Kyu-Ikeda-Tei
Engawa House, designed by Tezuka Architects (image: courtesy of Yui Tezuka).
“My room came with tatami mats and an oshi-ire [a large closet reserved for futons]. I eventually got a desk and a bed. It had an engawa [balcony] facing the garden, connected to another set of engawa via a few stairs – hmm, actually, that was more like a deck, not engawa. Shoji paper doors divided my room and my family’s living room, which dropped down about a metre from my room.”
Yui Tezuka, co-founder of Tokyo’s Tezuka Architects, is describing her childhood room, which was built in a suburb of Fujisawa in Kanagawa prefecture, Japan. Tezuka tells me that she couldn’t sit still when she was young. The architect becomes more animated as she describes the garden: the fun of “getting muddy” in the sandpit, which was made by her architect father, or else crawling between the pilotis that propped up the house, an architectural feature made popular by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who completed the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo in 1959, not long before Tezuka’s house was built in 1968.
Tezuka used to climb up onto the rooftop, which spanned the full width of the house in one sweep. Did she get into trouble for this? “Not at all!” she shakes her head, surprised that I even asked. “You had to be careful when you climbed the roof as it was made with metal sheets, so it could get very hot in the sun,” she adds. Tezuka would go up on the roof at night to study the constellations. “I was doing my homework!”
Tezuka dreamed of becoming an astronaut one day.
Yui Tezuka (right), photographed with her brother Motoki (left) and a friend (image: courtesy of Yui Tezuka).
Can memory serve as a design tool? Certainly, the ability to recall yourself as a child is a skill that can help fill in the gaps between you and other people. Memory can inform empathy, aiding your ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes and understand their needs and wants, which are usually more explicitly and freely expressed in childhood than in adulthood. The child you remember is not who you see in the mirror today, but recalling them can evoke profound emotions of nostalgia, sympathy, curiosity and wonder. It might give you something akin to what poet Y. B. Yeats termed “the centre” in his 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’:[1] a grounding perspective or moral compass from which to connect with others and assess the impact of your work on the world, especially its emotional, social or environmental impact. It is, I believe, an attribute that you’d want in a designer, especially in an architect, who might be designing your house, a school for your child, a mall for your neighbourhood, an airport to take you on holiday, or a bridge that lets you cross a deep ravine.
Tezuka, for instance, says that she has retained many vivid memories of her childhood home, which manifest in the buildings she designs today. “Houses are the starting point of our designs,” the landing page of Tezuka Architects’ website reads. “We consider them the basis of all architecture.”
Tezuka’s dream of becoming an astronaut would be dashed as she grew older,[2] but she has never lost her fascination with getting closer to the sky – or indeed, the universe – via a rooftop. Many of her contemporary projects dismantle the norms and function of a roof as a simple protective shield from the elements, and instead turn it into a platform for people to come together, play and enjoy the sun, the trees, the ocean, or whatever else is nearby. Her Fuji Kindergarten (2007) in Tokyo, for example, has a doughnut-shaped rooftop where children can get up and run around freely. They’re also able to climb up a giant tree that Tezuka left poking through the nursery’s roof, which is protected by a net below.
Kyu-Ikeda-Tei, the home that Yui Tezuka grew up in, designed by her father, Katsuya Ikeda (image: courtesy of Yui Tezuka).
“Children love running around in circles – I know this from experience,” Tezuka told an audience in April 2024 when she lectured at London’s Barbican Centre alongside her husband, Takaharu Tezuka. “I used to run in circles at my home in Japan.” Tezuka’s childhood home – Kyu-Ikeda-Tei (“kyu” = “old”, “tei” = “residence”), as she calls it – no longer exists. Her father, Katsuya Ikeda, lives in the same spot today, but in a much larger house that can accommodate a multi generational household. Tezuka’s brother, Motoki, and his family have moved in to be closer to his father; Tezuka’s mother, Chikako, passed away about five years ago.
