Radically Unfinished
The exterior of Holes in the House (all images courtesy of Studio mnm / Fuminori Nousaku Architects).
I first encountered Holes in the House at Voice of the Earth, a 2018 exhibition at the Architectural Institute of Japan in Tokyo that aimed to address the pressing issues raised by Japan’s 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which in turn triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Among the various architectural models on display, one stood out: it was the only one painted red.
Instead of exhibiting commissioned or theoretical works, architects Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku had decided to exhibit a model of their own home: a red, four-storey, steel skeleton, which didn’t feature a single wall. As I got to grips with what was being exhibited, however, it became clear that this wasn’t the only oddity about the house: its floor slabs had vast holes cut into them; a stairway led from street level all the way through the building to its roof; a drainage pipe to catch rainwater seemed to end in the shower head on the ground floor; and another pipe led to what looked like a traditional Japanese tatami room on the first floor. The windows and doors were all different sizes and there was no obvious kitchen. The home, the exhibition explained, was being inhabited under a state of constant de- and re-construction.
The stairway that leads from the house’s ground floor to its rooftop.
I was already intrigued by the project, but became even more so when I discovered that the home was a 30-year-old building in Tokyo’s industrial Nishi-Ōi neighbourhood, and that Nousaku and Tsuneyama had started their practices (Fuminori Nousaku Architects and Studio mnm) in 2010 and 2012 respectively, making them part of the first generation of Japanese architects to emerge in the aftermath of the Tōhoku disaster. The project struck a chord with me. Knowing Tokyo and its signature raze-rebuild-repeat development model – in which homes become valueless after 20 to 30 years, before being demolished to make way for a new building when their owner moves out – I was curious, but also a little sceptical. Why had Tsuneyama and Nousaku chosen to keep this 30-year-old house? Which parts of the house were original, and which had been constructed anew? And why had they chosen to constantly make and remake it? I had to see the project for myself.
To experience Holes in the House, I take a long metro ride out from Tokyo’s centre to reach Nishi-Ōi. Situated in the south of the city, it’s a typical example of Tokyo’s rapid urbanisation in the 20th century. Nishi-Ōi grew up in the postwar years, providing cheap housing for workers at the nearby Nikon factory. With the opening of the elevated Tōkaidō Shinkansen Nishi-Ōi train station in 1986, the neighbourhood began to flourish even further, with additional small manufacturers growing up around Nikon. Tsuneyama and Nousaku’s house was built in those years, when housing projects followed a typical layout comprising shops and small workshops at ground level, storage spaces on the first level, and clearly divided living spaces above.
“This project is my personal mission to commit to a structure that is still usable.”
Housing stock in Nishi-Ōi was not high quality. Historically, Japanese architecture had existed in a constant state of replacing itself within short cycles, with fires and other natural hazards repeatedly eating up the country’s traditional timber constructions. This approach was consolidated in the postwar years by building code revisions introduced after natural disasters to improve resilience, along with rapid population growth. Nationwide, buildings were being constructed quickly, cheaply and in low quality, with the raze-repeat-rebuild mindset developing as a means of making properties marketable for resale. Yet when the Nikon Ōi plant moved out of Nishi-Ōi in the 1990s, people moved away too. Vacant buildings in the neighbourhood remained unmaintained for years, unable to meet the newest building code revisions, while the lack of incentive to make lots marketable for resale meant that demolishing to build anew was also not an option – there was simply no demand for housing in a former industrial neighbourhood.
It was in this context that Tsuneyama and Nousaku came to Nishi-Ōi. While working on an earlier project (House for Seven People, 2013), the architects had begun to study Tokyo’s housing market. In 2017, they discovered a property that was not officially listed for sale, held little value on the real-estate market, and would not be easy to develop because of its hilly topography. This was the plot in Nishi-Ōi. Typically, this type of building would have been torn down when interest in the site developed, so why did the architects decide to keep it as was? “Investing myself into this project is my personal mission as [an] architect and citizen to commit to a structure that is still usable,” Tsuneyama tells me.
