DOJUNKAI APARTMENTS: TOKYO, YOKOHAMA 1924-1934.
LA CASA COLLETTIVA IN GIAPPONE E LA CITTÀ MODERNA
COLLECTIVE HOUSING IN JAPAN AND THE MODERN CITY
FOREWORD
Shogo Kishida*
Collective Housing is one of the major themes of modern architecture. Its development reflected
the new social attitude and it has had an enormous influence on the formation and transformation of
dwelling and urban environment in the modern era. In Western countries, the practice of living
collectively has been more prevalent than in Japan, where historically here has been a tendency to prefer
detached houses. However, more recently, collective housing, particularly in big cities, has come to play
as important a role as in the West.
In the Meiji period (1868-1912), Japan opened up to the West and embarked on a process of total
modernisation. During this period, the Japanese social and physical environment changed drastically. In
particular, Tokyo evolved remarkably from a castle town of the Tokugawa Shogunate into a modern,
capitalist metropolis whilst retaining the traditional framework of the pre-modern city. It was after the
Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, which destroyed Tokyo, that Japanese cities and dwellings largely
became modernised. The Dojunkai Apartments were built as part of the reconstruction plan of Tokyo
following the earthquake, so marking the first time that a systematically formulated modernisation
process of housing supply was undertaken in Japan. The apartments were planned as a large scale
collective housing operation, within this objective.
Today, when we think of the living environment, I believe we should know the vision which
formulates the environment ( or in other words, the pattern of spatial colonisation). By studying a
modern, collective housing scheme in Japan physically distant from Western world, and by comparing it
with its Western counterpart we are able to isolate and identify persistent characteristics of the local
spatial structure that allows us to re-evaluate the original model. The enormous gap between different
cultural backgrounds enables a clarification of the issues, informed by both points of view. Above all, it is
most significant to examine the Dojunkai Apartments as an avant-garde collective housing project
containing many of the problems associated by the processes of environmental modernisation.
According to the author of this book, the pattern of spatial colonisation seen in the Dojunkai schemes is
the heterogeneity of a fragmentary order. It contrasts greatly the Western pattern which emphasises
unified colonisation.
One further important point is that the Dojunkai and Western avant-garde projects have two
visions in common. One is the vision of creating a continuity between the structure of the city, collective
residency and individual dwelling units. The other point regards the reformulation of the pre-modern
within the modern.
Our living world is one entity that is self-sustaining in space and time and our long term future
depends on how we develop a total vision of the environment. This relies on what we can choose, how we
can interpret, how we can find new meanings by which to reconfigure our relationship to the existing
environment. If we have no means to understand our living environment then we will be unable to
evaluate our living world appropriately or create a vision for our future. In this book, the author clarifies
one of the most radical visions of the Japanese modernisation process, as it emerged from a strong,
hierarchical spatial order that evolved over a long period of time. It is my expectation that this work
based on the research conducted over four years by Dr. Marco Pompili will play an important role in
informing architectural projects in the future.
* Professor Shogo Kishida, Graduate School of Architecture, University of Tokyo
DOJUNKAI APARTMENTS: TOKYO, YOKOHAMA 1924-1934.
LA CASA COLLETTIVA IN GIAPPONE E LA CITTÀ MODERNA
COLLECTIVE HOUSING IN JAPAN AND THE MODERN CITY
INTRODUCTION
Marco Pompili
The idea of fragmentary building units and cities, as embodied by the Dojunkai Apartments (Tokyo/
Yokohama, 1924-1934) and the concept of a building as a molecular element, of space as a fluid vacuum
to which the housing structure of the apartments, as an aspect of human habitat, refer, are remarkably
suggestive. In addition to manifesting the persistence of autochthonous ways of colonising spaces, they
are also demonstrative of specific analogies to changes underway in contemporary cities.
Why study Japanese collective housing? Why study the Dojunkai Apartments?
The question of collective housing is marginal, it has been little dealt with by those who have
studied Japanese architecture. In Japan, houses are certainly a type of building that has not reached the
construction- and technological standards achieved in other construction sectors. In this sense, research
into collective housing broaches a theme that is apparently little representative, insofar as it is assumed to
be neither particularly evolved nor controversial. At the same time, however, this study is based on the
conviction that it is in fact by means of analysis of urban housing, in this case of a paradigm in modern
Japanese housing, that the specific conditions determining the occupation of a particular space, in a
particular place, in a particular culture, can be understood. Japanese architecture and cities have elicited
growing interest during recent years. Japanese cities have become fascinating images, they have an almost
futuristic suggestiveness. The city of chaos, of anarchitecture, of technological hyper-density.
