Non-Typological Architecture, Brendon Carlin

Abstract: Terms like playful, innocent, light, free, and sincere have often been used to characterise the work of the most famous Japanese architects of the 21st century. As evidenced in projects like EPFL's own Rolex Learning Centre, works from SANAA and contemporaries have become crucial to architectural practice and cultural institutions beyond Japan. In contrast to a playful lightness, the uncanny works of these architects also cast a dark shadow back into Japan’s history and its tethering to Western modernity since the mid-19th century. In 1970s Japan, several architects including Hiromi Fujii and Takefumi Aida, as well as the young Itō, later referred to as the New Wave, proposed and built a series of houses that were radically blank. In their composition (or lack thereof), houses like Fujii’s E-2 or Todoroki and Aida’s Annihilation House, not to mention Toyo Ito’s own early projects like U-House rejected Japanese and Western historical ritual and cultural associations and rejected modern architectural entanglements with the alliance between progress, technology, and production. The term non-typological architecture is proposed here to read and theorise practice and context through a set of examples that tend, in a way that is self-evident, towards blank containers of empty space.