Kyu-Ikeda-Tei was big by the standards of the time, although not ostentatiously so. Tezuka was proud of the house. It was built from timber like other buildings in the neighbourhood, but was still distinct in its shape.[3] In fact, Tezuka has an architectural model of the house that she made when she was about 11 for a summer holiday project. “My mother had to help me make some furniture as I ran out of time, but I made most of it by myself,” she tells me.
The model’s slanted roof top comes off, revealing a neat row of rooms inside – starting with the kitchen and bathroom at one end, a large living room in the middle, Tezuka’s tatami room followed by her brother’s, then their parents’ bedroom, and, finally, her father’s study at the other end. All the rooms are connected by engawa on the side of the garden and by a long corridor on the side of the street, which Tezuka found scary given that it was dark and gloomy, with only a narrow horizontal slit running along the bottom of the wall. “I used to get my brother to accompany me to walk down to the end of the corridor,” she says. Come to think of it, you won’t find any dark corridors in Tezuka’s architecture.
Tezuka’s childhood model of Kyu-Ikeda-Tei (image: Edmund Sumner).
Young Tezuka did not forget to draw the shoji doors on the wall between the family’s living room and her own room in her model either. She grew up sensing her family’s presence nearby at all times. “That’s why I can’t keep any secrets!” she chuckles. Many years later, Tezuka would emulate this intimacy in the design of her own home, which she shares with Takaharu and their two children. The bedrooms are placed neatly side by side at one end of their open-plan, second-floor flat, separated by thin plywood walls. Built on a kofun[4] in Denenchofu – one of the most exclusive residential neighbourhoods in Tokyo – and raised above a ground-floor flat occupied by Tezuka’s in-laws, their house, as I recall, has a gentle breeze created by cross-ventilation, as well as an incredible view of the city, with skyscrapers in the distance.
Tezuka says that she was mischievous when she was young. She got into trouble at school once and decided to go into hiding. She pretended that she had left the house, but in fact was hiding under it next to the pilotis, her room floating above her head. “Apparently I was good at cheating,” she remembers. “If I came across a difficult question during a test, I would simply shout out to the class: ‘DOES ANYONE KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION?’ My mum was mortified.”
Tezuka, photographed in the home she designed for herself and her family (image: Edmund Sumner).
Tezuka was educated at a private Catholic girls school, which had an “escalator system” that advanced students from primary school all the way to university without ever needing to take an entrance exam. It was a system that avoided shiken jigoku, or “exam hell”, which most children in Japan face, including Tezuka’s own brother who stayed in the state education system. “My mum probably thought it would be better for me,” she tells me, “as she also went to a private school.” Through this system, Tezuka would have eventually enrolled in Seisen University, a women’s liberal arts college in Shinagawa, Tokyo, but she didn’t go through with it – “I didn’t want to go to an all-girls college!” – and instead applied to study architecture at Tokyo University. She failed the entrance exam.
Now considered a ronin, a term applied to those who fail exams, Tezuka moved into her father’s study, which was at the far end of the house. After spending a year surrounded by architectural magazines and books collected by her father, she successfully passed her entrance exam to study architecture at Musashi Institute of Technology (now Tokyo City University), where she met her future husband.
Image: Edmund Sumner.
Tezuka may have been mischievous as a child, but her antics were largely confined to the haven of her home. The house consumed Tezuka in a good way: it kept her busy, out of trouble. She knew all of its various nooks and crannies.
“Do you know the term ‘sewari’?” she asks me during our Zoom call. “It’s a vertical slit you make in a timber log to facilitate its drying process. We had a few round pillars inside our house, one between my room and my brother’s and another one in the corner of our living room – you see?” Tezuka is pointing at the photo of her model to show me where the pillars are. “The gap in these pillars was just large enough to slip my fingers in and I would climb all the way to the top!”
Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to also interview Tezuka’s father on Zoom and ask him about the house he designed for his family. Ikeda is now 86, but looks much younger and is very chatty. He starts our interview by describing the house as an architect might: “I ran a couple of steel bars where I placed the carport. I had to put storage there, as well as a septic tank.”[5]
Image: Edmund Sumner.
