But what is sustainability? Is a building full of energy-saving features worthy of sustainability certification if it is built by tearing down another potentially usable building, is grossly oversized or is built far from where its users live or work? This question needs to inform a holistic dialogue about sustainable architecture, which must exist within the framework of sustainable neighborhoods and cities. Japan does less well on this count. There is no reason for a typical Japanese house to be rebuilt every 30–40 years, or much sooner if the builder can persuade the owner that new earthquake-related laws or chipped paint is reason enough to tear down the old house and make a new one. Just as Japanese architects are questioning every aspect of unsustainable practices in architecture, Japanese consumers must also ask questions about rebuilding their still usable and repairable homes. After all, Japan has the world’s oldest extant wooden building, the temple of Horyuji built more than 600 years ago.
Sustainable buildings are just one fix to the spectrum of unsustainable lifestyles we have created over the past few decades of global prosperity and hyper-consumptive behavior. A few sustainable buildings cannot alone change the indicators of pollution, climate change and depletion of non-renewable recourses. The urban form must also be sustainable, with mixed-use development that aids healthy and sustainable lifestyles that are less dependent on private cars for transportation. Japanese cities are already high density, and therefore more efficient than most world cities, but urban sprawl and depletion of Japan’s precious forest and farm lands must also continuously be checked.
Sustainable building design should also include physical and social dimensions. The built environment has the power to enhance or deplete the social capital and social equity of cities, and policy directions must ensure that Japan’s social capital, one of its main assets today, is nurtured and sustained through every urban intervention. This includes resisting the building of big box stores, shopping malls and gated communities at the expense of vibrant neighborhoods and shopping streets.
Sustainability has to do not just with the moment a building is built but also its life-cycle costing. This includes non-renewable materials used in its construction, the distance these materials travel to arrive at the site, energy use in construction, operational efficiency, maintenance and final destruction. Destruction of buildings is following the way of cars, ipads and clothing, where obsolesces are built into things to keep the makers in business.
This book focuses on exceptional work by architects who have gone much further than required under the Comprehensive Assessment System for Built Environment Efficiency guidelines developed since 2001. These guidelines are grossly inadequate at present, often more of advertising gimmicks than real attempts at addressing the most pressing issues about sustainability. However, they are a good start, and it is hoped that they will evolve into more meaningful guidelines and regulations over time.
This book focuses on exceptional work by architects who have gone much further than required under the CASBEE (Comprehensive Assessment System for Built Environment Efficiency) guidelines developed since 2001. The easy-to-understand format, succinct text, sidebars that call attention to specific technologies and methodologies, and photographs to illustrate the concepts will enable an expert as well as a caring citizen to enjoy the book while learning about important new directions in the field of sustainable architecture.
Geeta Mehta
THE SUSTAINABLE JAPANESE HOUSE:
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Deanna MacDonald
“I do not know the meaning of ‘Green Architect.’ I have no interest in ‘Green,’ ‘Eco,’ and ‘Environmentally Friendly.’ I just hate wasting things.”
Shigeru Ban, 2014 Pritzker Prize laureate
Today, everything from coffee to skyscrapers comes with claims of sustainability, often complete with a ‘green’ label. The line between marketing strategy and truly sustainable design has diluted the concept of green building to the point where architects like Shigeru Ban, known for context-sensitive humanitarian design, distance themselves from labels seen as meaningless.
Sustainability starts not with a marketing department but in the first stages of design and follows through resourcing and production into use and eventual reuse. This should be Architecture 101 worldwide. Yet, truly sustainable architectural design is rare. This makes the projects in this book all the more remarkable. These houses embody Japan’s recent move towards (or perhaps back to) a sustainable living environment, albeit with cutting-edge technology. These are designs that work in harmony with their environment and the people who use them.
Shigeru Ban’s words echo the concept of mottainai, a Japanese term expressing regret for wasting an object or resource. Loosely translated as ‘waste not, want not’, it is at the heart of traditional Japanese building. Traditional Japanese architecture, based on the 100 percent recyclable building materials of wood, paper and tatami, has always prized and worked in response to nature. This tradition was subsumed in Japan’s modern evolution into one of the densest urban centers in the world. It never wholly disappeared.
This book is about one of the most fundamental choices about how we live—our homes. Much of the world is now concerned with issues of sustainability, the environment and climate change. We all want to live in comfort and beauty. But is it possible to create a house that has beauty, functionality and sustainability? Can it be made affordable? This book offers an introduction to the unique ways Japanese design is responding to these concerns.
Pitched thatch roofs of traditional minka farmhouses.
The interaction of landscape and building in traditional Japanese architecture.
The Past
The elements of the Japanese house can be traced back to the aristocratic Shinden-style residences of the Heian era (794–1192), which were wooden post-and-lintel structures set on pillars, topped with pitched roofs and surrounded by gardens. The concept of the house evolved around the thirteenth century with the arrival of Zen Buddhism with its ethos of ‘eliminating the inessential’. A building was not just protection from the elements but an expression of the human relation to nature, with materials as unadorned and ephemeral as the world around it. Beauty and simplicity were one.
While both Shinden architecture and Zen philosophy originate in China, together they evolved into a new, distinctly Japanese aesthetic that resonates through Japanese architectural history. From the Muromachi period (1336–1572), various types of houses developed. There was the sturdy rural farmhouse, or minka, and the urban merchant house, or machiya. Aristocratic and samurai homes were built in the formal shion style, an evolution of the earlier Shinden style. As the tea ceremony grew in popularity, the ideal of the humble teahouse strongly influenced house design. The more relaxed Sukiya style, epitomized by the early Edo-era (1615–1868) Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto (see pages 136–7), found beauty in imperfection and ephemerality. The beauty of wabi sabi, once translated by Frank Lloyd Wright as “rusticity and simplicity that borders on loneliness”, was considered the height of sophistication. Sukiya interiors favored the unpredictability of asymmetrical modular layouts and varied materials and textures but linked all into a cohesive whole with strong lines and a muted color palette. And in all, attention to detail and craftsmanship were paramount.
These traditional Japanese houses were built from the inside out with the exterior reflecting the inner workings of the modular plan. As the European house gained a strong attachment to order and ornament, Japanese houses developed as simple flexible spaces with multiple uses and a ‘lightness’ that reflected the realities of living in an area of frequent earthquakes and Buddhist teachings of the transience of all things.
This functional approach resonated with early twentieth-century Modernists such as German architect Bruno Taut, who on visiting the seventeenth-century Katsura Imperial