This world of surfaces, however, cannot furnish a precise idea of what the Japanese city actually
consists, nor of what are its structural characteristics. As well, our knowledge about its underlying
architecture is only partial. Certainly, and with good reason, the common view is that modern and
contemporary Japanese architecture is distinguished by one particular aspect: the fact that it is at one and
the same time utopian and concrete. It suffices to recall some of the work of the Metabolists and the
recent examples of Kyoto's new station and Osaka's Umeda Sky Building. Housing, however, as a
question of necessary architecture, is by definition more resistant to change and therefore requires
particular analysis.
Another reason for the choice of this theme is connected to the observation that, in recent years,
collective housing is once again awakening interest. After a number of famous manifestations, the
application of which, however, failed (Fukuoka's Nexus World, for example), collective housing has
recently been going through a phase of positive innovation (the new town of Ryokuentoshi built in
Yokohama by Riken Yamamoto, and the new housing created by Kazuyo Seijima in Gifu, for example).
The serious consequences of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, various demographic factors, and the weakening
of family ties, are the reasons why this particular debate on collective housing in Japan has begun, and
today, in the large Japanese cities , an attempt is being made to educate the public to thinking about
collective housing in a new way. Collective housing has undoubtedly represented, for considerable time,
only one stage along the road to single-family private housing and is therefore a type of building for
which particular quality has never been demanded. It seems to me as though it is precisely this attitude
that those in Japan who are responsible for housing policy are endeavouring to change. This explains the
very particular flourishing of articles about living in apartments that are being published in Japan,
especially in non-trade magazines.
One of the reasons that this type of building has had difficulty finding a place in Japanese culture
is surely due to the fact that it is an imported concept. It should be pointed out that Japanese openmindedness notwithstanding, housing is one of the building types that has changed the least.
Analogously, the types of collective housing, and especially those on a large scale, have always
encountered difficulty in adapting to the extremely fragmented fabric of Japanese cities. The choice to
study the Dojunkai Apartments is therefore intrinsically connected to the themes that have been
delineated. Of particular interest is the fact that these apartments were built during a period that
coincides with a crucial stage in modern residential architecture, that is, the stage that generally consists
of the period from the Garden City theories to Le Corbusier's visionary plan for the La Ville Radieuse.
This is a period during which collective-housing design was seeking an ideal form of interaction with the
city, a form which I have defined as minimal housing complex. A level of intervention, that is, by means
of which new standards could be applied, in terms of both inhabited and open spaces, imbuing the
residence with particular public and urban meaning.
This study, therefore, poses the following questions as its point of departure. If evolution of the
minimal housing complex can be synthesised in four fundamental unit models, neighbourhood, block,
quarter and city (Garden City, Hendrik P. Berlage's plan for Amsterdam-Zuid, the German Siedlung and
the La Ville Radieuse), what is the form of minimal housing complex represented by the Dojunkai
Apartments?
What are the differences, from the organisational-functional point of view, among the types of housing
represented by these four canonical Occidental cases and the Japanese case? To which relationship
between constructed building and urban fabric do the morphological and functional characteristics of
the Dojunkai-Apartments type of complex refer?
This book, based on the research done for my Ph.D. thesis, presented at Tokyo University in
1999, is being offered as an information tool with respect to some of the issues regarding the history of
Japanese cities and spatiality that have not yet been sufficiently disseminated. It uses as its pretext an
analysis of the Dojunkai Apartments.
I have organised this work into three sections: an essential description of the housing projects
studied, within the historical context from which they derive; the results of analysis of these projects; and
a series of further-reaching reflections.
In the first part, the themes of the introduction of Occidental-style collective housing and of the
role of the Dojunkai association are dealt with, within the context of the radical changes that took place
in Japan during the Taisho period (1912-1925).
In the second part, the sixteen housing projects that were studied are described. This part
concludes with a definition of the minimal housing complex, based on comparative analysis of the four
canonical Occidental cases, that is, Garden City, Amsterdam-Zuid, Siedlung and the La Ville Radieuse.
In the third part, the conclusions drawn in the previous section are re-examined. The minimal
housing complex, defined in the Dojunkai type, is considered within the framework of its spatial
characteristics and the ways in which it differs with respect to Occidental models.
In spite of the Japanese custom of quoting personal names in the family name /name order,
names are presented here in name/family name order, for reasons of homogeneity with Occidental
names. I have, in addition, preferred to use the name "Dojunkai Apartments", since my study was based
on bibliographical material in both Japanese and English.