Pineapple Cake for Tokyo

Designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates and completed in December of 2013, Sunny Hills is a cake shop in the Minami Aoyama district of Tokyo situated in what is basically a residential neighborhood and at 297 square meters is probably not much larger than a two-story home. If anything, Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has given the people of Minami Aoyama a sight that dazzles and jolts the senses. At once beautiful and horribly out of place, his design for the Sunny Hills cake shop is well worth whatever the time and cost involved, simply for its daring to show what is possible in the art of building. On first look, it appears to be an enormous jumble of exquisitely joined and polished sticks that have no clear purpose architecturally. Almost like a scaffolding that hides the building inside, the traditional carpentry of the whole structure is certainly fine to look at, but at the same time confusing.

The building’s design will almost surely draw numbers of people to Minami Aoyama for a look at Tokyo’s latest example of avant-garde architecture, and a good many of those will not be satisfied with only a street view, but eager to see the inside. And since it is a type of store favorite among Japanese young and old, chances are good that Sunny Hills will find itself overflowing with customers eager to sample its pineapple cake.

Sunny Hills cake comes to Tokyo from Taiwan. The speciality is a variety of pineapple cake, a sweet popular in Taiwan and baked in the shape of a bamboo basket. The store is built on a joint system called jiigoku-gumi, a traditional method used in Japanese wooden architecture and often seen in shoji doors and screens—vertical and cross pieces of equal size entwined to form a muntin grid. Normally the pieces intersect in two dimensions, but in the architect’s design for Sunny Hills they are combined in thirty degrees, in three dimensions, producing a cloud-like structure. Using this idea, the section size of each wood piece was reduced to 2.4 x 2.4 inches. Because the building is located in a residential area, the aim was for a soft and subtle impression, something very different from a concrete box type of building. Architect, Kengo Kuma, believes the street and surroundings together with Sunny Hills offer a pleasing harmony to the eye. Some might consider that concept debatable, arguing that the design clashes with its surroundings.

A Sidewalk View of New York

Perhaps more than any other city in the world, a stroll along the sidewalks of New York offers the chance to gaze endlessly upon a cornucopia of architectural history and style. There are other great cities showcasing a rich heritage in building, among them Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Rome, and to great extent London, and all are cities where anyone with an eye for architectural detail can roam urban streets for days fascinated by the work of great builders. For me, having spent some years living in New York, my mind quickly returns there when architecture is the subject. Could cultural historian Judith Dupré have been right when she said that even those who have physically left New York never leave completely? I certainly feel that way about the architecture of that great city.

In his book One Thousand New York Buildings, photographer Jorg Brockmann wrote about the challenge of compiling the book: ‘…the buildings of New York don’t exist in isolation—they live crowded together in sometimes unlikely juxtapositions just as its people do, presenting endless contrasts of style, size, materials, and function. And out of this visual chaos emerges a kind of harmony. It wasn’t until that harmony was so suddenly and radically disrupted [September 11, 2001] that we paused to contemplate it. I mean this book to celebrate it.’

Brockmann’s One Thousand New York Buildings covers the breadth of New York City’s five boroughs, an area encompassing 320 square miles. The photographs below are a small part of the whole, and include only eleven examples from buildings in the area from Lower Manhattan to Greenwich Village and West 13th Street.

The New York Cocoa Exchange; 82-92 Beaver Street, at Pearl Street; 1904, architects Clinton & Russell. Originally known as the Beaver Building, the architects solved the problem of designing for an angular site by rounding off the corner. Part of the New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange, the Cocoa Exchange moved to the World Trade Center in the 1990s.

Delmonico’s Restaurant and Hotel; 56 Beaver Street at South William Street; 1891, James Brown Lord architect; conversion to condominiums in 1996 done by Mark Kemeny. Delmonico’s is New York’s oldest restaurant, dating from 1825. It has had seven different locations over the years. When the original was destroyed by fire it was replaced by this building, serving as both a restaurant and hotel for men only. The hotel has been converted into condominiums and the restaurant is open to all. The marble columns at the entrance are from the original building and are said to have been excavated at Pompeii.

   

World Trade Center; Church to West Streets and Liberty to Vesey Streets; 1972-1977, designed by Minoru Yamasaki & Associates with Emery Roth & Sons. The now-destroyed 110-story stainless steel Twin Towers were 1,350 feet tall and for a short time the tallest in the world. More than a pair of monolithic towers, the World Trade Center was seven buildings connected by a vast underground concourse and a wide plaza at ground level. The sixteen-acre site called “Ground Zero” is still under reconstruction, but the first new building called 1WTC reached the 100th floor of its construction in April of this year and is expected to open in late 2013.

