Japanese Architecture - Early Heisei Period

Early Heisei Period

The Heisei period began with the collapse of the so-called "bubble economy" that had previously boosted Japan's economy. Commissions for commercial works of architecture virtually dried up and architects relied upon government and prefectural organisations to provide projects.

Building on elements from the Shōnandai Culture Centre, Itsuko Hasegawa undertook a number cultural and community centres throughout Japan. These included the Sumida Cultural Centre (1995) and the Fukuroi Community Centre (2001) where she involved the public in the process of design whilst exploring her own ideas about the filtration of light through the external walls into the interior. In his 1995 competition win for Sendai Mediatheque, Toyō Itō continued his earlier thoughts about fluid dynamics within the modern city with "seaweed-like" columns supporting a seven story building wrapped in glass. His work later in the period, for example, the library to Tama Art University in Tōkyō in 2007 demonstrates more expressive forms, rather than the engineered aesthetic of his earlier works.

Although Tadao Ando became well known for his use of concrete, he began the decade designing the Japanese pavilion at the Seville Exposition 1992, with a building that was hailed as "the largest wooden structure in the world". He continued with this medium in projects for the Museum of Wood Culture, Kami, Hyōgo Prefecture (1994) and the Komyo-ji Shrine in Saijo (2001).

The UK practice, Foreign Office Architects won an international competition in 1994 to design the Yokohama International Port Terminal. It is an undulating structure that emerges from the surrounding city and forms a building to walk over as well as into. Klein Dytham Architecture are one of a handful of foreign architects who have managed to gain a strong foothold in Japan. Their design for Moku Moku Yu (literally "wood wood steam"), a communal bathhouse in Kobuchizawa, Yamanashi Prefecture in 2004 is a series of interconnected circular pools and changing rooms, flat roofed and clad in coloured vertical timbers.

After the 1995 Kōbe earthquake, Shigeru Ban developed cardboard tubes that could be used to quickly construct refugee shelters that were dubbed "Paper Houses". Also as part of that relief effort he designed a church using 58 cardboard tubes that were 5m high and had a tensile roof that opened up like an umbrella. The church was erected by Roman Catholic volunteers in five weeks. For the Nomadic Museum, Ban used walls made of shipping containers, stacked four high and joined at the corners with twist connectors that produced a checkerboard effect of solid and void. The ancillary spaces were made with paper tubes and honeycomb panels. The museum was design to be disassembled and it subsequently moved from New York, to Santa Monica, Tōkyō and Mexico.

Historian and architect Terunobu Fujimori's studies in the 1980s into so-called architectural curios found in the city inspired the work of a younger generation of architects such as the founders of Atelier Bow-Wow. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kajima surveyed the city for "no-good" architecture for their book Made in Tokyo in 2001. Their work in turn seeks to embrace its context rather than block it out. Although their office in Tōkyō is on a tight site they have welcomed the city in with huge windows and spacious porches.

Sou Fujimoto's architecture relies upon a manipulation of basic building blocks to produce a geometric primitivism. His buildings are very sensitive to the topographical form of their context and include a series of houses as well as a children's home in Hokkaidō.

Two former employees of Toyō Itō, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa formed a collaborative partnership in 1995 called SANAA. They are known for creating lightweight, transparent spaces that expose the fluidity and movement of their occupants. Their Dior store in Shibuya, Tōkyō, in 2001 was reminiscent of Itō's Mediatheque, with cool white acrylic sheets on the external facade that filter the light and partially reveal the store's contents. Their dynamic of fluidity is demonstrated by the Rolex Learning Centre at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, completed in 2010. This building has an undulating floor plane set under a continuous concrete shell roof that was poured in one go over two days. The plan is like a biological cell punctuated with tables and courtyards alike. In 2009 they designed the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London that comprised a reflective, floating aluminium roof supported by slender columns.