DESIGNWORKS Vol.12

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Interview with Norihito Nakatani"Urban Architecture and Organizational Design - “Dandyism” in Architecture"Interviewer: Design Works 12 has focused on architectural works designed with an awareness of the urban context in the cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. Professor Norihito Nakatani has taught at Osaka City University and is currently studying architectural history engineering at Waseda University. We have been fortunate enough to have him visit several of the works in Tokyo and Osaka that are featured in this issue, as well as the new Tokyo Main Office building, and give us his impression of these works. Professor Nakatani, I'd like to begin today by asking your impression of these buildings from the standpoint of a place to work or live in the city. Secondly, I'd like to ask you to reinterpret these works not simply as buildings but in the urban context and historical context of Osaka, Tokyo and so on. Finally, I would like you to comment on the significance of being rooted in such cities but at the same time functioning as a design organization. Impressions of Takenaka’s recent design worksNakatani: I also once spent some time doing design work in an organization. It's my impression that the things needed by society are the same now as they have always been. I don't think they'll change much in the future, either. For that reason, it's my impression that the needs of the design departments of architectural firms are basically constant. For this reason, in general the building takes shape broadly as the architect analyzes and develops the functions and spaces that are needed. But on top of that, the designer adds a little "something extra" to make the building stand out in the city. In this sense, I think the idea of the midair stage in the case of the Toyota Corolla Shin-Osaka Headquarters Building is extremely successful as a response to the urban context. The Nippon Steel Kimitsu Works Head Office, too, met all of the owner's given conditions but at the same time chose the method of proposing the motif of a steel profile spectrum and thoroughly developing this motif, and I felt it was extremely clear and understandable. Matsuzakaya Park Place 24 applied algorithms to the given conditions and was an extremely smart solution. And Sunmarks Dainichi was an extremely impressive building in the sense that the designer posed and answered the difficult question of how human beings will live in the future. "Architecture" and "Houses"Interviewer: In the sense of the needs of society, these buildings have various purposes. Some, like the Toyota Corolla Shin-Osaka Headquarters Building and the Nippon Steel Kimitsu Works Head Office, are buildings for people to work in. Others, like Sunmarks Dainichi and Matsuzakaya Park Place 24, are for living. Nakatani: As a premise, I prefer to define the human beings who use buildings as "entities with aspects that cannot be controlled. " Based on this premise, it is possible to divide buildings into those for human beings (in other words, architecture) and those that are not for human beings (in other words, houses). The architect Adolf Loos*1 once said that " Architecture began with the tomb and the monument. " In this way, I think we should first distinguish between works of "architecture" that exist as structures and "houses" that are intended to be inhabited by people. Having done that, we should recognize that there are various types of buildings that are distributed between the two categories of "architecture" and "houses" and do not fall clearly into either category. Simply put, "architecture" referred to places inhabited by the gods, such as ancient Greek temples. These were not places in which people lived. In ancient Greece, the houses of the common people were not built of stone as in the case of the Greek temples. To put it profound insights into the existence of human beings. Interviewer: What do you see as the proper approach to ornamentation in the city, for example in terms of the façade and finishing materials for the buildings you saw today such as Matsuzakaya Park Place 24 and the Nippon Steel Kimitsu Works Head Office?Nakatani: The most important thing with respect to ornamentation is the sense of ornamentation in "dandyism." The paradoxical "unobtrusive ornamentation" is an extremely dandy-like attitude. Whenever you make something, it will always express some meaning. But if you try to hide it completely and eliminate that meaning, conversely the result is ornamentation. For example, if you make a pure white box, that in itself has a strong significance. So the act of creating something in the middle of a city street that nobody will notice is, in itself, an approach to ornamentation that is rooted in dandyism. For example, the Morigo Building (1931) designed by Togo Murano*2 is something you'd walk right by without noticing. This is not a joke: several times I've walked right by it myself without noticing it. But if you look at it closely, it's extremely ornamental. I think this kind of ornamentation is actually one step ahead of what we normally think of as ornamentation. Interviewer: That's the opposite idea from the general concept of surface design and façade planning. Nakatani: Yes, it is. I think what's most interesting about it is not so much that it's hidden in the back but that it's a type of design that is hidden even though it's in plain sight, one that you don't notice it even though it's right there in front of you. In a sense, I think this is the ideal, the ultimate ideal, for architecture in urban spaces. One of the things that I learned while studying