Kazuo Shinohara: an architect against Ikea's comfort

For the Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006), the house is "art", as he himself wrote in one of his best-known texts, included in the exhibition dedicated to him by the King Martí Deposit until May 18, precisely titled Kazuo Shinohara. The House as a Work of Art. Shinohara is one of the most important Japanese architects of the 20th century and one who most influenced established architects such as Toyo Ito and Kazuyo Sejima, both Pritzker Prize winners, the Nobel Prize for architects, and others later. But he is still little known to the general public. Thus, the exhibition, which is included within the World Capital of Architecture in Barcelona, is a good opportunity to delve into his legacy.

"We have reached a point where we must assert that the house is art, even at the risk of being misunderstood and rejected," Shinohara used to say. "This means that the house must be separated from the territory of architecture. It must be moved to the realm of art, to which painting, sculpture, literature, and other disciplines belong," he warned. This vision also had a combative character. "I believe that residential design can be a critique of civilization —the architect said—. But this cannot happen when the house is either deliberately with society or diametrically opposed to it." "Exaggerating, all of Japanese architecture of the last fifty or sixty years comes from the House with an underground bedroom," says the exhibition's curator, architect Enric Massip-Bosch, who worked with Shinohara in 1987 and 1988.

Throughout his career, Shinohara designed more than thirty single-family homes, many of them small. He poured into them all the experimental drive and reflection on "domesticity" that, as Massip-Bosch says, has conceived the exhibition as a display of texts, plans, and photographs. "It's extraordinary that so many of Shinohara's houses have survived, because many are very small and built with very economical means," says Massip-Bosch. A curious case is that of the Casa Umbrel·la, which has been installed for years at the Vitra Campus in Switzerland. It should be taken into account that in Japan, by law, after thirty years buildings have no value and the land does. Thus, the renewal of the built environment is constant. "They are not easy houses, and the fact that they are still cherished says a lot about the emotional value they generate in their users. One of the main values of Shinohara's houses is that they always demand a reaction from you, they imbue them with an emotion that generates an awareness of being in the world. It was against comfort understood in the Ikea way, which in the end numbs our senses. So we are not aware of what is happening and have no real relationship with the world," says Massip-Bosch.

In the context of Japanese architecture, Shinohara adopted a very personal stance on modernization and Westernization after World War II. "With the North American occupation, this debate comes to the forefront. There are two lines, one that followed a modern architecture like the one done in California in the 50s. And another based on making a modern, but Japanized architecture —explains Massip-Bosch—. Shinohara went against this, and valued Japanese architecture as it is, not necessarily its form, not necessarily its imperialist tics, but its values and above all its elements. With some elements of tradition, he achieves absolutely unknown spaces".

One of these cases is the gravel pavement he made in a house commissioned by a couple formed by a documentary director and a screenwriter, the House of the Earth. On the other hand, the second house commissioned by the poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, Shinohara placed it at the top of the slope of the plot, so that nature would enter directly. Tanikawa had given him the commission with a poem: "Winter house or pioneer cabin (house) / Summer space or chapel for a pantheist (it doesn't have to be a house)".

Another of his most famous houses is a dwelling he built for himself in Yokohama, now disappeared: the dwelling consisted of an old wooden house he had saved from a plot where he himself had built a house, where he put the studio, and a new kaleidoscopic volume. Also emblematic is the project for a small refuge for him and his family in the mountainous region of Nagano, on which he worked for ten years, until his death. The tour concludes with various non-residential works and projects, among which the building for the Centenary of the Tokyo Institute of Technology stands out, considered a historic work.