why japan is crazy about housing _ archdaily
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Why Japan is crazy about housing.Architects house, japan, economics, familyTRANSCRIPT
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Why Japan is Crazy AboutHousing
House NA / Sou Fujimoto Architects. Image Iw an Baan
Japan is famous for its radical residential architecture. But
as Tokyo architect Alastair Townsend explains, its
penchant for avant garde housing may be driven by the
countrys bizarre real estate economics, as much as its
designers creativity.
Here on ArchDaily, we see a steady stream of
radicalJapanese houses. These homes, mostly designed
by young architects, often elicit readers bewilderment. It
can seem that in Japan, anything is permissible: stairs and
balconies without handrails, rooms flagrantly cast open to
their surroundings, or homes with no windows at all.
These whimsical, ironic, or otherwise extreme living
propositions arrest readers attention, baiting us to
ask:WTF Japan? The photos travel the blogosphere and
social networks under their own momentum, garnering
global exposure and international validation for Japans
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HouseT / Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects. Image Hiroyasu Sakaguchi
outwardly shy, yet media-savvy architects. Afterall, in Japan
the country with the most registered architects per capita
standing out from the crowd is the key to getting ahead
for young designers. But what motivates their clients, who
opt for such eccentric expressions of lifestyle?
An unconventional home requires an unconventional client,
one whos willing to take-on, or can afford to ignore, one or
more types of risk: privacy, comfort, efficiency, aesthetics,
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House in Saijo / Suppose Design Office. Image Courtesy of Nacasa&Partners
Inc.
etc. But Japans experimental commissions arent
necessarily luxury villas for a wealthy cultural elite. Many
are small middle-class homes, not a typology where we
expect to find bold avant garde design. So, what is it about
Japan that encourages such everyday risk taking?
In the West, deviation from societal norms can jeopardize a
homes value, since it may prove impractical or distasteful
to future buyers. Bold design decisions can present
investment risk, so clients usually temper their personal
tastes and eccentricities accordingly.
At least thats enshrined Western logic. Safe as
houses,right? Travel to Japan and this home truth is turned
on its head, largely because the Japanese can not expect
to sell their homes.
Houses in Japan rapidly depreciate like consumer durable
goods cars, fridges, golf clubs, etc. After 15 years, a
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Kumagai House / Hiroshi Kuno + Associates. Image Courtesy of Hiroshi Kuno
+ Associates
home typically loses all value and is demolished on
average just 30 years after being built. According to a
paper by the Nomura Research Institute, this is a major
obstacle to affluence for Japanese families. Collectively,
the write-off equates to an annual loss of 4% of Japans
total GDP, not to mention mountains of construction waste.
And so, despite a shrinking population, house building
remains steady. 87% of Japans home sales are new
homes (compared with only 11-34% in Western countries).
This puts the total number of new houses built in Japan on
par with the US, despite having only a third of the
population. This begs the question: why dont the Japanese
value their old homes?
Here, without wishing to resort to clichs, a little cultural
background offers some insight
Firstly, Japan fetishizes newness. The frequent severity of
earthquakes has taught its people not to take buildings for
granted. And impermanence is an enshrined cultural and
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House of Aw a-cho / Container Design. Image Eiji Tomita
religious value (nowhere more so than at Ises Grand
Shinto Shrine, which is rebuilt every 20 years). These oft-
repeated truisms nonetheless fail to offer a sufficient
economic rationale for Japans ingrained real estate
depreciation. Its disposable attitude to housing seems to fly
in the face of Western financial sense.
In the countrys rush to industrialize and rebuild cities
decimated after WWII, housebuilders rapidly spawned
many cheap, low quality wooden frame houses shoddily
built without insulation or proper seismic reinforcement.
Older homes from this period are assumed to be
substandard, or even toxic, and investing in their
maintenance or improvement is considered futile. So,
rather than maintain or upgrade them, most are simply torn
down.
