9. The House as a Container for the Unconscious

A few years after the American warships  of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854 forced Japan to open its trade to the world, the Japanese government sent out their young architects to learn about Western architecture and construction methods. Japanese architecture had up to that point been in the very capable hands of carpenters. The influence of the Japanese carpenter can still be felt today, as most of the larger construction companies in Japan can trace their origins back to traditional carpentry; the world’s oldest continuously running independent company was Kongo Gumi, founded in 578 and remaining continuously in operation until in 2006 it was absorbed within another Japanese construction company, Takamatsu. It is around the end of the nineteenth century that in Japan a schism appeared within its construction field with the introduction of the profession of the architect which led to one person now being solely in charge of the envisioning part of construction, while the execution would be remain in hands of the carpenters who were modernising as well. The division of architecture as an intellectual activity fitted well with, whom I believe is one of Japan’s most influential architects: Kazuo Shinohara (1925–2006). Although at first glance, Shinohara’s early projects look like the design of a traditional Japanese house, while analysing his writings, that always accompanied the publication of his projects, a series of deeper conceptual layers of spatial thought appear. For Shinohara, the house is a work of art, a “binding relationship between seemingly indifferent components and the whole (J. A. Architecture: Kazuo Shinohara. p. 119)” Shinohara sought contradictions, in order to provoke an emotional reaction in the people using his spaces. Shinohara took the small house and turned it into a self-expressing universe.