preview

Personal Awarness of Architecture in the City Essay

Better Essays

1
Through a condition awareness, the repeating actualities of daily life in the city provide images for my architecture. The following are the characteristics of that awareness
1. Collage. Our image of the city is a highly fragmented assembly of phenomena and experience lacking continu it y and a mutual context among the pieces. The image itself is a pattern produced by the inevitably subjective system of collage.
2. Homogeniety. The majority of the domestic urbanscape in Japan consists in an anonymous collection of co,orless mortar walls and colored steel-sheet roofing. Office districts consist of vertical and horizontal extensions of homogenous grids. To correspond with the colorlessness in both kinds of urbanscape, urban life itself is …show more content…

I can cal l the region to which .these forms belong a world of metaphor, space that generates· meaning. From my first work, A luminu m House (JA, February, 1972) to the house at Kamiwada (this issue) I have always designed in such a way as to suggest this world of metaphor. The aluminum covering of the first house was intended to give a superficial impression of the dull impression produced by urban colorlessness. The pipe through which light falls is nothing but a space signifying rhetori c rising from that colorlessness. Interior elements and skylights in both the house cal led Black Recurrence (JA, January, 1976) and the Kamiwada house are intended to represent urban rhythm.
But even more interesting for me is the way in which meaning spaces can be dismantled, as I have shown in the design processes for a series .of house&. This tendency to be concerned with dismantling has become especially noticeable in houses designed between the one in Nakano and the Kamiwada house. In the Black Recurrence, axial line and symmetry were pursued without letup from start to finish of the plan: the entrance, staircase, and skylights aligned along the main axis produce a powerful meaning space. Although a pair of walls forming a U in the Nakano house began to produce strict symmetry and a powerful meaning space, somewhere during the design process, I decided to abandon symmetry and placed interior elements in such a way as to

Get Access