HOUSE IN UEHARA: URBAN TREE DWELLING

House in Uehara (1975-1976) is located in a welloff

neighborhood in Central Tokyo, consisting of
single-family detached houses no more than threestory
high. It is a densely packed semi-commercial
district of rather small plots along streets with no
sidewalks, a very common situation in Tokyo and
elsewhere in urban Japan.
It was the urban residence for the photographer
Kiyoji Ōtsuji, for whom Shinohara had designed
some twelve years before the House with an
Earthen Floor (1963), a very small holiday dwelling
in Nagano Prefecture, not far from Tanikawa House,
made of wood, paper and earth.
At Tokyo it was going to be very diff erent. Building
regulations demanded either a setback from the
front property line, giving the possibility of rising
up to three storeys, or keep a fi ve-meter maximum
cornice height if facing directly the street.
Given that the site is rather small (barely a 10x10
m plot),2999 a setback was not really an option for
the required program, and therefore the house
stands right in front of the street, fi ve meter high,
occupying almost all the plot available.
When the design was virtually fi nished the client
found additional fi nancial resources and a thirdfl
oor minimal addition was included. This new
volume keeps the required setback and is deposited
as a light-weight structure over the fl at roof slab of
the previous design.
Shinohara explains this restriction matter-offactly,
as the primordial (and somehow inevitable)
condition that sparked the whole design as it is:
“Because of building restrictions, the height of the
side facing the street was limited to 5 meters, but
the use of the beamless slab made it possible to
provide adequate ceiling heights.”300
CONSTRUCTION AND SPACE
But this condition alone doesn’t seem suffi cient
to explain the fi nal result and all the construction
options adopted in this house, which are many and
quite unconventional.
Even allowing for the primordial choice of the
fl at roof slab to get the maximum headroom, it is
quite evident from the construction drawings that
it is not ‘beamless’ in a strict sense: the six pillars
constituting the vertical structure are connected
by way of beams embedded in the slab and that
are roughly double its thickness, protruding
underneath.
All these structural elements, though, are concealed by a continuous white gypsum-
board
ceiling concealing the insulation. The total
thickness of the roof system is 29 cm, plus almost
4 cm more for the roof waterproofi ng, indeed a
slender dimension overall. The fi nal headroom of
the second fl oor is a mere 2.42 m.
Moreover, the choice of a diff erent construction
system for the intermediate fl ooring, doesn’t
seem very eff ective in terms of gaining headroom:
it consists of a wooden structure made of planks
measuring 23.5 cm, 3.8 cm thick, placed at 30 cm,
supporting a double-plywood fl oor 2.7 cm thick,
and totally measuring about 26 cm, which is roughly
the thickness of the roof slab system, and certainly
thicker than the slab itself, which measures a mere
14 cm across.
Besides, in order to have an adequate height in the
fi rst fl oor, with a headroom of 2.5 m, Shinohara
excavates the plot and places its level some 40 cm
below the street level. It seems clear that other
structural or construction choices could have been
considered and they would have been at least as
eff ective as the solution adopted by Shinohara.
Shinohara always explained the structure of
House in Uehara as the best possible technical
solution given the conditions of the site and the
low budget. But his insistence in this issue is all
the more suspicious if we realize that, in fact,
those conditions are the common rule in urban
Japan. Conversely, there may be reasons why only
one House in Uehara has been realized and its
construction system has not been widely adopted.
These reasons hint at a less-than-rational approach
to th eeff ectiveness of the method devised by
Shinohara.
Moreover, if we follow the sketches of the process
of design we’ll realize that, at an advanced stage,
the shape of the house is already defi ned by the
bracing system of the structure supporting a fl at
roof.
But this system takes diff erent confi gurations in
diff erent drawings, hinting not only that it was not
inevitable and there were choices to be made, but
probably that the shape of the structure was not
a given condition by the structural engineer,3011 as
it would have been expected from an structurally
optimized system (and then it would have
inevitably referred to a preexisting, probably
conventional model), but rather the opposite.
