Where did Kazuyo Sejima come from?

どうせドイツ語になるんだから英語版もup。

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You might be shocked to learn that Kazuyo Sejima never received an “architectural” education. Then again, depending on how you look at it, perhaps you could say that she did. Although Sejima studied housing, interiors and furniture, she never studied anything remotely resembling what one would call “architecture.”

Between 1979 and 1981, while enrolled in the graduate Division of Housing at Japan Women’s University, Sejima focused her studies on the design and creation of housing and living spaces. During her two years in graduate school, however, she also made independent visits to Toyo Ito’s office, as well as the department of interior architectural design at Tokyo Zokei University, an art and design college located in a suburb of the Japanese capital that was modeled after the Bauhaus. Koji Taki (b. 1928), a leading scholar and theorist who was well-versed in the visual arts such as photography and architecture, was giving a course there on the history of Western furniture at the time, and Sejima would commute two hours each way in order to sit in on his lectures. At Taki’s advice, she also started participating in interior design practicum sessions, sweating it out twice a week devising projects and designs together with the younger students from the department. The surprising truth – that Sejima actually studied furniture during her college days – is, even in Japan, not widely known.

Sejima’s interest in Taki stemmed from the fact that he had photographed residential projects by Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006), an architect whose work she had much admired since her student days. Although the term “architecture” was still being used to refer mostly to public and municipal buildings, architects like Shinohara and peers who had rallied around him, such as Taki and Ito, contributed scathing critiques of their time from the perspective of residential architecture, art and individuality. This was the world of the 1970s, a period in which the notion of the “public” itself began to be questioned. It was Shinohara and his peers who first perpetrated the revolt against an architecture that had fallen behind the times and ceased to be relevant, and Sejima’s falling in with them was only a matter of course.
Born in 1956 and raised in a provincial “company town,” she found absolutely no sense of reality in social groupings that were based on the act of identifying as a local or national citizen of Japan. For Sejima, a legitimate sense of reality came only from herself and whatever stood within her reach. The starting point for her work consists in thinking about whether architecture can emerge from these two premises. In this way, Sejima established during her college career what would become the focus of her architectural thinking, through her study of housing, interiors, furniture – and, gradually, her own body.

This is how Sejima started to conceive architecture – by taking furniture as her starting point. The most straightforward example of this approach can be found in her early residential work Platform II (1990), which consists entirely of a scattered arrangement of units that integrate furniture with structure. Platform II represents Sejima’s attempt to fill a space completely with the smallest possible elements that convey a sense of tangible reality, based on her relationship to herself and the furniture that surrounds her. This is the essence of Sejima’s minimalist approach, from which all of her subsequent work derives – starting with a conception of furniture, and of interiors.

（英語訳：Darrylさん。ありがとうございました。）