Built in 1743 in what is now the heart of Kyoto, the House of Sugimoto — a fortuned Japanese family that founded its wealth on the the trade of kimono fabrics — is the incarnation of Japanese tradition and style of life. Unlike Western spaces, the rooms of the house are not defined by walls, windows or furniture.
“In a Japanese house … it’s impossible to understand the organization of areas or their hierarchy. Rooms are simply placed side by side. There is no furniture to indicate its purpose.” In fact, most rooms are left empty, representative of voids, which brings rhythms between the many events of the day-to-day.
“In Japan, a living space only becomes a space for living when a functional object is put in it, like a cushion or a decoration such as a painting,” allowing for total flexibility once anything is stored away; therefore, the space awaits without qualification: It is empty.
The structure of the house is also representative of the emptiness that must reign in order to carry on with everyday tasks. The roof is held solely with joint fixtures, making of the carpenter the true architect of the house. Neither carpet nor flooring can be found, but rather a series of tatamis — flexible, compressed rice straw mats with borders of black fabric — that act not only as unique representative patterns in each room, but also as measuring units for the size of the space.
The rooms in the house are placed next to each other, and the organization of each of them in relation with the front, rear or any of the cardinal points is meaningful to the room’s purpose and the importance of the guests or family members that utilize it.
Guided by beliefs that the devil enters from the north and paradise lays westward, the rooms of the house are organized so that ordinary guests and respected visitors interact with different spaces in the complex, the most sacred of which are located at the very back of the house, where a covered veranda offers a meditative vista of the curated garden filled with 100-year-old moss and tress.
Seen from above, the house is a series of more than 20 roofs, where trees sprout from the courtyards separating the units — from the store where fabrics are sold, to the living quarters, to the storage units and ancestral shrine. Throughout the house, screens guide the light, or rather the shadow, which is highly valued in bringing intimacy and mood to the space. “The whole house is an illustration of the clair-obscure, a hymn to half-light.”
Enjoy this video feature? You can check out similar movies on buildings like Herzog & de Meuron’s VitraHaus, French architect Jean Prouvé’s House, and SANAA’s Rolex Learning Center.
The video was directed by Richard Copans and coproduced by the ARTE France and les Films d’Ici, with the support of la Fondation Franco-Japonaise Sasakawa.