In large residential projects of recent years, Riken Yamamoto refers to the actual today idea of "home-office", where the combination of residential and office space does not happen as we are used to - at the level of individual parts of the building, but in each specific cell, which can be transformed into one way and the other.
The Japanese are forced to put up with a very high population density, and therefore the search for new opportunities for space for life is paramount for them. Social housing simply cannot provide families with large areas, and the architect must look for ways out, how, with a minimum of space, to make this living space humane, comfortable and rational. Riken Yamamoto found a way out in the system of office-living unit, which he calls "soho", as well as in the use of transparent materials, allowing to visually expand these miniature private quarters. According to Yamamoto, in addition to the rational use of space, the type of home-office also provides "an easy way out of communication with the external environment."
In 2003, Riken Yamamoto, along with Toyo Ito and several other architects, began working on a large project in downtown Tokyo - Shinonome Canal Court, near Tokyo Station, commissioned by a large Japanese construction corporation. The problem was the negative image of the area itself, densely built up with industrial facilities. People simply would not want to live there, and the city authorities approached Yamamoto with a proposal to make a project that would change the very appearance of this industrial zone.
"Initially, the limiting parameters, says Riken Yamamoto, were the color of the complex and its allowable height." As the chief architect of the project at that time, he chose the main directions of the building and the height. As a result, we got a complex of 14-tazhnyh buildings and located inside 10-storeyed, between which there is an internal S-shaped street. “Since Shinonome is located in the city center, we immediately insisted that the use of the complex should be combined, ie. partly office, then it will certainly create a connection with the external environment, tk. business-related activities always go outside the walls of this office."
Shinome is a mixture of homes and jobs, not houses next to jobs, says Riken Yamamoto. "We tried to increase the potential of collective housing by placing an office function in this housing." Since the areas of individual office and residential units are very small, the architect decided to "open" them with the help of so-called "common terraces" in two floors, randomly located throughout the building. They resemble small courtyards, as if "cut" into the mass of the wall, from which huge square blocks were taken out. Thanks to the terraces, the building, according to Yamamoto, is maximally open to the external environment. Another structural feature of this complex is the "foyer-rooms", rooms that can be used both for children and for hobbies. Each "common terrace" is surrounded by these rooms of eight residential units, as a result, about one quarter of the total space of a small office apartment of 55 sq. m. is open to natural light. In order to make such large square rooms "foyers" with limited space, kitchens and bathrooms, which in small apartments are usually squeezed into the area adjacent to the corridor, are here referred, on the contrary, to the window, which also gives them daylight.
The rest of the "units" are separated from the corridors by glass partitions, and the inner corridors themselves receive daylight and air exchange due to the very terraces that run throughout the building. Throughout the living area, Riken Yamamoto used transparent material to achieve the lightest possible spaces, which are also visually spacious in a small area due to the fact that the internal walls can be changed or removed altogether, turning the cell into a single space. Soho has great flexibility and variability and can be easily transformed, like a traditional Japanese house. By the way, there is also a "duplex" option, where there is an office downstairs and housing upstairs.
The complex is saturated with all the necessary office and residential infrastructure. Along the inner street, Riken Yamamoto made a kindergarten, a restaurant, a center for the elderly, small shops, the area of which, if desired, can be used as hotel family housing - Yamamoto emphasizes that this is a very flexible solution. “I think it's easy to reverse the overall situation,” says the architect about the task of the Shinomee project. “It's just that we have always lived with the consciousness that our home should be something of our own, completely cut off from the environment. But I think this is the wrong approach. The idea of Shinome is simple, I just changed the material, made it transparent, and the whole way of living in a confined space completely changed."
The next project, using the same idea with soho cells, is a similar Jian Wai SOHO mixed complex in the center of Beijing, which Riken Yamamoto demonstrated at the Venice Biennale. It is huge - the total area is over 700 thousand square meters. m., but at the same time they built it incredibly quickly - they started in 2000 and have already completed it. This is because the standard, as Yamamoto calls them, "semi-finished products" are used, assembled as a constructor. SOHO looks like a large cellular structure, with a dense grid of columns and ceilings on the façade. The complex is composed of 100 and 50-meter towers, where the former have a homogeneous structure, and the lower ones have a more diverse spatial composition.
The first three floors are allocated for offices and restaurants, and the main area of the towers is occupied by the same soho cells that combine a house and a small office, as in Shinonome, only here the class is higher and the size of the cells is much wider - 216 sq. M. m, and the smallest - 72 sq. m. Riken Yamamoto said that social housing, an example of which is "Shinone", after the settlement of the specified number of people, can be sold at negotiated prices. But the problem is that these social projects usually have tiny cells, while there is a demand for “big units” among the wealthier people, as in the SOHO project. Living in such an apartment is a symbol of a special position in society for the Chinese.