Stuyvesant-Fish House; 21 Stuyvesant Street between Second and Third Avenues; 1804, built by Petrus Stuyvesant, great grandson of the Nieuw Amsterdam’s Director General. A large Federal-style townhouse, it was built as a wedding present for Stuyvesant’s daughter Elizabeth when she married Nicholas Fish. The land  was once part of the original estate where the first Stuyvesant spent his last days.

Washington Mews; behind 1-13 Washington Square North, between Fifth Avenue and University Place. The street was originally called “Stable Alley” when it served as an area of carriage houses for the mansions on Washington Square. The carriage houses were converted to private homes in 1939. The residences on the south side were rebuilt in 1939 when when some of the houses on the square were turned into apartments.

MacDougal Alley; off MacDougal Street between West 8th Street and Washington Square North; built in the 1850s as stables for the residents living on 8th Street and Washington Square. A dead-end street of homes remodeled in a variety of styles, it is a charming escape from the city surrounding it.

127-131 MacDougal Street between West 3rd and West 4th Streets. This row of tiny Federal houses was built in 1829 for Aaron Burr. Not visible in the photograph are the iron pineapples at the entrance of No. 129. They are a symbol of hospitality that originated in Nantucket when whaling ships brought pineapples back from the South Seas. People placed the pineapples on newell posts outside the front door to signal that visitors were welcome.

56 West 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. This small Federal townhouse was built in 1832 and is one of the oldest and most charming houses on a street of beautiful residential architecture. The fluted Ionic colonettes at the doorway, the leaded windows and the wrought-iron handrails and newell post are typical of the Federal style which arrived in New York about 1800.

Jefferson Market Library: 425 Sixth Avenue at West 10th Street; 1877, architects Vaux & Withers; 1967 restoration by Georgio Cavaglieri. Designed by the same architect who did the buildings and bridges of Central Park, this is a flamboyant Victorian structure which stood empty for twenty-two years before being converted into a branch of the New York Public Library in 1967. Originally the Jefferson Market Courthouse, it stands on the site of a major food market during the early nineteenth century. The original courthouse was adjoined to a large jail that was replaced in 1931 by the massive Art Deco Women’s House of Detention. The detention center was demolished in 1974 and replaced by a neighborhood garden called the Jefferson Market Greening.

4-10 Grove Street between Bedford and Hudson Streets; 1834, designed by James N. Wells; among the last survivors of the early Federal style homes that dominated New York in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The wrought iron work, including the boot scrapers is all original, as are the paneled doorways.

6 St Luke’s Place; Leroy Street between Hudson Street and Seventh Avenue South. One example in an elegant row of brick and brownstone Italianate townhouses built in the 1880s, No. 6 originally had a Leroy Street address until James J. Walker, the city’s mayor between 1926 and 1932 used his power to have the eastern end renamed St Luke’s Place. At the time, only the mayor was allowed a lamppost at the bottom of his stoop, making his house easy to find.

Before A. Hays Town

Prolific Louisiana architect A. Hays Town first brought the beauty of traditional Louisiana building to the attention of people far and wide of bayous and Acadian culture, and my own love of those traditional building styles began with his ‘replicated’ designs. Perhaps becoming so enamored of the famous architect’s designs blinds us to the fact that such building was going on long before Mr Town made it de rigueur. It was his eye that fully discerned the beauty of Louisiana’s old plantation houses, left in many cases to neglect and deterioration. His architectural masterpieces took old ideas and materials into a modern setting away from the bayous and sugarcane fields and made them sing as beautifully on city streets. But as much as I admire the work of Mr Town, the focus here is on a house standing long before his birth.

The March/April issue of the magazine Louisiana Life includes a story on one of the old Louisiana houses, this one—though moved eleven miles from its original site—is in a rural setting of seventy acres located along a channel of water in southern Louisiana. Owners of the house like to call this waterway a bayou, but it is more accurately a channel or chenal, remnant of a Mississippi River channel that once flowed through the area. But it’s best not to dicker over words, since the setting of Maison Chenal, whether bayou or channel is idyllic.

A cherished part of Louisiana’s architectural history, Maison Chenal is a raised eighteenth century Creole plantation home located along the Chenal waterway in Point Coupee Parish. The house was bought and moved eleven miles to its present site in 1973 and restored to museum perfection by its owners, Pat and Jack Holden. Unfortunately, complete documentation of the early history of the house does not exist, but evidence points to construction in the 1790s. The last documented owner was planter-merchant Julien Poydras in 1808, a gentleman well-known in New Orleans history.

The front garden of the house is surrounded by a pieu (post or pointed stake) fence made from split cypress boards.

The downstairs porch on the front of the house has a floor of old bricks common to these old homes and a frequent characteristic of Hays Town designs.

A bedroom opens onto the front gallery overlooking the garden.

Those wishing to read the complete article and view other photographs, click here.