Perhaps the greatest gift Tezuka’s father bestowed on his daughter was the unlimited access he gave her to explore and experience the family house inthe way she wanted – if she fancied crawling under the house, she could; if she fancied running along its engawa terraces or climbing its pillars, she could; if she fancied getting up on the roof, of course, she could do that also. I imagine Kyu-Ikeda-Tei brimming with possibilities, its capacity for unlimited play fostering deep learning for Tezuka.
Ikeda’s parental style, which encouraged the growth and development of a young mind, may have been influenced by the way he was taught by his own teachers, who had pioneered a new direction in architecture. Ikeda studied architecture at Meiji University under Yuichiro Kojiro, an architectural historian and critic who wrote books such as Forms in Japan (1963), and architect Sutemi Horiguchi, who founded Bunriha Kenchikukai (the Secessionist Architecture Group) in 1920, at the height of the Taisho democracy.[6]
The Secessionist Architecture Group wanted to distance itself from the past and forge a new path (or identity) for Japanese architects, searching for ways in which traditional Japanese architectural styles, such as the 16th-century Sukiya style[7] (a subject Horiguchi would later write a book on), could be elegantly merged with the latest architectural trends from the west.[8] “I went to Kyoto with Prof Kojiro and Prof Horiguchi on a study tour once,” Ikeda recalls. “We visited a Tai-an, a Sukiya-style tearoom purported to be the work of the 16th-century grand tea master Sen no Rikyū. We would engage for hours discussing all the characteristics and traits that made this tearoom irrefutably the work of Rikyū.”
The Fuji Kindergarten, designed by Tezuka Architects (image: courtesy of Yui Tezuka).
Ikeda assisted Horiguchi as a site manager for one of the campus buildings he was designing at Meiji University.[9] “Prof Horiguchi liked bright colours; he would suggest applying bright green or turquoise for pillars and floors. I think he was the greatest influence for me,” Ikeda reminisces. He shows me a book that was gifted to him by Horiguchi on his wedding day, including a tanka poem that Horiguchi had written for him inside.
Ikeda expressed his taste for colour in his own interior work, such as Café Lawn (1954) in Yotsuya, central Tokyo: a café described as “a classic kissaten [tearoom] that’s seemingly straight out of a Haruki Murakami novel” in a 2023 article in Tatler Asia. A photo of the space shows a bolt of sunlight shining through a narrow, double-height window and the entrance door. A corridor, meanwhile, cuts through the middle section of the café, flanked by vermillion leather booth seats and darkly painted timber walls, with a spiral staircase tucked away at the end. The café’s interior has remained exactly as Ikeda designed it over half a century ago, and some of the details were inspired by the Tai-an tea room, such as an aversion to sharp corners. “Good architecture should let you move your body freely, without you becoming conscious about [the movement],” he says.
Due to budgetary constraints, Kyu-Ikeda-Tei was more muted than Café Lawn in colour and materials. Tezuka’s mother, Chikako, however, was there to brighten up the house. “She always wore colourful kimonos,” Tezuka remembers. “Her kimonos…” Ikeda sighs, “are just sitting in the closet these days.”
Yui and her partner Takaharu, cofounders of Tezuka Architects (image: Edmund Sumner).
Tezuka might not wear colourful kimonos like her mother did, but she does always wear red. Her partner Takaharu, meanwhile, sticks to blue, with these colours having established themselves after the couple went to live in the UK in the early 90s. Tezuka studied with Ron Herron at UCL Bartlett, while Takaharu joined Richard Rogers’ office, working on projects including Heathrow Terminal 5. Indeed, visiting the house that Rogers designed for his parents in Wimbledon proved to be a pivotal moment in Tezuka’s life. “I remember Richard’s mother greeting us in a bright green dress,” she says. “It was so vivid, seeing her against those yellow walls, matching the greenery outside. It was so beautiful.” Rogers himself was apparently influenced by his mother’s love of bright colours. “She was ‘a very elegant and a very beautiful woman’,” wrote Rowan Moore in The Observer back in 2013. “He recalls being embarrassed, in the drab years of postwar austerity, when she turned up at the school gate in dazzling clothes, but their influence has stuck.”