Or, to formulate it in a diff erent way: Shinohara’s
quest for bringing into the house a non-domestic
emotion was the main guide to go along, pursued
in complete intellectual freedom, to which
construction system and calculations were
subordinate. That much is clear when he speaks
of the “wildness [spontaneity] I felt in the actual
design process.”3022
The non-domestic emotion looked for by Shinohara
is provided in the House in Uehara by the structural
elements, a series of tree-like pillars and bracings
like those of Tanikawa House, this time in rough
concrete fi nish,3033 not unlike the traditional shibui
taste.3044
Comparatively, their dimensions are extraordinarily
big for a house, out of scale, belonging more to
the world of the road infrastructures built in Tokyo
from the mid-1960s on than to the domestic realm.
Their dimension is in this sense more public than
private, a fi rst nod towards the infl uence of the
‘city’ in the design of the house. But there will
be many more, making of this project the fi rst in
which such relationship is acknowledged:
“In a typical small-scale residential street not
too distant from Shibuya Station -which [...] had
long been the point of departure of my urban
theory- I designed House in Uehara in 1976. And
here I introduced in a new design theme the task
of establishing a direct relationship with the
surrounding cityscape.”3055
This cityscape is taken not just as an abstract
background, but as an inspirational source to
provide the house with emotions, so that it
responds "in earnest to the ambient non-uniform
situations".3066
It provides both with a conceptual frame -that
of overlapping, chaotic encounters- and with a
tactile atmosphere to respond to: "There is a public
bathhouse behind the house, and the smoke from
its chimney fi nds a place in the landscape."3077
“WHAT IS OBSCENE IS WHAT IS HIDDEN”
House in Uehara stirred many comments when it
was fi rst published, centered around its ‘violence’
-and it is still viewed nowadays as a wild interior,
although we have all grown accustomed to strong
emotions in the meantime.
Certainly it has the great care for detail and
material qualities like any of the houses ever
designed by Shinohara, but none of their
conventional comfort, elegance or asceticism.
Many of the frames of the Japanese fi lm director
Yasuhirō Ozu could serve to indicate the quiet
mood for Shinohara’s previous houses, and in
fact this relationship has been noted in several
occasions.3088 But from House in Uehara on they no
longer serve to explain them.
To fi nd the wilderness and freedom of design
that House in Uehara conveys we should retort
to the movies of Nagisa Ōshima and their “need
to question social constraints, and to similarly
deconstruct received political doctrines”,3099 as
seen in his line of fi lms starting by "Death by
Hanging" (1968) up to "In the Realm of the Senses"
(1976).310
When questioned in court about the unsimulated
sexual scenes of “In the Realm of the Senses”, he
“formulated a defense that could apply to almost
all his work: ‘Nothing that is expressed is obscene.
What is obscene is what is hidden’.”3111
By the 1970s the zeitgeist for individualism
was already global, and refl ected at the same
the disillusionment with the failures of the
revolutionary dreams of the late 1960s and the
necessity to state personal freedom.
This can be seen very crudely in the French fi lm
Themroc (1973), dubbed in several countries as
’The Urban Troglodite’ or ‘The Urban Caveman’.
Directed by Claude Faraldo and starring Michel
Piccoli, it was made on a low budget with no
intelligible or meaningful dialog, thus enhancing its
‘sauvage’ tone.
It tells the story of a French blue collar worker
who rebels against modern society, reverting into
an urban caveman. The fi lm’s scenes of incest and
cannibalism earned it adults-only ratings, but this
fact didn’t prevent it of becoming a cult movie
still now regularly shown at universities and cineforums.
In one of its most memorable scenes, the main
character opens a big hole in his fl at by hammering
the façade to pieces, carving it out like if it were a
cave, opening the interior to the outside world, for
all to see: what is obscene is what is hidden.
To imagine Shinohara as a Piccoli mallet in hand
opening up his house would be perhaps going a tad
too far, but the truth is that House in Uehara is his
fi rst design which is openly exposed to the street.
