Modern Multi-unit Housing in Japan and the Dōjunkai Apartments (1924–34)

Abstract

The Dōjunkai Apartments were built in Tokyo between 1924 and 1934. The period coinciding with the construction of these buildings by the Dōjunkai Association marked a crucial phase in the history of housing architecture. Certainly by the 1930s, theories on four types of residential organisational structures were consolidated to include the neighbourhood (Garden City); the block (H. Berlage's plan of expansion of Amsterdam); the quarter (German Siedlungen); and the megastructure (Le Corbusier's La Ville Radieuse). Influenced by European models, the Dōjunkai schemes are typified by an original combination of endogenic and exogenic forms. Drawing on the comparison with Western counterparts and on the analyses of plans and of other archival material, this article will demonstrate the peculiar organisational structure of the Dōjunkai Apartments. This will be defined as a “segmented block”, characterised by fortuity, fragmentariness and linearity. Further, the article will propose the idea that these elements recall the archetypes of the nagaya (a type of traditional Japanese row house), the linear village and the kinetic spatial structure characteristic of the city of Edo-Tokyo.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Japanese names are written according to the Western convention of given name first followed by surname.

Notes

^1. The analysis of the works discussed here is based on original documents preserved in the Tokyo Metropolitan Archives under the name “Uchida Catalogue”. They consist of blueprints of the original drawings, which are represented in various scales (1:600, 1:200, 1:100, 1:20, 1:5). The Uchida Catalogue, however, does not contain sufficient documentation to permit a description of all the works, thus requiring the collation of documents from journals and photographic collections of the time, as well as texts published by the Dōjunkai Association kept at the library of the Department of Architecture and at the main library of the University of Tokyo.

^2. The Dōjunkai Apartments originally included the following complexes: Nakanogō, Daikanyama, Aoyama, Kyōsuna, Yanagishima, Mita, Toranomon, Sarue, Uenoshita, Minowa, Hiranuma-chō, Yamashita-chō, Higashi-chō, Uguisudani, Ōtsuka and Edogawa. None of the sixteen complexes have survived: the last, the Minowa Apartments, were demolished in 2012. This was despite the fact that they were included in the heritage list of DOCOMOMO Japan; their sites have been redeveloped into large mixed-use complexes.

^3. Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan (New York Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 162–64.

^4. See André Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan (New York: Routledge, 2004), 108–13.

^5. An example is the articles published in the journal Kenchiku to Shakai (Architecture and Society) in 1923. These texts encompass topics such as the planning of multi-unit housing, the garden village and Howard's ideas for the Garden City. See Kenchiku to Shakai 6, nos. 1, 5, 6, 9 (1923).

^6. Both Edward Seidensticker and Marc Bourdier have noted the importance of the two visits made by Charles A. Beard to Japan before and immediately after the Great Kantō earthquake. See Seidensticker, Low City, High City, Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake, 1867–1923 (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 276–77, and Bourdier, Dōjunkai Apāto no Genkei (Dōjunkai Apartments Prototypes) (Tokyo: Sumai no Toshokan Shuppankyoku, 1992), 45–46.

^7. Of these, the case of Motomachi Park is noteworthy. The topic is covered in Hidenobu Jinnai, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, trans. Kimiko Nishimura (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 202–03, and Hidenobu Jinnai, “La Progettazione Urbanistica negli Anni Venti e Trenta” (Urban Planning in the 1920s and 1930s), Controspazio 6 (Rome, 1990): 64–66.

^8. Wright collaborated on the design of the Jiyū Gakuen School with the local architect Arata Endō. Wright's Imperial Hotel was officially inaugurated in 1922 and completed shortly before the 1923 earthquake, which it survived. It was demolished in 1968 and part of the building is today preserved in the Meiji Mura Park near Nagoya.

^9. Carlo Severati, “Architettura Giapponese: Alle Origini del Moderno” (Japanese Architecture: At the Origin of the Modern), Controspazio 6 (1990): 26.

^10. The importance of the theme of housing for the working class (as well as Yamaguchi's influence) is well represented by the set of projects presented at the exhibitions of the Bunri-ha and Sōsha, held between 1927 and 1930 and published in the journal Kokusai Kenchiku during these years.

^11. Many articles by Bruno Taut, who arrived in Japan in 1933, appeared in Japanese literature on architecture, especially in technical journals, such as Kokusai Kenchiku and Kenchiku Zasshi. Taut's articles handle, in particular, the German Siedlungen, and he authored Houses and People of Japan (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1937). Regarding the relationship between the Modern Movement in Europe and the architectural avant-garde in Japan, see Kazuo Nakajima, “Dibattiti Architettonici nel Novecento in Giappone” (Architectural Debates in the 1900s), Controspazio 6 (1990): 40–49, and David B. Stewart, The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture (Tokyo/New York: Kodansha, 1987).

^12. New urban planning laws favoured the founding of housing cooperatives. The best example is the law known as Woningwet, which was issued in the Netherlands in 1901 and came into use the following year. The Woningwet provided a new regulatory framework for housing, in particular, the establishment of new provisions for expropriation (nationwide) and urban expansion plans. Most importantly, it allocated considerable subsidies for working-class housing.