All the inner space of the complex is given to pedestrians, cars at the entrance are immediately sent down to the underground garage. The spatial connections between streets and buildings are structured around what are called “decks,” a multi-tiered structure that Riken Yamamoto pointed out could just as well be used in Tokyo and New York. An extensive courtyard surrounded by skyscrapers is, as the architect explained, something like a "double deck", i.e. ground space, as it were, duplicates itself underground, going down by 4 tiers.
Compared to the previous two giant complexes, the social housing project for Amsterdam seems very small. It is also quite low-budget, but according to Riken Yamamoto, he is just doing pretty well with such a cheap construction. The city officials already had their own concept for this housing - alternating higher and lower volumes, which Yamamoto did not like too much. He came up with something different - a single building with a "cellular" facade. The living space here is very limited, miniature student studio apartments, so Riken Yamamoto once again, like in Shinoneme, used transparent material to reveal the space. He also came up with an original design of the chair, inscribing it into the outlines of the window: you can half-sit-recline like this and watch what is happening on the street. Somewhere the chairs were taken out onto the balconies.
Pan-Gyo Housing in Seoul is an example of a detached villa-style housing arrangement. Riken Yamamoto participated here in the international competition for a creative project of sustainable and low-rise family housing in the new Korean city of Panyo in 2006. As a result, the project will be implemented by Riken Yamamoto together with Finnish and American architects. Construction will begin next year.
The two main ideas proposed by Yamamoto are the clustering of individual objects and the creation of so-called common "decks", a kind of large shared halls. In total, there are 9 clusters or groups of houses on the site, each of which consists of 9-13 residential units with 3-4 floors. A common "deck" on the second level connects the light transparent spaces, called "Shiki", of each individual apartment into a single lounge-living room. "Shiki" is a vast and highly variable space that can be used for a wide variety of functions - as a home office, art studio, living room, billiard room, etc. Since this "deck" is transparent, it is a connecting, transitional space between clusters and the environment. …
Materials for building houses are standard, from ancient stone and wood to reinforced concrete, glass and steel structures in the industrial era. But today, it seems, the era of a new material is emerging - aluminum, from which they began to make curtain walls. Riken Yamamoto suggested more - he designed a house entirely constructed from aluminum, showing how strong this material can be, easy to assemble, transformable and very transparent. The appearance of such a house depends entirely on the material with which you decorate it, the main thing here was to come up with a reliable aluminum structure.
This pilot project began with an order from SUS, which manufactures precision instruments using aluminum. “Our idea with aluminum architecture,” says Riken Yamamoto, was to achieve a new structural expression that would not have been possible with steel. Aluminum is so flexible that it can be smelted into almost any shape, very accurately and easily. In general, aluminum is certainly not the most environmentally friendly material, since it takes a lot of energy to maintain an aluminum house, as well as to produce it. In Japan, 50% of aluminum bauxite is imported and 85% of all aluminum is reused. But the cost of an aluminum house is still low."
For a long time, Riken Yamamoto has perfected the basic modular structure - a 1.20 meter wide panel, the "transparent brick" from which the building is assembled. “The cost of an aluminum building, says Yamamoto, depends on its total weight, we initially got 21 kg per sq. m. In the original design, the transparency was not the most ideal. Then we made a "honeycomb" panel 1.2 m wide, which perfectly fit into the required wall area, and brought its weight to 13 kg. Fasteners between adjacent cells are made according to the principle of a lock, so the resulting rectangular panel does not need additional fasteners and itself is capable of carrying heavy loads. " As a result, the load-bearing wall of this house consists of crossed aluminum panels that have a flexible and reliable connection, and such an assembly system is designed for mass production, and the process itself is very simple and takes only a month, including the construction of the foundation.
“We can decorate this structure from above with any other material,” says Yamamoto. In this case, everything here is made of aluminum, even furniture, plus glass, due to which the room is very bright. The elements can be varied and positioned in different ways, it is easy to control the illumination. The first aluminum model house opened in Tosu, Kyushu.
At the end of his lecture, Riken Yamamoto noted that, having been designing residential buildings for a long time, he was convinced that architects, changing their concepts and approaches to organizing the housing system, can influence the social component and significantly improve it. “Our task is not only to deal with design and architecture, but always think about the interaction of architecture and society. It's not such a difficult task."
