House in Uehara

This house is located in Uehara, a well-to-do suburb of Tokyo less than half an hour from the city’s financial district, and slightly beyond the metropolitan ring railway that includes Shinjuku and Tokyo stations. As is common in such neighbourhoods, in recent years plots here have been divided and subdivided.

Consequently, the Uehara lot is quite small and the dwelling itself is some 9 metres on one side with no garden, while the main façade and carport give directly onto the narrow road. The client was an art photographer and the ground floor comprises his studio with a darkroom.

The upper storey is composed principally of the standard Japanese living-dining-kitchen space, although the kitchen and stair areas are partially screened by a massive articulated concrete pillar. This monolith burgeons with great struts rising to support the beamless concrete flat-slab roof and is part of a giant forest-like order whose tops are imposed and revealed throughout the residential storey.

The second-floor plan evokes the divisional plan-and-section arrangement of House in White from ten years earlier, with its sheer Japanese cedar pillar. In addition to the main living space, it contains a square master bedroom with a small matted granny room sandwiched between this bedroom and the bathroom at rear. A request by the client, virtually an afterthought, caused the children’s room to be situated under a corrugated, and structurally separate, vault that results in a diminutive third storey set on the roof.

House in Uehara represents a dramatic personification of “gap” and “nakedness”. However, the far more demanding concrete frame is the work of Toshihiko Kimura, foremost Japanese structural consultant of his generation and responsible for all of Shinohara’s concrete designs from the mid-1960s onward. As explained below, the intermediate floor is of wood, whereas the structural work required of what would normally have been the transverse beams of a beamed-slab is transposed into three vertical planes parallel to the main façade.

Much has been made of the potential chaos resulting from this arrangement in the intermediate residential storey. However, minimal seating furniture was used and the life of the house turns on the presence of a long, rough wooden table with benches, just as in an ordinary Japanese or Mediterranean farm dwelling, where a parlour would be left for only the most important occasions. Similarly, Shinohara was always at pains to emphasize that in this house, or indeed any of his houses framed in concrete, such as the House in Higashi-Tamagawa (1971–1973), what might appear to a non-Japanese architect as over-detailing was simply a reflection of the minimum anti-seismic structural regulations in the greater Tokyo region.

“The overhead roof is a beamless slab supported by six columns [in three planes] with unequal pairs of perpendicular diagonal braces. Over the carport, a corner section of wall is suspended from the upper ends of the larger braces, and only here does the second floor translate as a cantilevered concrete slab. In the rest of the house, the walls rise directly from floor to roof. Since the remainder of the second-storey floor is framed in wood, it was possible to execute the two-storey walls in a single pour. On the inner side, plywood to which insulation had been cemented was used as formwork, and this constitutes the interior walls, later on painted. The partial cantilevered structure was necessary to provide space to park two cars outside the first floor work area and studio.

Because of a building restriction, the height of the street façade was limited to 5 metres, but use of a beamless slab enabled the provision of adequate ceiling heights. At the same time, the braces needed for the roof slab created problems in the floor plan, and particularly in the area around the freestanding central post, where a massive 45-degree brace runs directly in between the top of the entrance stairway and the living room. 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.

After the design had been completed, the owner decided to place an additional living space atop the roof, and the style I chose there was completely different from that of the house proper. Again, this seemed to me to be an accretion of fact. For me, a more significant point was that the large spaces I have always taken as my ‘theatre of operations’, are here nowhere to be found. They had to be replaced by a collection of much smaller spaces, whose combination became a new problem. It was in this connection that the concept of ‘savagery’ arose shortly after the beginning of my Third Style.”
Kazuo Shinohara

Text for House in Uehara, Shinkenchiku, vol. 52, no. 1, Tokyo, January 1977 (first published in English in Japan Architect, Tokyo, February 1977).