Harumi Apartments, between tradition and modern living
Maekawa was invited by the Japan Housing Corporation 1 to design the apartment block in 1956. The apartments were constructed in Harumi 2, a reclaimed area in Tokyo Bay which was developed by the Japanese Housing Corporation as a part of a systematic effort to solve Tokyo’s housing crisis. Along the time, Tokyo Bay has been the scenario of most of the revolutionary ideas, since the megastructures of the Metabolist group, until the new projects for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
The Harumi project was one of the corporation’s first experiment with such a large-scale housing block. Harumi was at the time, part industrial and part residential and contains a major shipping pier, The Tokyo International …show more content…
Like most islands in Tokyo Bay, Harumi was once a garbage site until 1929 when the landfill was closed. The first land reclamation was completed in 1931, when the island was 76 hectares, the final land reclamation was completed in 1966, and the current island is now 106 hectares.
Harumi Apartments is one of Maekawa’s most important projects, as well as one of his most innovative architectural responses to a residential building. The Harumi Apartment’s structural frame is megastructural in its proportions and concept. The Harumi Apartment show a powerful appearance in a radically simple concept. It will became an example of Japanese version of western architecture that would introduce a completely new topic into world architecture.
Harumi Apartments recall the western modern architecture and traditional Japanese houses; this fact would lead Reyner Banham to the statement that Harumi marked the point where a Japanization of western architecture began. If we analyze the facades, we can imagine the individual Japanese houses fitted into a giant skeleton, a concept borrowed from Le Corbusier, which would later become the key concept of the …show more content…
In the Harumi Apartments, we can see a return to the design of more traditional residential organizations with flexible spaces, only divided by sliding doors. These offered more possibilities than the functionalist plans orientated towards the existential minimum of a western nuclear family. Sliding screens could be closed to provide at least limited privacy, and opened or even removed for uninterrupted space. The ‘’traditional’’ features were functional, economical, and made the interior space more comfortable for those who used them.
Even if the incorporation of the Japanese-style interiors into apartment buildings utilizing modern construction methods was not new in 1958, (buildings constructed in the late 1920 and 1930 by semipublic agency often incorporated tatami rooms) the scale on which the Harumi Apartments negotiated the apparent contradiction between high technology and premodern aesthetics was new.
The strategy that wanted achieve Maekawa in these high-density housing, was a reasonable level of comfort within the constraints of public