribute to a large hotel project in Euralille, which remained unbuilt but which "would have been the best Japanese building outside Japan," as Koolhaas later explained.
The core of the book is, in fact, the second and third chapters, which Shinohara used to his own advantage to promote himself within the somewhat impermeable architecture milieu in Japan at the time. The second chapter, “Contemporary conditions,” devoted to establishing a conceptual framing for his own work, starts with a crucial text, “The House is Art”, which, quite bizarrely, was only first translated into English in 2015 by Tomoko Sakamoto and me as an annex of my doctoral thesis, “Five Forms of Emotion”. But it has to be noted that the original text that we used, first published in 1962 and later reprinted in the book Jūtako-ron (1970; several reprints since), is quite divergent from the one included in “Residential Architecture”. The other articles included in this chapter, the shortest of the three, are also seeds of further developments. Maybe calling them a “theory”, as Shinohara named them later on, is going a tad too far, but are nonetheless a basis for further developments in his career.
The third chapter, “The Design of Space,” is where Shinohara shows how he applied his conceptual framing to his seven projects built up to 1961, from House in Kugayama (1954) through House with a Big Roof (1961), all of them more or less dependent on Shinohara's take on traditional Japanese architecture. In this sense, the book has to be read not so much as a starting point but as a point of arrival, as a closure rather than as an opening. Indeed, in 1964, the year of publication of “Residential Architecture”, which is the year of the first Tokyo Olympics and the opening of Japan to the world after the Second World War, is also the year in which Shinohara designs simultaneously two houses that signify a sharp departure and a courageous exploration of new grounds for his architecture, House in White and House of Earth.
Kazuo Shinohara, House in Komae, Komae, Tokyo, 1960, north elevation of Kazuo Shinohara Estate.
His designs would never be the same after that. And this is exactly what he meant when he said, taking by surprise both followers and detractors that pigeonhole him as a “traditionalist”, that tradition could be a departure point for architecture, but never a destination. When he published this little book, he was ready to jump forward towards unknown territories.
Text.- Enric Massip-Bosch.