Hachioji Triangle House

Smallness is a quality that can be enjoyed. It is also a quality that in architecture can turn into spare beauty on a human scale. Geography has always played some part in Japanese building, with space a constant consideration because of the narrowness of the country, within which large areas are mountainous and unsuitable for building. Japanese architects, especially in modern times have taken this limitation as a challenge and arrived at solutions that turn smallness into highly livable and innovative housing.

The photographs below are from Space: Japanese Design Solutions for Compact Living by Michael Freeman. The house pictured is in the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji, built on a steep slope right at the limits of practicality in an architectural sense. It is situated on a narrow access road too steep for vehicles, one that also serves several other conventional dwellings. Architects Akira and Andrea Hikone wanted to avoid leveling the ground because of the greater limitations that would impose. They decided to experiment with a shape that would fit the ground rather than fight the slope. They call it a triangular section.

This photograph shows a view of the exterior from the rear looking downhill. The town of Hachioji is downhill on the right.

A double bedroom for the two boys, who enjoy its den-like atmosphere. Several skylights set into the sloping roof make the space bright and airy. Not visible is a glass facade extending up from the ground creating maximum enjoyment of the view overlooking Hachioji.

The living room downstairs faces out through that same double-height glass facade.

A view of the kitchen and dining area looking out onto a back garden

Take a look at another clever use of space in a backyard soy barrel house in Ibaraki, Japan.

1:1.618

For many, working and living in the same space presents a challenge to motivation and focus. Without distance or space to temporarily take away the forgiving environment of home, more than few of us find the distractions a barrier to uninterrupted work. But then there is another side to having a place apart and that’s those occasions we yearn for space that takes us away from everything, a place where we can sit watching the wheels go round, answering the questions we ask ourselves.

Michael Pollan wrote a book in 1997 called A Place of My Own in which he recounts the process of designing and constructing a small one-room structure on his rural Connecticut property—a place in which he hoped to read, write and daydream. Though a confessed non-carpenter, Pollan built his ‘writer’s house’ with his own two hands. Not a task he approached lightly or with any sort of confidence, it was rather an endeavor that involved long thought and careful research, plus the help of a longtime architect friend.

A Place of My Own takes the reader through each phase of the project, from the germination of an idea thrown out by the friend-architect remodeling Pollan’s home. Looking out from an unfinished second floor window to the slope, woods and meadow beyond, the architect felt the view needed a focus and the best bet would be a small structure build on the same axis as house, garden and meadow. At the same time Pollan had been thinking of a small hut or room set apart where he could do his writing. Next came research on the marriage of architecture and nature, on the question of selecting a site, and then a study of sketches from the architect’s standpoint.

From the initial concept the project was never meant to be large, complicated or expensive. A big part of that was Pollan’s desire to build the structure himself, a decision that required more than anything simplicity. But to make a long story short, this dream of Pollan’s was eventually realized, designed by his friend, but built by Pollan at an ultimate cost of $125 per square foot.

One part of the story is particularly interesting and involves a system unfamiliar to me before reading Pollan’s book. There is a mathematical formula of sorts known as the Golden Section, a famous mystical sequence of numbers illustrating that the ratio 1:1.618 occurs again and again in both architecture and nature. It can be seen in the elevation of the Parthenon and in the wings of a butterfly; found in the facade of Notre-Dame, it is also evident in the spiral of a seashell. In sizing the ground plan of Pollan’s one-room writer’s house, the architect along with Pollan determined that the desk should run the length of the front wall. To get an idea of dimensions Pollan extended his arms out to the side, a span measuring six feet, to which was added the depth of two feet for bookshelves on each end. This gave them the width of the room. Using the Golden Section, the architect then multiplied that length (eight feet) by the factor 1.618, coming up with 12.9. He then sketched a rectangle eight feet by thirteen indicating the final measurements of the room.

Charles R. Meyer, Pollan’s architect has this to say about the Golden Section: “The Golden Section is a bridge joining architecture and nature. The same proportioning system that works in buildings also shows up in trees, leaves, seashells and sunflowers, as well as the human body. It’s everywhere.” Both Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier were faithful to the principle in their work.

A. Hays Town: An Inside View

Close to one year ago the topic here was Louisiana architect A. Hays Town, and featured photographs of five homes he designed. The focus that time was limited to exterior views, and while that perspective establishes a first and basic impression, the Hays Town continuum passes through exterior walls and extends to equally harmonious interiors.

Rounding a curve in the road and catching first sight of a house by Mr Town can in many cases be a view that momentarily takes the breath away. The perfect marriage of landscape and architecture is evident from each and every perspective, with lines and angles from all vantage points revealing elements of classic Louisiana. Exterior walls in the architect’s design mark passage into another phase of the overall vision. More than any interior decorator, it is the style of Hays Town that defines the interior of his houses. Very likely that the decorator walking into a Hays Town home finds half the work already done. The colors are there, the furnishings recommended. In some cases the architect went as far as recommending a dog to complement the design.

