DESIGNWORKS Vol.13

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Interview with Tatsuro Sasaki"The Value of Architecture in the Effort to Create a Sustainable Society -Individuality as a Starting Point and Cultural Durability"Interviewer: Professor Sasaki, in this issue we are featuring primarily health care and social welfare facilities and residential environments. Among the works of the Takenaka Corporation Tokyo main office, you viewed Shisei Daichi Children’s Home, Lefond Gotenyama and City Tower Shinagawa. Before asking your impressions of these works, as an architect, educator, and researcher, and as someone who has participated in urban activities such as the e-hama Club, I'd like to ask you about the various ways in which you are involved with architecture and the specific activities in which you are currently engaged.Sustainable Value as an Environment Where Starting Point is IndividualitySasaki: Architecture is the basis of all of my activities. From the interior of a bistro that seats 20 persons, to the extension and addition to a general hospital with nearly 1,000 beds, I've been working on buildings of many different sizes and types. And I've utilized the knowledge gained through these activities in the preservation of historical structures, in cityscape design accompanying road widening, in the enactment of landscape planning, in a vision for the harbor area 50 years in the future, in working to disseminate aluminum structure residences, and in efforts at sustainable urban development in the city of Yokohama. Through these and various other projects, I've been working on architecture and the way in which cities are formed.Interviewer: With regard to residences, you viewed two residences for sale in the Shinagawa area: Lefond Gotenyama and City Tower Shinagawa. What was your impression of these two works?Sasaki: I think one aspect of apartments for sale is the commoditization of the space in order to increase the instantaneous value at the time of sale. Planning and construction technologies tailored to each individual site are employed for this purpose. And while making sure that there is nothing that might prevent this instantaneous value from attaining the maximum level, I think it's important to figure out what kind of structure can be built on that site, and how a quality sustainable environment can be given form. In this respect, I think the buildings I visited today, Lefond Gotenyama and City Tower Shinagawa, are constructed on sites that have a completely different context from one another as residential locations, and on these sites they accurately meet this context on their respective levels. Lefond Gotenyama in particular converted its severe shape restrictions into interior stairwell access that affords a high degree of privacy, and achieves a skeleton with a large outer wall area as compared to its floor space. And this outer wall forms a structure that takes into account the context of the surrounding area.Interviewer: City Tower Shinagawa is a "tower" condominium, but one whose eight-sided shape succeeds in securing scenic views, even in an area crowded with tower condominiums.Sasaki: Putting aside the question of whether tower condominiums are a suitable living environment for human beings, I think the value of the skeleton is increased by determining a building volume that responds with sensitivity to the surrounding environment. In terms of the pure rigid-frame structure form, which is the result of an effort to achieve the ultimate in building rationality, I have concerns about the low floor height, but in the future the building can be diverted to a variety of uses. In this sense, compared to apartment buildings that use the wall as part of the structure, I think it has great social value as a skeleton with functional durability that can accommodate a variety of different situations.Interviewer: The Proud Shin-Urayasu Marina Terrace, on the other hand, is a low-rise separate structure apartment complex, and the surrounding area is quite different from that of Shinagawa. Sasaki: Urayasu is like a sample fair for residential areas. It has residential this respect, Shimada General Hospital has been involved with Takenaka Corporation, and through a spiraling addition and renovation work process and so on, I think a hospital complex that is in harmony with the surrounding urban environment has been achieved.Considering the Quality of the Sleeping EnvironmentInterviewer: I understand that there are many administrative and legal restrictions in the case of a health care and social welfare facility, but is it important to view such facilities as residences from an end user perspective?Sasaki: There are often debates as to whether health care and social welfare facilities are facilities or residences. Originally I got my start working on health care and social welfare facilities when I worked on a senior citizen health care facility in the city of Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture, in which all of the rooms were private rooms. They wanted to have the design done not by someone who designs health care and social welfare facilities but by someone who normally designs homes and apartment buildings. In almost all cases such as this, there is a tendency to trivialize the differences between residences and facilities in terms of taste in interior decoration and so on. But this also includes a lot of other central issues such as the scale of the residence, the relationship between the bed and the water fixtures in the residence and so on, that could be seen as a matter of how to assemble building spaces. However, many of the facility standards that meet the eligibility requirements for subsidies are not suited to something of the scale of a home, and I think the discussions will also need to include how to reconfigure things to meet these requirements. These days, convalescent wards are being reduced in scale, and more and more facilities are homes that function as health care and social welfare environments, or health care and social welfare facilities that function as residential environments. As a result, I think the most important thing will be to make a clear distinction between a "health maintenance" environment and a "cure" environment. I'm not talking about turning care facilities into residences, as was mentioned a moment ago; I think a hospital should basically be a place that specializes in the results