WINDOW RESEARCH INSTITUTE

In this series, architectural historian Terunobu Fujimori, who has traveled extensively to study buildings of various times and places, will be introducing a selection of notably intriguing windows found in historic buildings from all across Japan, one at a time. The subject of the eight installment is the Karuizawa Summer House, which architect Antonin Raymond designed as his own villa and summer office. Now relocated and housing the Museé Peynet, the building features a large ribbon window. What significance do such windows hold in the history of architecture?

 

 

Mayumi Takizawa, known for his role in pioneering modern architecture in Japan as a member of the Bunriha Kenchikukai [Secessionist Architecture Group], once shared a window-related anecdote with me during an interview:

When we participated in the Tokyo Peace Exhibition for the first time in 1922, we wanted to create long horizontal windows but ultimately gave up because we were unsure how to eliminate the intervening walls and pillars. A couple of years later, I saw Le Corbusier’s work and thought, ʻSo that’s how you do it’. Impressed by his creativity, I copied his method in a building I designed in Kanda during the reconstruction period after the earthquake [of 1923].

We can understand from this statement that there was a yearning among Japan’s young avant-garde architects of the time to create continuous horizontal windows, and it was Le Corbusier who first showed them how it’s done.

Though Le Corbusier may not have been the first in the world to make such windows, he certainly was the first to advocate to the world for their importance as an essential element of modern architecture. One can make this claim because he explicitly includes the “ribbon window” as the fourth point of “The Five Points of a New Architecture” that he presented for an international audience. A ribbon window can be created by cantilevering short beams outward from the columns, positioning the exterior wall at the end of these beams, and making a horizontal opening in the wall. It’s important to note, however, that there were some steps that came before the ribbon window was popularized by Le Corbusier, starting with an encounter between traditional Japanese architecture and the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. I briefly mentioned this point in the earlier installment on the Rinshunkaku, but I would like to expand on it in a bit more detail here.

The Japanese pavilion designed by Masamichi Kuru for the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 was named the Phoenix Hall (Hooden), referencing the structure of the same name at Byodoin Temple in Uji, after which it was modeled. To modern eyes, the pavilion, built using traditional wood construction techniques, would undoubtedly appear as a somewhat strange specimen of Japanese architecture that mixes elements of temple, shoin, and sukiya-style buildings. What struck Wright was not the building’s mishmash style, however, but rather the unfamiliar design of its openings. The inside and outside were separated by shōji [sliding paper screens] and amado [sliding storm shutters], while the rooms were divided by thin fusuma [sliding partitions] and shōji, which could be gently slid away to merge indoor and outdoor spaces, as well as adjoining rooms. The prominent postwar American architectural historian Vincent Scully describes this fluid, seamless character of traditional Japanese architectural space using the term “continuity”.

Wright conducted extensive design studies based on traditional Japanese architecture to develop houses with flowing, continuous spaces, which were naturally accompanied by horizontally elongated building forms and windows. In 1910, he published a compilation of his plans of these buildings, along with perspective renderings inspired by ukiyoe [woodblock prints], through the publisher Ernst Wasmuth in German. He set his target on a German audience because, at the time, Germany was at the forefront of the global modern movement.

Wright’s collection of drawings hit its mark, instilling inspiration among leading German architects such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Gropius, for example, went on to build the horizontally articulated Fagus Factory building in 1911 and Bauhaus building in 1927. It was in the following year that Le Corbusier presented “The Five Points of a New Architecture”, cementing the ribbon window as a staple of modern architecture worldwide. A few years after that, the ribbon window found itself at the center of a certain architectural incident involving France and Japan.

In 1934, Le Corbusier, upon opening an issue of a freshly delivered architecture magazine, was bewildered by what he saw: the Maison Errazuriz, an unrealized Chilean project he had proposed in 1930, depicted as standing in Japan. What he actually saw was the Karuizawa Summer House, a villa and summer office that Japan-based American architect Antonin Raymond had built for himself in Karuizawa. The elongated building consists of two areas: an office area and a living area, originally situated at the west and east ends, respectively. Its overall plan forms a cross, with the east-west axis of the office area intersecting the north-south axis of the living area. This cruciform plan, of course, adheres to the principles of plan composition that Wright, Raymond’s mentor, had developed after being inspired by the open, continuous plans of traditional Japanese architecture.

But what became the issue was neither the cruciform plan nor the design of the living area; it was the plan and elevations of the office area. Comparing them with those of the Maison Errazuriz, anyone would be surprised by the similarities. The resemblance is particularly striking in the elevations. I cannot name any architect in the world other than Le Corbusier who designed an inverted wooden gable roof, a form that is counterintuitive to the natural behavior of rainwater. Yet, it was this roof that enabled him to not only effectively express the spirit of anti-tradition at the core of early modernism but also inject a sculptural dynamism into the work, breaking from the box forms of mainstream Bauhausian modern architecture.

The form of the roof also relates directly to the plan, with its taller eastern end accommodating a loft which served as a drafting room accessed via a ramp instead of stairs. Although built of wood, the composition tying together the inverted gable roof, loft, and ramp bears the unmistakable mark of Corbusian modernism. Raymond became enthralled with it upon seeing it a French magazine, and when he learned that it would not be realized, he gave in to temptation and built it while changing out the masonry for wood. Even though he did include a footnote to acknowledge Le Corbusier as the author of the original scheme when he published the project, what he did was not commendable. Raymond, it seems, had a propensity for succumbing to the temptation of appropriating others’ work; this was one of three instances in which he did so during his career.

Just as Raymond defends himself in his autobiography, however, the Karuizawa Summer House, while identical to the Maison Errazuriz in its overall composition, does possess many features of his own design, particularly in the details. The most notable of Raymond’s original contributions can be found around the windows.

If you look at the western side of Le Corbusier’s interior perspectives of the Maison Errazuriz, you can see that there is a series of windows segmented by thick structural masonry walls. What ever happened to the ribbon window? The heaviness of these masonry walls aesthetically clashes with the lightness of the freestanding wooden columns and wooden roof beams, undermining the harmony of the space. Raymond undoubtedly noticed this and appropriated the design knowing that he could improve on it. And in fact, Le Corbusier himself compliments Raymond’s project in a letter, calling it a “successful adaptation” of his idea.

The ribbon window was the most crucial feature that contributed to Raymond’s success in translating Le Corbusier’s masonry design into a wooden design. Raymond certainly was aware of this: he features the window prominently in his autobiography, which includes a photograph showing his family and staff enjoying the seamless integration of indoor and outdoor spaces achieved by the wide and seemingly unglazed opening. He created this illusion of there being no glazing by applying the special traditional Japanese technique of “amado stowing” to the garasudo [sliding glass doors]. That is, he designed the window so that the amado and garasudo would slide along the outer and inner sides of the two central columns, respectively, such that the amado retract into an exterior tobukuro [door pocket], while the garasudo retract into an interior tobukuro.

The modernists’ dream of creating open, continuous spaces, inspired by traditional Japanese architecture and passed on from Wright to Gropius, then to Corbusier, and finally to Raymond, came full circle and was realized in Japan in the form of disappearing garasudo à la stow-away amado. However, the somewhat brute-force solution of stowing all the garasudo on one end of the window never caught on, as it resulted in unresolved details on the interior, which you can see in the photographs. If one really wanted to, one could do it more neatly by laying down a separate track for each garasudo. In fact, Raymond did just that in a project after the war, as did Isoya Yoshida, but this solution results in an excessively wide threshold, which lacks the appeal to merit imitation.