private residences is that, while the hamlet as a whole constitutes a certain type of expression, the individual residences are all of the same quality, so ultimately you can't really see them as individual residences. Even in the modern era, I think it's possible for there to be an architectural design in which houses are constructed but people tend to forget that individual houses are being built. Quality Without a NameInterviewer: During the inspection I noticed that you seemed to take a great interest not only in the buildings, but in their temporal and spatial continuity: the status prior to construction of the building and the current relationship of the building to the surrounding environment. Nakatani: I taught at a university in Osaka for about eight years, and that was my first encounter with a large city. It's because at the time I was an outsider. On the outskirts of the city was an area where there were rice paddies, and this area was developed and a giant shopping center was constructed. I see this as a positive thing. The reason is that, from the standpoint of a farming family, using the land as a place for rice paddies and selling the land are both production activities. Meanwhile, the structure of the village center has not changed at all. To this day, the village structure has remained almost unchanged. Doing something like cutting down the sacred grove of trees in the village shrine was something that was unthinkable as long as there was a community that had existed there for many years. So the structure of the village has hardly changed at all, but the places for production that exist around the village can undergo any number of changes. The change in the scenery of the suburb has been tremendous, but remove one major street and you can immediately see the structure of the old farming community. For example, the site of Sunmarks Dainichi was once the site of a in modern terms, automated factories and buildings built to house computers would represent the essence of architecture. As not all architecture is "human" in nature, it might be best to think of it as an attempt to introduce humanism into architecture. In the future, we might see things like high-rise buildings for trees that secure a floor depth of 3 meters or so to reduce CO2 emissions, or structures that promote the parasitic high-rise growth of trees. I'm certain that such creations are imminent. But as human beings would need to be involved with these buildings, office buildings — an ambiguous intermediate type of building — would also exist. So behind a catchphrase like "our goal was to create an office with a human touch" lies the assumption that offices are basically places without a human touch. Interviewer: In that case, do you think it's possible for there to be an office for human beings in the true sense, not just in a catchphrase?Nakatani: Of course it's possible to create an office for human beings. This is the reason that designers exist: to find a way to make the time spent working more human. In this sense, for example, I think the Tokyo Main Office of Takenaka Corporation is wonderful. For example, I think the Tokyo Main Office building is wonderful. If an office is not a space for human beings but a space for labor, and if that labor can be done even by robots, then you wouldn't need the space in the first place. And if human beings were present in that space, they'd be like some kind of interference or something; you'd never know what they might do. So you'd have to focus all of your attention in design, including equipment planning, in an effort to figure out a way to control them. I think the individual cellar-like spaces in the Tokyo Main Office building are a sufficiently modern accommodation for the problem of how closely you can make modern labor approach a "human" activity. When it is inevitable that house-like elements are needed for an office because human beings congregate there, the question becomes how to reconcile the animal-like aspects of human beings with the extremely inorganic nature of architecture. Compared to the olden days, these variations have become extremely complex in the modern era, and I think that a more meticulous process is required. Ornamentation and DandyismInterviewer: If Adolf Loos made a distinction between architecture and the house, what was his feeling about the paradoxical concept of "architecture for human beings?" Nakatani: Loos wrote a famous essay titled "Ornament and Crime." Apparently it was based on a lecture given around 1908. This is generally held to be one of the earliest examples of praise for modernistic unadorned architecture. But if you actually read the essay, it talks about ornamentation in many places, and although he disparages it, by no means does he reject it completely, so it's perplexing to many readers. In other words, for Loos, ornamentation was what could be called a necessary evil. In this sense, you can see parallels between the humans that are like "interference," in that you never know what they might do, and the ornamentation that can't be helped. You might say that, for human beings, ornamentation is not a crime so much as an original sin — like a fig leaf. In other words, from the beginning there was a feeling that there was something frightening or shameful if you didn't wear the fig leaf. In order for us to go back to being innocent Children of God, we have to get rid of the fig leaf. But in the modern world, when we have come to possess knowledge, we can't do this. For this reason, removing the fig leaf is the final struggle for people in the modern world. So Loos didn't deny ornamentation blindly. His criticism of ornamentation contained Interview