A living space in the house.
Today, most of the storefronts I see in Nishi-Ōi are covered by shutters. Faced with this anonymity, I begin to understand why Tsuneyama and Nousaku decided to keep the original colour of the house’s facade. Its neon-yellow paint fills the quiet, as if screaming “hello!” to the world, a bright grin against all the odds. This relationship to the street is, in fact, essential to the project. Holes in the House is named after the first, and most obvious, set of interventions that Tsuneyama and Nousaku made to the building: cutting open the house through a series of large holes. Given these gaps, the house appeared to the surrounding neighbourhood as a construction ruin, but was actually already a functioning home and workplace. Tsuneyama and Nousaku had moved into the property right after removing large parts of the ground-floor facade that had previously sealed off the house from the street. Covering this initial hole with a blue tarpaulin, they lived with this opening for a year, experiencing both summer and winter breezing through their house, before finally covering it over with a glazed facade. Upon learning this, my question from 2018 shifted. What had prompted Tsuneyama and Nousaku to live in this radically unfinished house, and how did they make themselves a home in such conditions?
When the architects purchased the property, they saw potential in the resources already on-site, as well as the house’s pre-existent qualities: its orientation; its sun exposure thanks to its corner location; the fact that it has a small, quiet side-alley, as well as a large ground floor that connects the house to the neighbourhood. All of these traits became ripe for experimentation. The house’s steel structure still seemed solid enough for modification, despite its age and the impact of the 2011 earthquake which had damaged buildings across Tokyo. “My role as the designer-architect shifted to the role of a building inspector,” Tsuneyama says. “Scouting for solutions to make the best out of what [was] already there became a personal quest to cut costs while doing something good for ourselves, the neighbourhood and the environment. I had to be really clear about what was important in the project, and what ideas were [simply] ‘nice to have’, since those usually cost the most.”
The ground floor hole covered in blue tarpaulin before it was replaced by a glazed facade.
But even if budgetary considerations for a personal project were a factor, they were not the determining force in the trajectory Holes in the House followed. “My priority in design shifted totally,” Tsuneyama explains. “As homes are organically connected to our lives and we are inseparable [from] and intertwined with them, I thought: ‘What if we could create a kind of wild connection between our lives, evolving needs for space, and our house? Could we discover a new way of living? A new way of being at home? A new way of being in architecture? What would that look like and how do we make it a reality?’”
When I first saw Holes in the House at Voice of the Earth, its red model was exhibited alongside a poster, printed with big, red letters reading “Holes in the House” and “Urban Wild Ecology”. The poster showed an axonometric section drawing of their house and its holes, yet in contrast to the neat emptiness of more familiar architectural drawings, this one featured a series of hand-drawn illustrations, with “how to”-style accompanying details explaining what the architects had done. The home and its surroundings were depicted as being full of people of all ages, animals and lots of plants, and with no passing cars, as if the house were located somewhere in the countryside. From every line in the drawing I could sense the architects striving to establish their own position: people inside and out were interacting with the architecture, and the house was merging completely into its environment.
“My role as the designer-architect shifted to the role of building inspector.”
Cutting holes into a facade and slab looks effortless on a poster, but the reality demands thorough inspection and careful engineering. This process uncovers multiple layers of built history, demands messy calculations based on estimates and, above all, seeks to avoid any structural risks that could mean collapse. On top of that, Tsuneyama and Nousaku tell me, they had to think about fire-proofing and earthquake resilience, finding ways to meet all the latest building requirements, while still leaving room for future iterations. Cutting holes makes this difficult – destroying any remaining property value and limiting usable square metres – but it was, the architects assure me, an essential act. “The physical holes in the slabs are also notional holes that attack the existing system of housing,” Nousaku explains.