Depreciation is also a holdover from the collapse of
Japans economic bubble in the late 1980s. Then, the
ballooning price of land shot up so rapidly, buildings were
considered temporary installations. This perception
persists today, propped-up, in part, by policies that
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House N / Sou Fujimoto. Image Iw an Baan
artificially sustain land prices, despite years of economic
stagnancy and population decline.
The quality of todays typical homes most of which
arerobotically prefabricated has greatly improved, but the
earlier mindset remains entrenched as market logic.
Depreciation is the mantra of housing appraisers. Yet,
theres no material reason why, if properly maintained or
improved, these homes couldnt provide shelter in
perpetuity, like in the West, where reselling and moving
homes several times throughout ones lifetime is
commonplace.
Japans army of loyal salarymen enjoy secure jobs for life,
and rarely move to relocate to a new job. Although this is
starting to change, a stable salaried job is still a
prerequisite for a mortgage, which borrowers slowly repay
in full over the course of their careers. Selling up much
less profiting from the resale is out of the question, since
no one wants to buy a pre-owned home. As the salaryman
dutifully slaves away to pay off the mortgage, his or her
propertys value is all the while depreciating, eventually
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leaving only the value of the land (minus the cost of
demolishing the house). In other words, negative equity is
the norm. Grinding economic and, consequently,
geographic immobility is an entrenched reality for most
Japanese homeowners.
Compared with other developed economies, where, mainly,
the wealthy hire architects, many more young Japanese
first-time homeowners buy land and hire an architect to
build their new home, perhaps because for all the
economic reasons just discussed theyre resigned to
living in it for the rest of their lives.
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Wall less house / Tezuka Architects. Image Katsuhisa Kida / FOTOTECA
House in Kohoku / Torafu. Image Daici Ano
So, how do Japans bizarre real estate economics influence
its architecture? Clients need not contemplate what a
potential buyer will think 8-10 years into the future. This
gives them and their architects greater personal freedom.
Without property values to safeguard, Japan, generally
lacks planning scrutiny or incentives to protect and
preserve local character. Neighbors are largely powerless
to object on aesthetic grounds to what gets built next door.
This is a boon to architects creative license, but it also
reduces the collective incentive to maintain and beautify
communities by, say, nurturing greenery or burying
overhead power lines.
The freedom to build homes that are a highly personal
expression of lifestyle, taste, and aspiration, makes Japan
a fertile environment for architects and their clients to test
the limits of residential design.
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House in Hiro / Suppose Design Office. Image Toshiyuki Yano
For architects, it also helps that civil lawsuits are rare.
Unlike their litigation-wary European and American
counterparts, Japanese architects rarely fear claims of
negligence, emboldening them to take greater risks.
Japans younger architectural clientele may be more open
to risk-taking at the behest of their architect, for whom each
project presents an opportunity to test new and innovative
ideas. Perhaps theres also a measure of youthful navet
as to the long-term consequences of design decisions that
they, as end users, will have to tolerate for the rest of their
lives.
It may seem sad that Japanese families slave, scrimp, and
save to build a home, only to see their investment rapidly
vanish over the ensuing 15 years. In this light, some of the
avant garde houses seem like fatalistic last hurrahs
follies to the futility of home ownership in Japan. Resigned
to their predicament, but needing somewhere to live and
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Library House / Shinichi Ogaw a & Associates. Image Courtesy of Shinichi
Ogaw a & Associates
raise a family, its little wonder that Japanese clients reclaim
control and quietly rebel in the best way they can through
design.
Besides theyll eventually tear it all down anyway.
Alastair Townsend (@AlaTown) is co-founder of Tokyo
Architects BAKOKO. He also writes about architecture and
housing in Japan at alatown.com. He was the former editor
of the website ja+u (Japan Architecture+Urbanism) and
editor of JA Yearbooks 1990-2011.
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Cite:
Alastair Townsend . "Why Japan is Crazy About Housing" 21 Nov
2013.ArchDaily. Accessed 21 Nov 2013.
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