There is a sensual side to Tezuka’s architecture, one that is not necessarily expressed in its colour, but through the physical sensations afforded by its open structures. Walls, for instance, disappear to allow a breeze to come through, because “architectural ideas and concepts should be felt”, Tezuka says, “not explained in words”. She adds that “clients give us ideas. We are led by our clients. We never tell them what to do.” Roof House (2001) in Hadano City, Kanagawa Prefecture, for instance, includes eight skylights, each of which is equipped with a ladder so that the family can access the roof from any of them. “Roof House came about because our clients told us that they liked to relax on the roof of their old house, which was easily accessed from the upstairs room,” Tezuka tells me. “We then came up with the idea of a big roof for the family to have a picnic on.”
The Fuji Kindergarten (image: courtesy of Yui Tezuka).
Roof House caught people’s imagination and led to larger commissions, such as the Fuji Kindergarten. One of the practice’s more recent projects includes a commission for Tokyo’s Play! Museum and its Play! Park (2020): a space that bills itself as “not a playground with readymade playground equipment and toys”, but rather a site in which children are encouraged to “encounter the unknown”. Here, the studio responded by placing “a large dish” in the middle of a large room, in which children are encouraged to engage in any kind of play by “thinking for themselves”. Similar themes are at play in the Tezukas’ plans for a new learning centre for the Jhamtse Gatsal community in rural Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India. Their design for the space shows ripples of circles – rounded classroom buildings that seem to spin off a cliff-edge. This design was led by how the children sit in small circles in their classes so that no one feels left out.
My favourite project of Tezuka Architects, however, is Engawa House (2003), which has an affinity with Kyu-Ikeda-Tei in size, material and structure. It was designed for a multigenerational household in the Adachi district of Tokyo. Instead of demolishing their existing house, which had become too small for a growing family, the architects built a separate house for the younger family members on a new adjacent plot. Equipped with large window panels, the new house opens out across a garden to the original, which is occupied by the senior members of the family.
“It doesn’t actually have an engawa, you know,” Tezuka tells me. “Instead, the whole house becomes one once you open all the windows.” In this way, Tezuka has managed to create a sense of closeness for the family, resembling the intimacy that was created long ago in her childhood home in Fujisawa, designed by her father Ikeda. The relatively low-rise structure of Engawa House allows sunlight to reach both the older home and the garden between the two, where the young and old can come together. There it is: Tezuka’s childhood home, shining brilliantly through a design that aims to deepen family connections, providing them with a centre that can hold.
[1] “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” – W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, 1919.
[2] She says that she became violently ill after taking a ride on a glider in England.
[3] Postwar Japan faced an acute housing shortage and homes had to be built quickly and economically, en masse. It meant that suburban houses looked exactly like one another: two storeys in height, all facing south, with a small garden, and a veranda jutting out of the second floor where clothes and futons could be air-dried.
[4] Kofun are ancient burial mounds that are found all over Japan. They usually date back to between the 3rd and 7th century CE.
[5] On-site sanitation systems (Johkasou) were common in Japan until they were replaced by public wastewater systems in densely populated areas by the late 1980s. Individual septic tanks are still widely used in Japan, however, especially in sparsely populated rural areas, and still account for about 30 per cent of total sanitation coverage.
[6] A brief period of peace dating roughly from 1905 to 1925, before the rise of fascism in Japan, which took the country to war.
[7] Buildings in Sukiya style are typically constructed in timber, with wood left in a natural state to emphasise harmony with nature. Sukiya walls are typically made of clay, and great attention is paid to detail and proportions.
[8] The Peace Tower that Horiguchi designed for the 1922 Peace Commemorative Exposition in Ueno Park, Tokyo, was inspired by the Wedding Tower that Joseph Maria Olbrich designed for Darmstadt, Germany, which was completed in 1908.
[9] Horiguchi was responsible for the design of some of the school buildings at Meiji University, including No 2 Building on Izumi campus, which was completed in 1960. The campus building was demolished in 2022, despite it being registered with Docomomo Japan as historically significant and masterfully designed.
Words Yuki Sumner
Images Edmund Sumner