By cutting open the slabs and adding staircases to the holes, Tsuneyama and Nousaku have created a void that connects the ground floor all the way to the rooftop, transforming the building into a single unit and bringing accessibility, light, sound and airflow to all spaces equally. Upon entering the house from street level, I can instantly feel a light breeze. If I stand in the right spot, I can see the sky through the top-floor skylight, which ventilates and naturally cools the entire space using the temperature difference between the first and fourth floor: a zero-energy AC. I recognise the red steel structure from their architectural model, with layers of flooring, dangling electric cords, fragments of insulation and personal items positioned here and there. While the holes may have decreased the home’s financial value, they are aimed at providing a different kind of value: for everything in the building and the surrounding area to be seen as simultaneously in relation to one another, just like in their drawing. “Holes in the House is a symbol of reconnecting with resources,” says Tsuneyama. “The sun, air, water and soil. It’s tapping into what is already in abundance.”
The bedroom.
Strangely, despite the mess of a construction site, being inside the house does not feel like standing in a ruin. Even if I close my eyes briefly, feeling the airflow, hearing voices from interconnected spaces, catching the ticking of the clock on the upper floor, I can still sense the scent of fresh earth from the plants on the ground floor, mixed with traces of paint and lunchtime cooking. The house is filled with life and, surprisingly, feels like being in a traditional Japanese countryside home. Without the holes, you could never experience the richness of moment-to-moment spaces, and the visual connections that become apparent as you move around. The inside and outside become one, opening up the house to its surroundings, just like in the poster and red model. I had not expected to find traditional spatial qualities of Japanese architecture translated into a 30-year-old house, with its openness, the distribution of light and shadows, the micro-climate, the flexibility to transform spaces. Here in industrial Nishi-Ōi, I was discovering Japanese tradition and minimalism – just a little rough around the edges.
Making holes has also extended from the house to the surrounding city. After becoming parents, Tsuneyama and Nousaku turned their attention to the asphalt surrounding their house. “Luckily the side-alley of our house is a dead-end street, forming a safe zone for play,” Nousaku says. But the pair’s ideas about their outside space were simultaneously being shaped by the high levels of inflation and growing levels of food insecurity that Japan has suffered in the 2020s.[1] “After we experienced inflation and food shortages, we wanted to revitalise the soil underneath the asphalt and use the space for our own food production,” Tsuneyama tells me, “while also adding an element of a playfield for our son.” Restoring nature to the parking lot became important to the architects, particularly given that Nishi-Ōi, as a semi-industrial neighbourhood with a lack of green space, has become an urban heat island. Residents had previously attempted to resolve this by putting out small potted plants and occasionally watering the asphalt to cool the streets. Tsuneyama and Nousaku, however, trusted in their ideology of holes: they decided to knock open the asphalt with their own hands and on their own terms.
A working space in the house.
Central to the architects’ plan for Holes in the House is their notion of urban wild ecology, the term that had appeared alongside the name of the project on their initial poster. “Thinking, making and creating one’s own life autonomously generates the power to live,” Nousaku tells me. “This is urban wild ecology.” The idea behind the concept, he explains, sits “between the two ends of the spectrum of political ecology and deep ecology” – that is, an understanding of environmental change as being driven by political, economic and social factors, and a belief in the value of nature as independent of its utility to humans. “We see ecology in the urban setting, where people like us enjoy the comforts and convenience of life in the city,” Tsuneyama explains, “and we seek to bring out the wilderness that every one of us instinctively has, but which has been forgotten in everyday life due to the comforts of our consumerist society.” This notion of urban wild ecology is not, she adds, a static definition, but is instead actively explored. Parking lots on streets, for instance, are normally under the jurisdiction and planning authority of the city ward; with the destruction of the asphalt outside of their property, Tsuneyama and Nousaku have entered semi-legal territory. But with each breakthrough in the asphalt, they have invited neighbours and friends to celebrate their progress. Instead of the more traditional house-warming gift of a bottle of sake, one guest brought earthworms to one of these celebrations – creatures intended to help bring life back to the newly uncovered earth. To help water the earth naturally, Tsuneyama and Nousaku have reclaimed the street gutter, allowing water to reach the soil and reactivate micro-organisms with rainfall. The soil has now recovered to the extent that it has proven possible to plant a tree.
