< Previous64 12. Ryue Nishizawa. “Creating Principles. Structure, Plan, Relationship, Landscape”. GA Architect, 18. p. 8-13. The ‘Ito Method’ and the ‘Sejima Method’ In Kanazawa the situation was completely different from Sendai. Juko Hasegawa, before being promoted in her career as a curator, was the Manager of the Museum of Contemporary Art from 1999 to 2006 and had very clear ideas about what she wanted. She worked closely with Sejima on defining the spaces. They eschewed retracting walls and instead implemented a custom-made design for the artworks to be exhibited. Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa followed clearly established guidelines. The building was to be as open as possible to the city. Since 1990, with the N House, Sejima had already been applying the ‘Ito Method’ to take curved bites out of square cakes yet it was not until the Villa in the Forest, 1992 that he used a clearly circular floor plan.12 It was also in Kanazawa that the ‘Sejima Method’, of dividing out the programme into separate rooms, was employed. Hasegawa, as the supervisor of the function, might have suggested this diagrammatic decomposition of independent spaces under the same roof leaving intermediate circulation routes and structuring the interior landscape. The boundary of the exterior curve , the glazed ‘expansive curve’, brings together the two worlds and opens up the sightlines to the castle and to Kenroku-en, one of the most famous gardens in Japan. A POSTERIORI 65 a) ‘Ito Method’: Toyo Ito & Associates. Fire Station and Residence for the Elderly in Yatsushiro. Kumamoto, 1992-1995. b) ‘Ito Method’: Kazuyo Sejima Architects & Associates. N House. Kumamoto, 1992. c) Kazuyo Sejima Architects & Associates. Villa in the Forest. Nagano, 1992. d) ‘Sejima Method’: SANAA/ Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa. 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa, 1999-2004.88 No rush Our house is on the boundary of the Motomachi gallery, between sectors 4 and 5, next to Hanakuma Metro station. The gallery is one of those roofed streets crossing the centres of Japanese cities, sheltered from the rain and the sun by polycarbonate vaulted roofs. Alongside, the alleyways are used for loading/unloading and refuse collection –the other side of retail activity– and finally the avenues, where traffic circulates and which dominate the urban weave, extending the city parallel to the coast and also northwards, crossing the mountains. Kobe is a city growing out from the side of Mount Rokko stretching out towards Osaka Bay. The port, the origin of the city, continues to gain ground with manmade islands. A memorial commemorates the 1995 earthquake which destroyed a large part of the downtown area. A few metres away, a leaping carp, Fish Dance Monument, a work by Frank Gehry, reminds us of perseverance in the face of adversity. Above all this, an elevated double-height railway track still separates the city from the port, just as it did before 1995. We arrived in Kobe in no rush and when you move slowly you appreciate movement more, with its incessant visible presence in this urban continuum, seemingly with no guidelines or references. MONDAY, JULY 2ND, 2018, KOBE89 11 05 15 13 07 02 01 16 08 10 09 14 03 04 06 12 0 km1 km 01. FERRY TERMINAL 34.683088, 135.197965 02. SANNOMIYA 34.693748, 135.194304 03. FISH DANCE MONUMENT FRANK O. GEHRY 34.684955, 135.189671 04. EARTHQUAKE MEMORIAL PARK 34.683928, 135.190051 05. KAZAMIDORI HALL, KITANO 34.701398, 135.189760 06. HYOGO ART MUSEUM TADAO ANDO 34.699810, 135.218469 07. NUNOBIKI WATERFALL 34.709391, 135.193648 08. ROKKO HOUSING TADAO ANDO 34.724634, 135.227686 09. ITSUKUSHIMA SHRINE 34.724813, 135.228705 10. ROKKO CABLE CAR 34.737080, 135.233399 11. MOUNT ROKKO 34.752194, 135.236807 12. ROKKO-ARIMA ROPEWAY 34.766362, 135.246804 13. ARIMA ONSEN STATION 34.791150, 135.245565 14. ARIMA 34.796840, 135.247797 15. SUMA BEACH 34.642676, 135.124524 16. JAMES BLUES LAND 34.683544, 135.183548 KOBE Hyogo Prefecture OSAKA BAY TAKAMATSU-KOBE108 Dotonbori Canal, at Ebisu Bridge, is the most famous meeting point in Osaka. It is a sort of river Times Square offering night-time leisure. This is where Shinsaibashi Mall empties out, another example of these anodyne linear spaces roofed with transparent polycarbonate domes, reproduced ad nauseum in identical versions in Japanese cities. Each premises has a young women at the door shouting out the offers, trying to drown out the other businesses. And amidst this ‘lively’ noisy atmosphere there still remain several traditional shops, such as the Nakao Shoten book and old prints store, which is where we bought the print from The Tale of Genji, which appears on page 130.109124 “When at last I saw Okamoto’s tower (looking like a giant phallus) penetrating the soft membrane of the roof, I thought to myself that the battle for modernity had finally been lost.”* ARATA ISOZAKI *Arata Isozaki. Japan-ness in Architecture. MIT Press, 2011. p.56.125134 50 m0 mKORAKUEN N 02 01 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 01 ENTRADA PRINCIPAL 02 CASA DE TÉ ENYO- TEI 03 ESTANQUE KAYO- NO-IKE 04 ESTANQUE SAWA- NO-IKE 05 COLINA YUISHINZAN 06 CAMPOS DE ARROZ 07 ARBOLEDA DE CIRUELOS 08 PLANTACIÓN DE TÉ 09 JARDÍN DE IRIS Y PUENTE DE YATSUHASHI 0 m50 m KORAKU-EN GARDEN Tsuda Nagatada Okayama. Okayama Prefecture. 1687-1700. Edo Period. 01. MAIN ENTRANCE. 02. ENYO-TEI TEAHOUSE. 03. KAYONO-IKE POND. 04. SAWA-NO-IKE POND. 05. YUISHINZAN HILL. 06. RICE FIELDS. 07. PLUM ORCHARD. 08. TEA PLANTATION. 09. IRIS GARDEN AND YATSUHASHI BRIDGE. TEA PLANTATION PATHS MEADOW WATER CAR PARKS WOODED AREAS BUILDINGS RICE FIELDS PLUM ORCHARD135 50 m0 mKORAKUEN N 02 01 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 01 ENTRADA PRINCIPAL 02 CASA DE TÉ ENYO- TEI 03 ESTANQUE KAYO- NO-IKE 04 ESTANQUE SAWA- NO-IKE 05 COLINA YUISHINZAN 06 CAMPOS DE ARROZ 07 ARBOLEDA DE CIRUELOS 08 PLANTACIÓN DE TÉ 09 JARDÍN DE IRIS Y PUENTE DE YATSUHASHINext >