At the same time it generates several sorts of
relationships with its immediate surroundings, using
diff erent compositional devices:
It cantilevers part of the second fl oor generating a
void that takes in the exterior space, and protrudes
a volume above the roof line pointing upward; it
opens it up the main rooms of the house towards
the street, albeit in a suff used or indirect way
through the triangular windows, wider on top and
narrower below; it gazes outside from the third
fl oor eye-like openings, that resemble a creature
inhabiting the top of the tree-like structure
underneath, and in fact refer to the act of looking
of the inhabitant inside.
But for all these mechanisms, House in Uehara is in
reality one more step forward towards recognizing
the city or, more precisely, the urban landscape, as
a reference for the domestic designs of Shinohara.
In previous projects we can see a progression
towards this opening to the city. Notably in House
in Higashi-Tamagawa (1971-1973) where the
interior recalls urban landscapes photographed by
Shinohara in his overseas trips [photo of interior
plus photo of Granada].
And in the extension of the same house, the
Higashi-Tamagawa Complex (1980-1982), the
lessons of House in Uehara will prove valuable: here
Shinohara employs again a cantilever, and explicitly
uses it as a compositional device to connect both
buildings, using the void and the projection of the
volume as clues to a virtual unity.
The space within this cantilever, a studio cum
library for the client, is referred to by Shinohara as
an opening framing the exterior.3122 What matters
here is how this relationship with the exterior takes
place in this project: the domestic interior needs
to be ‘alienated’ by distorting its conventional
horizontality, and only then can be capable of
establishing a tête-à-tête interchange with the
exterior.
THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN IDEA
It is true, though, that the structural system and,
even more importantly, its construction on site,
were meant to be innovations to be replicated, and
in that sense House in Uehara has to be seen as a
prototype, however unconventional and diffi cult to
serialize it might be.
The concrete shell of two storeys was poured in
one go, creating a single volume that was later on
subdivided with a wooden structure, thus forming
the second fl oor like a sort of inhabitable platform
perched on the branches of a tree.
This method is akin to the subdivision method used
at House in White, where the whole volume was
divided both vertically and horizontally. The main
diff erence, though, is that in House in White the
‘third space’, the hidden unconscious of the house,
was to be in House in Uehara precisely the main
living space.
Living in this space is not exactly easy: one
revolves always around the recurrent presence
of the structure in the relatively small plan,
calling for constant attention on the part of the
dwellers, getting literally in the way and actually
conditioning life inside the house.
Even arranging the plan and giving appropriate
passage to the inhabitants called for some
compositional awkwardness, most clearly evident in
the nook provided to give access to the bedrooms.
Shinohara sees that as somehow natural that needs
not further reworking: “I solved the problem of this
brace simply by according a detour around it. This
should not be regarded as a compromise, but rather
a direct recognition of fact.”3133
If the ‘misalignment’ between structure and
plan recalls the operation of Tanikawa House
of superimposing two diff erent systems, the
‘naturality’ of the recognition of fact in House
in Uehara goes one step forward reaching what
Shinohara terms ‘savagery’, borrowing the term
from Claude Lévi-Strauss.3144
For Shinohara ‘savagery’ is the plain
acknowledgement of crude juxtaposition as a basis
for design, resonating with the way the chaotic city
outside is produced, “[...] responding in earnest to
the ambient non-uniform situations [of the chaotic
cityscape that is Tokyo].”315
Only when Shinohara is capable of introducing
‘savagery’ as a key concept in his designs, is
he capable of dealing with the city and, more
precisely, with the urban landscape, and develop
further his ideas.
THE COCOON AND THE TRANSGRESSOR
Many of the instances in which juxtaposition plays
an emotional role in Shinohara’s work involve the
contrast between a private interior (the cocoon)
and an external fi gure (the transgressor) that
apparently does not belong there.
More often than not the role of transgressor is given
to structural elements that pierce or occupy the
cocoon, seemingly regardless of its inhabitants.