The paired photographs above and below show both sides of six different designs by Mr Town. All photos are by Philip Gould from The Louisiana Houses of A. Hays Town. Five of them are from the earlier post, and are paired this time with an interior view. The photos above show exterior and interior views of the architect’s home in Baton Rouge; the picture on the bottom shows a view into the study.

Here are two views of Witter House, the lower photo showing a view of large windows which bring the live oaks practically into the room.

And Sherar House…

…with a peek into the den from a back glassed-in porch.

A beautiful view of Laborde House with its blooming azaleas…

…and the informal dining room; note the brick floor with a beeswax finish, a treatment common in old Louisiana houses.

A view of Strawitz House…

…and the enclosed rear porch. The weathered boards seen in the exterior fence are repeated as horizontal wall planks inside.

Here is look at the classic Louisiana Bonnecaze House…

A dramatic interior that uses old warehouse beams, plank floors and brick arches.

Shelved

He describes his work as a harmonious marriage of traditional and modern architecture. Demonstrating that comfort is possible in small spaces, the designs incorporate sustainable materials and eco-friendly amenities that blend indoor and outdoor environments. One of a new generation of architects, 39 year-old Kazuya Morita impresses with novel housing designs, which include a pentagonal house and another called the Shelf Pod house. Kazuya Morita Architecture Studio located in Kyoto, Japan is an example of the avant garde growing out of Japan’s oldest and most traditional city.

Morita’s Shelf Pod house in nearby Osaka is an innovative design built with floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall shelving in 557 square-feet, and accommodating ten tons of books. Nearly every interior surface is covered in shelving, from the library to the bathroom. Designed for a client with a very large book collection, Morita conceived the house with interlocking laminated pine boards that slot together to form a lattice of towering shelving units. Because the client’s field is Islamic history, every element—from stairs to windows—was scaled to the individual shelf unit. The aim was to achieve the geometrical harmony seen in Islamic architecture.

The Shelf Pod was one of Morita’s most ambitious and challenging projects, requiring shelving strong enough to support the entire house. With its unusual structure and no experience with this kind of architecture, Morita ran numerous tests and experiments on models to guarantee structural integrity, and to convince city planning officials to issue the building permit. Structurally the house can survive earthquakes. Shelving extends even into the bathroom, stretching across a wall behind toilet and bath. The exterior features a painted clay and bamboo wall, with cedar exterior wall plate.

Work on the house began in mid-2006, lasting until March 2007. One stage in building was pre-construction of the large shelving units, all assembled and structurally tested in a laboratory at Kyoto University.

The architect believes that Japanese architecture has got to be smaller and more efficient. Like Beijing, New York and London, the cities of Japan face similar housing problems. Smaller designs can be both practical and comfortable, Morita says. Shelf Pod house was a move toward smaller, greener houses, taking into account the need to build more compactly in crowded cities.

The picture above is a bird’s-eye view of a model of Morita’s Pentagonal House built in Tsushima City, near Nagoya.

Soy Barrel Evenings

Thoughts today still rumbling around the idea of space and how it can best be utilized for aesthetic as well as practical purposes. With the clever design of Japan’s ‘bicycle tree’ still in mind, it was understandable that other innovations and designs by those clever Japanese would trickle into my thoughts.

If finding available space for parking bicycles is a problem in Japan, it’s nothing compared to using available space judiciously in the design and construction of houses and apartments. True, many Japanese homes are a stuffed jumble of boxes and furnishings where interior space becomes increasingly cramped. But there are as well living spaces designed by architects on the cutting edge of space management.

Five or six years ago I bought a book in Tokyo called simply, Space, by photographer Michael Freeman which examines in photographs ‘Japanese Design Solutions for Compact Living.’ The 224 pages are filled with examples of how Japanese architects and homeowners have tackled the problem of comfortable yet aesthetic living in small spaces, extending the principles to garden as well as interiors.

Photos included here are of a backyard den in Ibaraki, just north of Tokyo. A traditional wooden barrel used in making soy sauce serves as a foundation for the structure. The diameter of the barrel, and ultimately the den as well, is six and a half feet, and the idea of turning that small round space into a playroom for the guys came from a group of friends who have known each other since childhood. The ‘house’ was built in the garden of one friend at a cost of $4,600, and was a three month project. It features a central hearth for both cooking and heat, and also has air conditioning for summer months. The tiny house is furnished with a hi-fi system, television, a central table with drawers and rice straw mats on the wood floor. The friends prepared the barrel by leaving it filled with water to remove the smell of soy sauce. The barrel is made of Japanese cedar and this is enough to ensure privacy for the Saturday nights of beer and baseball. The photograph shows only three people, but in a crunch it can accommodate seven in what the builders describe as ‘close comfort.’