Architecture and Environment as One
A Conversation with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa
Maki Onishi
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Maki Onishi: I’d like this interview to be an opportunity for the two of you to discuss your thoughts these days on the possibilities and prospects for architecture. I’m particularly interested in learning what you mean by "architecture that is one with the environment", a theme you have both addressed in recent writings. Sejima-san, you’ve said that you’ve been thinking for a long time about how to link interiors and exteriors, trying out various approaches such as creating in-between areas, working from experience and so on&mdashbut that lately, you’ve come to feel that thinking about interiors and thinking about exteriors are one and the same process. Nowadays, what does the idea of "architecture and the environment as one" mean to you?
Kazuyo Sejima: Up to now I’ve engaged in a lot of trial and error. I wanted to design architecture in terms of its relationship to its surroundings and also to what would be created inside. But I found it hard to find a balance between both considerations: my work would tend to prioritize either the outside or the inside. Then, as I thought about how to build things with both aspects in balance, it occurred to me that at the outset, there was really no interior and no exterior. It was a mistake to treat them as separate entities in the first place and then try to join them together.
Right now I’m interested in ’pointillism'. Why pointillism? Because if everything in the universe is made of points, a high density of points can be something like a wall, and reducing the density of the points in the wall can turn it into a space. If you think about things in this way, interior and exterior don’t have to be separate entities, they can blend together, in harmony.
Since around the time we designed the Louvre-Lens, it’s become more important to us to consider how architecture can be one element of a landscape. I wanted our approach to the relationship between architecture and landscape to dovetail with our approach to the interior of the structure. That’s when the notion of pointillism occurred to me. In a painting, for example, you can draw an object or scene entirely with lines, or, alternatively, you can draw it using no outlines but simply with dots of varying densities and colours. I wondered if there was a way to draw the interior of a building and its surrounding environment like that, as a continuum.
When you talk about architecture as one element of a landscape, you mean something different from, say, a farmhouse blending harmoniously with the surrounding fields and woods, I think. What is your image of architecture where interior and exterior become one as in a pointillist painting?
KS: A farmhouse standing on a hillside certainly fits the image of blending with the landscape. That’s one aspect of what I’m talking about, but my question is, does it apply to the interior as well? One can certainly take this approach&mdashblending with the scenery, using the same materials or colors as other structures in the neighbourhood, and so on. But I’d like to take that a step further and create new architectural spaces or places that include interior space. For example, the conditions of light in a space constantly change in a way that resembles the variations of light and shade in a painting. I am thinking about how that kind of variation can be incorporated into architecture.
I can sense your interest in such phenomena when I view buildings designed by SANAA. I see it in your design of the façade of the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, or in the pilotis of Università Bocconi, which create multiple layers of space that remind me of phenomena like clouds and rainbows. Do the two of you think in terms of intangible ’phenomena' of this sort?
Ryue Nishizawa: To us, those phenomena are part of the structure. We have never aimed strictly for ’phenomena' per se. They exist only as a result of the structure. For example, when we think about the appearance of a building’s façade&mdashhow it will look&mdashwe are usually thinking about the structure of the building. Will it be layered? How will the rooms be laid out? We are always thinking about the relations among elements, i.e., their structure, and that is that determines the appearance of the building.
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