Young Japanese architects looking for new housing style for communication-thirsty Japan

May 31, 2012

Young Japanese architects looking for new housing style for communication-thirsty Japan

Japan’s society is flush with information amid the fast spread of new communication tools, but residents of the rich, advanced country, particularly young people, appear to be thirsty for truly satisfactory communication with someone else.
Solitary persons’ unnoticed deaths have continued to draw media attention in Japan. This reflects weakening human relations mainly in urban areas following the aging of society and the trend toward the nuclear family.
Until a few decades ago, Japanese tended to choose trouble-free, privacy-oriented urban life, hoping to live in condos and apartment houses, but they have become aware of the demerits of the conventional housing styles, Hiroyasu Sawa, a young member of the Fukuoka Association of Architects and Building Engineers, said in a recent interview.
Architects’ jobs are basically to provide hardware for customers, but “we have to think about changes in society, too,” in order to propose new housing styles and software, such as management, to meet people’s diversifying housing-related needs, he said.
Sawa and Yukari Fujita, another member of the association, are key organizers of a workshop to introduce “collective housing” projects in Tokyo and other parts of Japan as an influential new living style aimed at better communication among dwellers. The workshop is part of activities by a team of 15 or so young architects who belong to the association. It was initially launched in 2004 and after a four-year interval, restarted in September 2011.
Collective housing is an innovative housing style in which residents share part of their life while having common space for meals and other purposes. The communication-oriented housing style was proposed in a “paradigm shift” in studies about the way of housing and living amid the changes in the social situation in Japan, Sawa said. “This may not be a general solution to the problems facing us, but it should be an occasion to study about a desirable housing style for today’s Japan,” said Sawa, who served as the moderator at a recent workshop about collective housing, the fifth in the current resumed round.
Collective housing initially started in Sweden in the 1970s to enable residents to share child care, housekeeping and other jobs following an increase in working women. In Japan, collective housing has been expected as a solution to various problems facing Japan’s society, such as increases in families of elderly couples, single mothers and independent working women.
There are a variety of communication-oriented housing units according to the extent of common space to be shared by residents. “Shared houses” are so designed as to have individual single rooms for residents but have a common dining room to have meals together. This compares with “collective housing” in which residents have independent rooms with kitchens and dining space but they also have common space to have meals together periodically or a lounge to have a chat with each other. There are various other examples, for rent and for sale, with many generations or not, between shared houses and collective housing in light of the specific needs among the residents involved. The importance of ensuring communication and mutual support among dwellers began to be felt strongly after the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, which claimed about 6,000 lives in Kobe and neighboring regions. People’s awareness of the need for mutual support became even stronger after the devastating earthquake and tsunami waves which extensively damaged the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan in March 2011.
The Tohoku earthquake left approximately 19,000 people dead or missing and caused various changes and scars in Japan’s society, among them an increase in the number of marriages, not just in affected regions but elsewhere, too. This reflects young people’s desire to have bonds or links with someone else in today’s uncertain society.
“Young people hope to be tied to somebody or something,” Sawa said. "They just want to feel the same things together and feel their goodness together." They can communicate with each other easily with such tools as the twitter and the facebook, but actually, they rather lack communication in the true sense of the term, he said. People, young or not, are seen to be lured to a housing style in which communication is ensured and various values are shared among residents, Sawa said.
Shared houses are rather popular among young people, but collective housing can better provide a sense of communication and mutual support to residents, according to Fujita. In shared houses, people have common things together and take them back to their respective rooms, while collective housing is designed for people to bring together and share things. This allows people to feel the common space more closely to them.
The collective housing workshop was initially proposed mainly by female architects. Women must be thinking about their way of living “more realistically” when they get old, Fujita said. Women prepare meals every day and how their life should be after their partner passes away is expected to be an issue of strong interest for them, she said.
There must be needs for collective housing as a communication-oriented housing style in Fukuoka, but there are none at present. Fukuoka, the most populous city in Kyushu, southwestern Japan, is known as an area that accommodates many students and single-member families. People in the related circles “are just unaware that collective housing will be a feasible business” in Fukuoka, Sawa said. “We have to do more to disseminate information about collective housing in this city,” he said.