Organic Architecture is egg-citing

Without a doubt, Masaharu Takasaki is an organic architect: "Architecture aims to be a living body in its environment," he says. The shapes and floor plans of Zero Cosmology reveal the fluidity appropriate to a follower of Bruce Goff. The dramatic living room takes Wright’s ideas of the hearth at the core of a home to a somewhat illogical extreme. This is Japan, however, where houses have problems fitting into a city and where an architect like Takasaki has his own non-western agenda. What kind of a building does this make Zero Cosmology?

The house is made entirely of in situ concrete, its shuttering marks left clearly exposed. Yet concrete does not exclude the house from Takasaki’s organic goals. The early modernism of Le Corbusier, for example, sacrificed the true nature of materials so that the hours of craftsmanship necessary to achieve the pure forms were disguised beneath the rhetoric of industrially-produced perfection. Post-war brutalism reversed such orthodoxy, leaving concrete to express its inherent organic identity.

Takasaki has a greater problem verifying an organic architecture for the city. "The architecture itself contains natural energy and stimulates its natural surroundings," he says. Yet, Zero Cosmology is squeezed on to a typical Japanese urban plot, surrounded by the ugly tiled roofs of its neighbors and not a rural idyll. The context explains Zero Cosmology’s introversion. Tadao Ando does much the same with the Kidosaki house, using an abridged version of the outside in a central private courtyard as an alternative to real life. Takasaki goes further still, confining everyday experience purely to the activities of domestic life.

That decision would seem somewhat dictatorial but then Takasaki does claim for himself the grand aim of "giving birth to a new culture and a new consciousness." For him, organic architecture is not simply about putting people closer to nature through a building but is about introducing humans to a wider spiritual world: "The force of architecture is its spiritual diversion; only this can induce people to meditate and thus reach a liberated state of mind." An earlier era would have labelled Takasaki’s goal that of abstraction.

The pure geometry of early modern houses, for example, was a direct transference of the abstraction of painting into architecture. People were to be conscious of something other than merely the built form. Yet, Takasaki has not always understood this. Crystal Light (1987), an earlier house, entered under a huge canopy, has three floors of accommodation around a central courtyard. Takasaki claims that the meaning is generated by "the ongoing dialogue between the building’s spiritual essence and its physical forms."

Yet, Crystal Light is far from abstract. Verandas overlooking the central courtyard are covered in fish-scale-like metal panels; the canopy resembles the body of a gigantic silkworm about to raise its head and nibble a leaf. The house, far from organic, is an essay in zoomorphic forms far too easily recognized to have any symbolic significance. Abstraction, after all, relies on a type of silence, not the frenzied articulation of Crystal Light.

Takasaki has learned that lesson. Zero Cosmology is far from literal interpretation of a brief. The clients are a businesswoman, Yoshiko Hayashiyama, and her daughter, Keiko. The house is located in Kagoshima, the capital city of Kyushu, Japan’s largest southern island. The city is dominated by Sakurajima, a still-active volcano. Takasaki has placed the house squarely on a plot surrounded on three sides by roads or lanes. Normal rooms are stacked in pairs on a fourth side against a neighboring building – the store and music room on the ground floor. Tatami room (a traditional-style living room) and kitchen on the first floor, and bedroom and bathroom on the second floor.

The living room, though, differentiates this house and gives it its name. An ovoid volume stands out from the more functional spine of rooms. The living room is supported within an oblong grid of concrete cross-bracings or triangular panels, allowing the curved bottom of the egg to hang apparently unsupported over a shallow pool of water visible from the street. Inside, the room entered through a circular portal, has no furniture apart from a low row of fitted cupboards with a bench on top. The space enjoys an extraordinary level of light, which enters through 54 openings in one of two sizes, punctured in its walls.

Many might see the living room with its portal as little different from a nuclear shelter mounted above ground, but Takasaki has consciously sought a place of security and privacy for the client. A fairer comparison than a bunker would be with the safe rooms created at the heart of politicians’ or businessmen‘s homes as places of refuge against terrorism. An earlier working title for Zero Cosmology was the Egg house, an obvious comment on the shape of the living room and some of Takasaki’s intentions towards that space. Japanese culture sees little of the west’s humor in preferring, instead, its associations with birth and creativity: for egg, read womb.

Yoshiko Hayashiyama takes this notion further: "To us the Egg is like a planet, a microcosm for us alone." Here, Takasaki would agree. Zero Cosmology refers to a place where "people are incited to realize their views on the Cosmos." The troubled link between an organic architecture and the city made good; for Zero Cosmology, sitting below the smoking volcano, "stimulates its natural surroundings," addressing Sakurajima rather than its crowded urban context.

— From Modern House

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