From this chance encounter or misalignment, of
possible Surrealist roots, a new meaning is derived,
a new expression of domestic space is achieved,
and a new consciousness or awareness of the
fragility of contemporary life and its many tolls on
the aesthetical experience is attained.
Even when not being a transgressor, structure
always played a critical role in the defi nition of
Shinohara’s works, to the extent that he regularly
engaged structural engineers as consultants, even
for the smallest of his houses. Although adhering
to conventional techniques at the beginning of
his career, when the spaces of his houses were
characterized by structural elements directly
related with traditional Japanese architecture,
Shinohara’s ‘tour de force’ with structure was part
of an eff ort to go beyond traditional construction
methods and carry structural possibilities to the
limits.
But the examples taken by Shinohara from
Japanese architecture in his fi rst period are not the
traditional, light-timber and fragile houses, even
though his designs are built like them. Instead, the
interiors of houses such as House with a Big Roof
(1960-1961) or House with an Earthen Floor (1963)
recall old farmhouses or sake breweries, or the
heavy wooden structures of temples and shrines.
The role of these structural elements in these
earlier interiors is, in spite of their big scale,
reassuring by evoking past spatial experiences,
fi xing domestic life beyond the passage of time, but
becoming a presence that will only grow bigger in
time.
Linked to the structural experiment of House
in Uehara, and close nearby, is the quasicontemporary
House in a Curved Road (1976-1978).
It presents itself as a shell-like interior pierced by
huge structural elements capable of erasing any
complacent domestic feeling of the house.
The original pictures of this house published by
Shinohara show some Thonet-like chairs inhabiting
this space, representing the maximum fragility of
human life confronting the permanence and solidity
of the concrete structure.
ANTI-DOMESTIC HOUSE
Even if Shinohara’s interiors are for the most part
remarkably comfortable, domesticity in Shinohara’s
work is never complacent or banal, but is rather
a challenge to conventions, both practical and
intellectual, a challenge that demands an active
response from the inhabitants of his houses.
In another memorable scene of “Themroc”, Piccoli
throws all the furniture of the house through the
newly opened mouth of the cave. There is no space
there for conventional domesticity, and all props of
civilization must go.
At House in Uehara, there’s no furniture at all,
except for a long table with benches, very similar
to those of the holiday retreat of the family at
the House with an Earthen Floor. All life revolves
around these very basic and neutral pieces of
furnishings, and in the mind of Shinohara there’s no
need of other props.
REACHING HIGH UP
In Shinohara’s designs there is always a hint
towards verticality. Be it a simple ladder reaching
up, or a skylight, or just a double-height hall,
the vertical dimension is present in many of his
projects, remarkably in the smallest ones.
We can read the evolution undergone by the
projects of Shinohara, from House in White to
House in Yokohama, as an aspiration, or reaching,
towards height. More precisely, towards the
inhabiting of the highest point.
In House in White height builds the symbolic role
of the central pillar, which rises above standard
domestic heights towards an abstract, fl at ceiling,
marking the maximum visual dimension of the
house. But the real height of the house is negated.
In Tanikawa House the potential of reaching high
is explicitly acknowledged, not only by leaving the
tree-like structure exposed and accessible, but
specially by incorporating as a main prop of the
spatial experience of the meditation room a freestanding
stair that acts as hint on how to move or
dwell vertically in this space.
These fi rst dwellers of the highest point of Tanikawa
House will literally be taken as the inhabitants of
House in Uehara. The permanent residential space
in it will be the tree-platform, and its inhabitants
will need to negotiate permanently their way
around the concrete branches where they live.
In House in Uehara there is yet a higher point than
the inhabitable platform: the path continues above
towards another room, very distinct from the lower
fl oor: it is a self-supporting shell, rounded like a
tree canopy and with views opening towards the
exterior. Above the trees, the vision of the forest.
It will be this newly found shell, with its main
characteristic of being visually un-structural and
its malleability to confi gure shapes and create
relations that will be the basis for Shinohara’s fi nal
synthesis in House in Yokohama.