of treatment. What is important is not how comfortable the place is as a home, it's how comfortable it is as a cure environment. With regard to residences, on the other hand, recently young people have begun to enjoy collective housing*1 designed for senior citizens. Although I'm sure it also depends on the person and the region, up to now senior citizens have not had much experience with communal living. In that situation, it's not easy for numerous individuals to relate to one another and live harmoniously. In contrast, young people these days are extremely flexible and easy in that respect, and they've learned proper "etiquettes" in terms of how to live in communal housing — not being too close but not being too far apart either. So I think they'll live a collective lifestyle for their whole lives, even when they get older. But without a doubt there's also the question of the type of architecture that revolves around the individual, and I think we'll have to clearly define exactly who this type of architecture is for. What I mean is that there's no distinction between young people and old people in terms of the relationship between the individual and the group. In this sense, we are coming to the point at which we need to revise our approach to architectural forms and the characteristics of users, in a way that cuts across all building types.Interviewer: In that sense, what do you think will be the central issues to consider when treating health care and social welfare facilities and residences in a common manner in the future?Sasaki: I think in general there are two important issues. One is the sleep environment. There are various types of bedrooms in homes, in health care and social welfare facilities, in hotels and so on. These are actually the starting point for individual lifestyles. Naturally the standards and values for that environment will differ depending on the type of building. For example, areas with all kinds of homes and apartment buildings. However, as the building-to-land ratio and floor space ratio have been established in patchwork form, overall the area has a scattered quality. In this setting, Proud Shin-Urayasu Marina Terrace makes the most of its outstanding floor space ratio of 100% by placing five buildings and greenery in a checkerboard pattern that treats both buildings and open spaces in an equivalent manner. The result is a villa-like appearance that increases the independence of each building. Although some say that this was done for project reasons because increasing the outer wall area would increase the work costs, I think it should be seen in terms of increasing the restorative value to the interior by placing an open space of a certain scale adjacent to the outer wall. This type of layout plan is difficult to use if you're wedded to a certain orientation, but by providing stairwell access as in the case of Lefond Gotenyama and making all of the rooms on the periphery of the building into residences, I think it's possible to further maximize the value of the open space.Interviewer: Professor Sasaki, you've also designed several social welfare facilities for senior citizens. How would you compare these with a facility like Shisei Daichi Children’s Home that is designed for children?Sasaki: In the past, I've worked on several facilities in which senior citizens live for a certain period of time, such as a chronic phase hospital and a senior citizen health care facility. Recently, after concluding the design supervision of a day-care center approved by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, I had the opportunity to think about senior citizens and children. Both of these are basically facilities that revolve around the individual. The individual person is the focus, whether it's a small child or a senior citizen. The main issue is how to conduct planning for individuals as the basic unit. And this will be significantly affected by the approach to management. The planning of Shisei Daichi Children’s Home, which has two units each accommodating eight children and a common management space in the center, and is open in the east and south directions, both of which offer abundant greenery, is rational from a management perspective of taking care of a certain small number of persons. Moreover, the residences that are the starting point for each person's lifestyle are based on two-person units, and these have movable partitions that can be removed to allow them to be used by four persons. In addition, the view that these two-person units should be able to be separated into single person units is particularly important in the case of a children's or senior citizen's facility, and this has been taken into consideration by resolving the question not within the residence but by providing an alternative space in the form of a counseling room. On the other hand, while I think the main concept of the "Daichi Deck" is designed to connect the individual and the community, when I actually saw it, I got a strong sense of independence of the community, the deck and the individual. The deck and residential zones are connected only at the entrance, much like a residential area with private homes. I thought it would be good if there were a more gradual linkage, but I know there has to be a clear delineation for management and safety reasons. That's a difficult problem.Interviewer: In this issue, we're featuring several health care environments as well. The Shimada General Hospital is a project in which renovations have been conducted for nearly 80 years. Among other services, the hospital offers preventive care, for which demand has been increasing in recent years. Sasaki: In the case of a health care and social welfare facility, the facility standards are changed frequently and it's important to deal with these changes. For this reason, the facility must have not only physical durability but also functional durability. It's crucial to figure out how to ensure the quality of the skeleton as one that can accommodate future changes in use. Meanwhile, for a hospital that is embedded in an urban area, such as the Shimada General Hospital, renovation, expansion and the like must be conducted in a way that does not decrease the uptime ratio of the hospital. This will require a very forward-thinking site acquisition plan and the putting together of a flexible master plan that can be changed to match the status of site acquisition. In Interview