“We want people to rediscover their own sense of wilderness and what it means to be human in the city.”
This attention to ecology also stretches inside. Tsuneyama and Nousaku have restored the traditional Japanese tatami room on the building’s first floor using biodegradable materials such as mulberry paper and konnyaku potato paste, as well as repurposing discarded materials from their house or rescued from other construction sites. They have made use of solar and thermal power, collected rainwater, and begun to deconstruct what it means to build a house in Tokyo. “Tinkering with ready-made tools and doing small agriculture in the city without going back to ancient times, tapping into leftover resources and repurposing what others discard: that is what we understand as ecology and what has been separated from our profession,” Tsuneyama tells me.
During the formative years of Tsuneyama and Nousaku’s architectural education, the concept of Wa (和), with its suggestions of peaceful harmony and philosophy of emptiness, had brought serene minimalist spaces to the forefront of contemporary Japanese architecture. The popularity of Wa peaked in 2009 when Kenya Hara published his book White, which presented a view of architecture as a blank piece of paper, waiting for its inhabitants to fill it with life. Simplicity and subtlety meant that structural elements and anything that might disturb the eye were neatly hidden in walls, ceilings and floors as if spaces magically supported themselves. Yet the devastation brought about in 2011 by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami marked a turning point. Not only did the disaster damage buildings, but it severely affected the collective self-image of Japanese architects. Suddenly, the architecture created in Japan prior to 2011 felt distant from societal challenges, and was interpreted as having descended into formalism. Meanwhile, for the first time in its history, Tokyo began to experience a rapid population decrease, making it the world’s first shrinking megacity. The same trend was occurring across Japan as a whole, too – its population has now dropped below 125 million, and is on course to be down to 88 million by 2050, with a third of its inhabitants aged over 65. At the time that I visited Voice of the Earth, vacant housing was almost 14 per cent, and estimated to rise to around 30 per cent by 2038. Given these ongoing challenges, what is possible for design at the frontiers of uncertainty?
A living space in the house.
Holes in the House is one suggestion as to what form this could take: an architecture that is less perfect, but which aims to reach out to the society and environment surrounding it, and which restores a sense of agency through hands-on engagement with the discipline. It understands architecture not as finished work, but rather as a process of constant becoming, led by the needs, budgetary possibilities, available resources and lifestyles of its inhabitants. It aspires to lift the discipline away from the burden of having to come up with a masterplan to change the whole planet, and instead argues that small steps in the here and now can have a large impact on ourselves, our neighbourhoods, and perhaps even our cities. “We want people to rediscover their own sense of wilderness and what it means to be human in the city,” Tsuneyama tells me. “Our life in Tokyo depends on infrastructures such as electricity, gas, water and transportation and industrial products. While industrialisation has improved the convenience of our lives, the things that support our lives have become black boxes.” In this regard, Holes in the House is highly informed by the experiences of 2011. “Our practice began right after the disaster, when we started researching and rethinking the origin of our resources and finding alternative ways to make,” she says. “Our house became an attempt to create a fully self-sufficient cycle in the city while getting back our wild senses.”
As we stand on the rooftop, surrounded by solar panels and a small garden, the full scale of what Holes in the House means in Nishi-Ōi becomes clear. The house’s rooftop and parking lot are the only patches of nature amid a sea of visibly deteriorating building stock. It is scenery that demands that something be done. “We know that we cannot undo the past all at once,” says Tsuneyama. “So we seek what we can change today, realistically with our own hands, and the material that we have now.”
[1] Japan imports a high percentage of its food and, as such, its supplies have been severely affected by the global rise in energy costs.
Words Selma Alihodžić
This article was originally published in Disegno #36. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.