^13. This discussion calls to mind the notion of multi-unit housing as an “exportable” building type, as defined by Gianfranco Caniggia in G. Caniggia and P. Maffei, Il Progetto nell'Edilizia di Base (Design in Basic Building) (Venice: Marsilio, 1984), 20–24.

^14. I refer chiefly to the types more commonly found in the city of Tokyo. As a building type, the nagaya has regional variations and is therefore represented by different configurations, such as the uranagaya (back-nagaya) and nukeroji nagaya (nagaya along alleys).

^15. For a discussion of the nagaya, see Hirotarō Ota, Zumen Nihon Jūtakushi (History of the Japanese House through Pictures) (Tokyo: Shokokusha, 1973), 53.

^16. There are two basic building types of multi-unit housing within the residential fabric of Tokyo: the apāto and the mansion. The apāto generally comprises wooden buildings of a modest scale, with two or three floors, while the mansion includes multi-storey buildings of reinforced concrete. Large residential complexes, first established based on the danchi model (mostly utilitarian multi-unit housing in reinforced concrete), are also found in suburban areas; a noteworthy example of this is the famous Harumi Danchi, designed by Kunio Maekawa in 1955. This was followed by larger scale, higher density schemes, as seen in Tokyo's northwest Hikarigaoka district, which, like in the West, consists of various settlement and building types. Mention must also be made of the fact that the most recent, increasingly widespread urban morphological phase (that is, most notably after 2000) of multi-unit housing is the super high-rise housing that is common in both central and peripheral areas of the city.

^17. The houses of Gunkajima have now fallen in disuse. Some buildings have been demolished; others are in a state of decay. A proposal was made to UNESCO in 2008 to include the entire island on its list of World Heritage Sites.

^18. Plans of the Yokohama municipal housing at Kashiwaba was published in Kenchiku Zasshi 35, no. 423 (1921).

^19. Despite their state of degradation, the Furuishiba Apartments were inhabited until the end of the 1990s; the were published for the first time in the architecture journal Kenchiku Sekai 4 (1926).

^20. The Ochanomizu Apartments, also known as Bunka Apartments, have been almost totally demolished. Part of the original building was incorporated into Arata Isozaki's Ochanomizu Square in 1987. The Bunka Apartments are discussed in Masaaki Yamagata, Buoreizu no Jūtaku (The Houses of Vories) (Tokyo: Sumai no Toshokan Shuppankyoku, 1991).

^21. The stylistic features of the Kudanshita Building have retained their original elements. The simple façade, characterised by the recurrence of dark bricks alternating with light stripes of plaster, is vertically punctuated by higher vertical elements. These identify the areas of access and interrupt the unique serrated coping (crowning). The building is mentioned in Jinnai, Tokyo, 212.

^22. Dōjunkai, “Jūgyō hōkoku” (Report on Housing) (Tokyo: 1925–26, 1927–40).

^23. For a profile of Yoshizō Uchida, see Carlo Severati, “Giappone all'Origine del Moderno” (Japan at the Origin of Modern), Controspazio 6 (1990): 5–39.

^24. I refer, for example, to the relationship between the Garden City, the German Gartenstädte and the Siedlungen, as discussed in Simon Pepper, “The Garden City Legacy,” Architectural Review 43, no. 976 (June 1978): 321–76.

^25. This study defines the evolution of collective housing and its role in the transformation of the city during the first three decades of the twentieth century using four pivotal collective housing prototypes. Each refers to archetypes that are crystallised in four variant forms that, although dissimilar, also imply an interdependent development. They are seen as four residential prototypes, both in terms of their organisational structure and in their ability to represent public and collective values. In this author's doctoral dissertation (1999), “A Typological Study on the Organisational Structure of the Dōjunkai Apartments,” the four types are studied individually, positioned within their historical and sociological context and analysed by their morphological characteristics.

^26. Benedetto Gravagnuolo, La Progettazione Urbana in Europa, 1750–1960 (Urban Planning in Europe, 1750–1960) (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1991), 295–96.

^27. With regard to the concepts of “type” and “latent form” see the work of Carlos Marti Aris, Le Variazioni dell'Identita (The Variations of Identity) (Milan: Cittá Studi, 1990). On the nagaya, see Noboru Shimamura and Yukio Suzuka, Kyō no Machiya (Kyoto's machiya), SD-Sensho series (Tokyo: Kajima Shuppankai, 1982). Regarding the linear village, see Fumihiko Maki, “Collective Form: Three Paradigms,” Japan Architect 16 (1994): 254–63.

^28. Cited in Tokihiko Takaya, “Michi no kōzu” (Street Composition), in Fumihiko Maki, Miegakure suru Toshi (The Appearing and Disappearing City), SD-Sensho series (Tokyo: Kajima Shuppankai, 1998), 79–80.

^29. See Kenchiku Zasshi 142 (1898).

^30. Compare with Mitsuo Inoue, Space in Japanese Architecture (Tokyo/New York: Weatherhill, 1985).