Moriyama House, by Ryue Nishizawa
“The quiet accumulation of urban elements rooted in daily life” #1
I recently took the opportunity to make rapid visits to two houses in Tokyo, both of which sit an hour or so on the subway from Tokyo central station, well into the city’s sprawling suburbs: Sou Fujimoto’s House NA and Ryue Nishizawa’s Moriyama House, the subject of this post. I circled each furtively with a camera for a while, trying to ever-so-discreetly stalk their structures as both are private residences. Yet as both are also pinned up on foundations of ‘radical transparency’, I didn’t feel too awkward in doing so. But the photos I’ve selected below represent that privateness, as well as their publicness, and I’m not revealing their precise locations accordingly.
Both are highly influential buildings, produced in the early twenty-first century, and both now exemplify for me the most interesting forms of urban architecture, of housing, or urbanism; the sense that “architecture and the city are seamless”, as Ryue Nishizawa, architect of the Moriyama House, has said elsewhere. And thus, public and private, individual and collective, personal and shared are part of a more complex continuum than is traditionally understood, at least in ‘the West’. The emphasis on the collective — through a rediscovery of public realm, of communal and cooperative…
