Crystal-clear public space

Two and a half hours' drive from Tokyo, one reaches the small semi-rural town of Onishimachi, now in decline. Internationally renowned Japanese female architect Kazuyo Sejima, who is still awaiting a major project in Tokyo, has instead been designing a number of public facilities in outlying regions. Left unscathed by American bombing during World War II and largely untouched by postwar development during Japan's "Era of Rapid Economic Growth", Onishimachi still retains its traditional townscape of old houses. Not a single modern building is to be seen. I'd imagined Sejima's Multipurpose Facility Onishi would appear totally out of place, yet until one actually reaches the building its presence is scarcely noticeable because its profile blends in with the low rooflines surrounding it. Whereas most public buildings in Japan strive for symbolic stature (when I sat on a selection committee for one regional art museum competition, the local participants all seemed to vote on the basis of height rather than the quality of the design), the primary school directly behind Sejima’s Multipurpose Facility is actually far more prominent from a distance. The Multipurpose Facility Onishi manages to keep a low overall profile under a flat roof by recessing the large volumes of the gym and auditorium below the surface of the site. The banks of audience seating finish at ground level, resulting in above-ground spaces that are freed from the constraints of functional use. The submersion of elements that would otherwise obstruct surface sightlines also allows for the use of glass enclosures, offering clear views across the large span interior and its hybrid structure of local cedar and steel. The building’s predominant transparency allows a small number of staff to supervise the gym and auditorium spaces with ease from the administration office in the adjacent wing, much in the same spirit as Gropius's thinking for the Bauhaus, not to mention Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin or Philip Johnson's Glass House. Though if those were glass temples, the Multipurpose Facility Onishi is more of a fluid glass landscape. Sejima revisits the glass spaces of the Modernists, not merely for the sake of transparency, but rather in the playful attempt to generate a variety of phenomena: she plays with subtle variations in semi-transparency, adds geometric patterns, delivers op-art illusions. In her Yokohama Mutsukawa Daycare Center (2000), for instance, the glass facade is printed with different patterns inside and out, creating a moiré effect. And in the Dior Omotesando building (2003) gradated semi-frosted acrylic screens set inside the glass create an illusion of swaying drapes. Similarly, the irregular outline of the Multipurpose Facility Onishi makes for overlapping layers of glass, so that different viewing angles afford varying distortions of the lush green surroundings, a visual effect not unlike that of American artist Dan Graham's glass pavilions. Furthermore, the glass facades occasionally create “open-air corridors”, connecting passages so narrow that one feels “inside”, even though technically speaking they are open to the sky - most curious spaces indeed. As a point of reference, the convenience store (kombini) has frequently been cited as a new architectural model in Japan since the 1990s. Open 24 hours a day, this innovative interpretaion of the corner shop not only sells daily necessities, but also provides information networking terminals and a truly wide variety of services: one can pay bills, order books, purchase travel and concert tickets, withdraw cash. The single most characteristic architectural feature of this new building typology that is somehow emblematic of the new Japanese lifestyle is its large glass facade. Toyo Ito likened his Sendai Mediatheque, for instance, to a "media convenience store". Far from the single-function factory Modernist ideal, the kombini is a multipurpose space where anything can happen. While she was working in Toyo Ito's firm, Kazuyo Sejima was nicknamed “Kombini Girl” for her talent in taking ispiration from many sources, and true enough, the Multipurpose Facility Onishi is even more of an exposed glass space than any convenience store. Furthermore, unlike most houses and public buildings in Japan that are typically enclosed behind walls, the Multipurpose Facility Onishi bucks this tendency toward closed in spaces, eschewing any fence whatsoever. As with the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Domus no. 876/December 2004) by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), the interior of the Facility is visible from outside the grounds, and in just the same way visitors can look out in all directions from inside, not merely due to the all-glass shell but because there are no visual or physical obstructions anywhere on the site. The interior and exterior interpenetrate to literally form an open space that gives new meaning to the word "public": students from the primary school next door cut across the grounds perfectly naturally on their way to and from classes. Likewise, when I visited, the doors to all three wings were wide open, inviting free access throughout. This building is not a discrete object placed on a site; rather the gently sloping landscape plays right through it, creating a very real sense of continuity. One revealing detail: although the building is now officially named Multipurpose Facilty Onishi, the present design was originally inspired by the competition title "Onishi Indoor Plaza (tentative)”, an open-ended metaphor that clearly informed Sejima's blurring of interior and exterior space. For while the Facility as built differs slightly from the proposed competition entry, the essential image of an archipelago of free-form housings remains unchanged. In fact, when wandering through the site, there were moments when I really couldn't tell if I was inside or out. Various opening events — traditional folk singing, a T'ai Chi demonstration, a calligraphy exhibition, concerts and classes for the elderly — let people wander about wherever; it must have been fun to see people's reactions, now finding themselves separated face-to-face, now seemingly so far apart yet still within the interior. The illusions this space generates can be very disorienting. At the time of my visit, an adult ballroom dance class was in progress in the auditorium, which brought to my attention the unusual acoustics of the space. Due to the crooked form of the building, I could stand looking straight across at the auditorium beyond the glass and not hear a thing, and yet sounds from the entrance, from which the auditorium is not even visible, came through loud and clear. Distantly close, or remotely nearby? This is, undoubtedly, a distance-warping glass landscape.

Taro Igarashi Architect and architecture critic. Born 1967 in Paris, he is currently employed as Assistant Professor, Tohoku University. He also guest lectures at Tokyo University of the Arts and Yokohama National University among others. His writings include Architectural Endings, Architectural Beginnings and New Religions and Mega-Architecture.

Crystal-clear public space

Kazuyo Sejima’s design for a multipurpose building in the hills of Onishimachi uses transparency to play on the perception of distances. Text by Taro Igarashi. Photography by Yoshiko Seino. Edited by Joseph Grima, Kayoko Ota.

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