Reverse Your Destiny!

Maybe your image of Tokyo coincides with one of two stereotypes, both mistaken.

1. Old, thatched and wooden dwellings with ‘partitioned’ space created by sliding screens and modular tatami mats; or

2. A fantastic mess of soaring and colliding vertical and diagonal lines and skyscrapers in glass and steel.

Both exist in a token, symbolic measure and are amply represented, but for the first-time visitor to the Japanese capital there is no escaping the initial shock of those acres of samey drabness, those tiled ‘mansions’ and apartment buildings clad in acrylic and polished marble, mirrored surfaces, corrugated plastic.

There is much to admire in the compact scale and direct street frontage of Tokyo living spaces, but don’t confuse the symptom with the cause: many are just a contingent scrap of a dwelling hemmed in by narrow plots, or herded into leftover margins between other more important structures. There are building restrictions both physical and notional, and the urgent allure of needing to be close to the station.

Tokyo houses are what and where they are because of unseen, systemic considerations. I once read an article by someone who attempted to map and pattern citywide transit systems. The author claimed to have worked out certain formulae that determined distances between buildings and metro stations in Paris, and between homes and convenience stores in Tokyo.

The location and articulation of all houses in Tokyo is apparently disorderly but in fact supremely programmatic, subordinated to civic and communal considerations - like where to plant the giant redwood-sized electric pylon, where to thread the railway tracks through. The infrastructure comes first, and then the houses work around it. For a thrillingly cinematic illustration of this, get on the Setagaya or Inokashira line above-ground train, press yourself up against the glass paned door (even if it’s not commuter rush hour), and watch the apartments huddling against the flimsy mesh wire fence that is the only thing keeping them from toppling over and lurching in front of the train tracks.

Individual homes are even more mathematically planned. When you go house hunting, real estate agents will show you a one-page graphic abstract of your potential home. There will be photos and a floor plan, but what really gives you an instant sense of its layout is the alphanumeric formula.

Which looks something like this: “1DK: 6.5 jo“, or “3LDK: 6/6/4.5 jo” (jo is the collective noun for tatami mats). A typical Tokyo dwelling is built according to some permutated multiple of a tatami mat (six feet by three feet), an irreducible modular measure that dictates the dimensions of your home. Unlike Le Corbusier’s ‘golden section’, however, the tatami mat is not a human measure tailored accommodatingly to your body, but rather an industrial one that forces you to fit within its rigid geometries.

Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa are out to rectify those inhuman dimensions, rescue us from cruel boxing-ins, and grant us the liberty to refashion our own measurements. Straight lines are confining because our bodies themselves have none. For an architect, however, curves are an indulgence; they create wasted, unusable space that refuses to cleave cleanly to other planar surfaces, like storage units and most furniture. What Gins and Arakawa want to make is an interface that is an extension of the body, a wearable vessel you can grow into.

In a quiet western suburb of Tokyo in Mitaka City, they built a nine-unit avant-housing complex called the Reversible Destiny Lofts, completed in October 2005. Reversible because it up-ends confining quadrilateral ideas about what suitable housings for our bodies are; Destiny because they believe ‘home’ is about providing an ideal overlapping of interfaces, a place for physical encounter and stimulating interactions. A living room is an existential cloister, not a lounge for vegging out.

To that end, each Loft is outfitted with slightly clunky “terrain” that is a daily challenge to navigate. For example, there are cup-shaped bumps and depressions in the rough stuccoed floor that surrounds the kitchen in the center of the room. Some rooms are spherical pods that confound anyone who tries to walk around in them (you try to step forward, but slide back down the curve to the bottom of the pod).

Straight and parallel surfaces are lazy default settings, so to speak, for unthinking, subjugated home-dwellers. The Lofts, however, use as few straight lines and right angles as possible, reversing that relation and empowering the user to participate more actively in the definition of one’s own home. Apparently, it is also a good way to stave off dementia through lack of ’stimulation.’

You create your own makeshift household logistics solutions. There are extensible power cords that dangle from the ceiling. You can also store your belongings in open umbrellas that you hang above your head, hooked to iron rings welded into the ceiling.

There is one small problem with the customization issue, however. Aren’t these features just a set of hoops for already beleaguered homeowners to have to jump through? An inconvenient assortment of pre-furnished solutions to get stuck with? Do people really need to be helped to inconvenience themselves, or to ’stimulate’ their everyday routines? In this boutique development, Gins and Arakawa have substituted a dictatorial module for the default one. They have even included a kind of user’s manual addressed to potential tenants in which they prescribe various ways of getting to know the features of your apartment intimately, to rename parts of it, to assume particular roles and gaits (like ballerina or waitperson) as you move through it. Regular architects are not half so cavalier about imposing an artistic vision of a home.

If you find yourself in the strange position of not being able to find any ready-made furnishings to pad your Loft with, maybe you will turn to making your own. That at least seems to be the desired escape route towards your very own domestic Reversed Destiny. How this is any more different from building your own mud shack or reed hut is not really clear, though.

In at least one case, though, the pre-selected options seem to have dovetailed perfectly with the owner’s activities and intentions. Photo artist Tak S. Iitomi and his partner and writer Izumi Ashikari have converted their Loft into a home studio and photo gallery, called “Respontes du Artututu,” their personal artistic response to Gins and Arakawa’s creative gambit. Iitomi is a landscape and nature photography specialist. His special technique was developed for arid terrain, in Nevada and New Mexico, for example. The otherworldly brightness of these exposures is mirrored in the candy colored hues of the Loft’s interior, and their aridity and expansiveness cleverly twinned in the stucco floor with its little rocky “dunes,” which recall adobe mud dwellings. There is a kind of magical transport at work here, the interior and architecture landscape serving as a platform to catapult yourself into the photographs of other landscapes farther away.

On a mundane, drizzly afternoon in Tokyo, perched cozily on a smallish mound on the stucco floor, gazing at Iitomi’s fiercely hued landscape photos, the Loft seemed to offer a whiff of a potentially reversible destiny, of exotic travel and wanderlust.

Darryl is a translator in Japan and has a deep love for the built environment.