The Daily Yomiuri – Osaka, Japan
By Julian Satterthwaite / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
The Contemporary Tea House: Japan’s Top Architects Redefine a Tradition
By Arata Isozaki, Tadao Ando, Terunobu Fujimori
Kodansha International, 134 pp, 4,410 yen
How do you update something as heavily circumscribed by tradition as the Japanese tea house? Any change is liable to be met with howls of protest. Anyone who tinkers with the basic elements is likely to be derided. It’s a brave man–and tea house builders always have been men–who takes on such a task.
The question is the subject of The Contemporary Tea House, by Japanese architects Arata Isozaki, Tadao Ando, Terunobu Fujimori and others who (strangely) don’t get a credit on the cover. And a quick glance at the book would suggest that they have answered the question by ignoring it.
Ando’s tea house designs feature his characteristically somber concrete construction. Fujimori seems more interested in tree houses than tea houses (see main story), and Kengo Kuma–one of the uncredited authors–has built his out of unorthodox materials such as plastic.
Can these designs have anything to do with the tatami, wood and washi world of the traditional tea house?
Actually, yes, because all the featured works are actually more faithful to tradition than first seems the case. The innovation lies in material, shape and style.
In his introduction to the book, Fujimori defines the key elements of the tea house as small size, inward orientation, front and rear gardens, a “mizuya” preparation area and an alcove.
Of the contemporary architects, Isozaki has stuck most faithfully to these elements. Indeed, his are the only structures that could be used for a strictly formal tea ceremony as understood today. Designs such as Uji-an (1992) at first look like Isozaki’s typically postmodern mix of styles and references–but actually tick off all the requisite elements.
Fujimori and Ando are freer in their reinterpretations of the tea house. The latter’s precarious Takasugi-an, which teeters atop two tree trunks, at first seems to owe more to a Western garden folly. But even here, Fujimori argues, he has stayed true to tradition while rethinking the form.
His tea houses are invariably accessed by a “nijiriguchi,” for example–a low entrance that forces the visitor to crawl, and emphasizes that they are entering a very special space, distinct from the outside world.
Besides, if these houses don’t fit the tea ceremony as currently practiced, perhaps it’s the ceremony that is out of step.
Fujimori argues that tea houses were very different places until they became so codified by tradition. Until the 16th century, he says, the tea house was really a place for solitary contemplation and artistic expression, not ceremony. His quirky designs really go back to that earlier tradition, he argues.
The Contemporary Tea House is beautifully illustrated in color throughout, and makes good coffee-table fodder for those who don’t actually plan on reading it.
Those who do read it will find that–besides an authoritative look at its subject–it offers the incidental pleasure of insight into the personalities of its authors.
“When conceiving a new building I begin by rendering it in my mind as a single schematic concept,” writes the academically-minded Ando.
“I began with a general sketch, then headed into the mountains in search of a chestnut tree that fit my idea,” says the more pragmatic Fujimori.
It seems there’s more than one way to build a tea house.
