It is a little world
- Cubed
In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.
Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.
...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.
The brick is one of those old technologies, like the wheel or paper, that seem to be basically unimprovable. ‘The shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made,’ writes Edward Dobson in the fourteenth edition of his Rudimentary Treatise on the Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles. There’s a simple reason for the size: it has to fit in a human hand. As for the shape, building is much more straightforward if the width is half the length.
Gorgeous artwork by Minori Asada.
To accommodate the spaces between the trees, I built three walls in a radial pattern. Filling out the spaces on both sides of these three spline-like walls, I came up with a structure that appears to be slipped in among the trees. This design allowed us to proceed without cutting down any of the woods.
I refer to small money-earning business that consist of the work of a visible individual, or have evolved from a personal hobby or skill, as "small economies". We can include in this category newer forms of at-home work—side businesses, telecommuting and the like. The amount of income is unimportant; meager profits are compensated for by the motivation of the owner. A small economy may or may not be someone's main form of livelihood, but it is always a spontaneously conceived and continuing activity.
Nearly all housing in Japan today consists of exclusively residential units for salaried workers and their nuclear families. Such residences have, by definition, no reason to interface with their surroundings.
Salaried workers commute to workplaces outside, and often a considerable distance from, their homes. Residences built for these workers do not contain a place of livelihood—in the broader sense, a place for exchange. This "residence-only housing" is only a place for the nuclear family to eat and sleep, with no occasions for interaction with the outside world, and no need to foster a sense of belonging to the community at large. Thus the only organizational principle is the maintenance of privacy. Both in external appearance and in lifestyle, it is an extremely closed structure.
This house exists in the midst of a year-long cycle of natural phenomena. One might say that this cycle entails the periodic "rise and fall" of the ground surface. In winter it sinks below a snow cover that grows head-high or more; as spring approaches, this height gradually decreases until we can see the actual ground surface, not yet covered with undergrowth. With summer the vegetation grows higher and higher until the plaza seems once again to be lower than its surroundings. With the falling of the leaves, autumn restores our ability to penetrate these surroundings at eye level, at least until the snow begins to fall again... Through the four seasons, we experience the sensation of the ground rising and falling, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
I call this cycle of natural phenomena an ecological cycle.
There is a Japanese catchphrase, community suru, literally "making" or "doing" community. I will never forget the queasy feeling that came over me when I first heard that term, phrased as if community were a kind of event.
Hold an event, bring people together, get people who might otherwise never meet to interact. It's a wonderful thought. I have nothing against events per se. However, if they are not spontaneous and voluntary, they will not last. That is my objection to the keep-it-lively concept of community. The perception of community as event stems, I think, from a yearning for the festivals and rituals that once flourished in rural communities in Japan. But those events occurred precisely because a community existed, not the other way around.
Functionalist modern architecture has prioritized the functionality of interiors and treated surfaces and external appearances as an outcome of that priority. Diagrams illustrating functional layouts generally frame them with thick borders. Updating conventional program theory entails questioning what those thick borders are actually made of, and how they should be designed. A dynamic program theory should be one that turns these thick borders into more organic interfaces that will foster exchanges and interactions.
In the design of his own residence / workplace, Toshiharu Naka created a small ecological cycle. Rows of green planters in front of the wall protect the house from the sun and help cool it in summer. Rainwater is collected via catch-basins from the roof, and used to water the planters.
In the water buckets is a micro-cycle — fish live in the buckets, eating mosquitos from the planters, eliminating the need for pesticides.