Site Specific: Three Floating Objects

Studio Shunsuke Kimura - Kyoto, 2020

SSK Machiya Vision is an ongoing collaboration between KYOTOGRAPHIE and the Kyoto City Centre for Landscape and Town Planning, which supports the restoration, management and research into the traditional, Japanese timber townhouses, known as machiya. I designed two exhibitions for KYOTOGRAPHIE 2020.

To transmit the vision for the future of Kyomachiya (the specific machiya of Kyoto), the exhibition features videos of current residents of these buildings describing their daily lives, their thoughts on these dwellings and their cultural value. The second element was the design for Atsushi Fukushima's photo exhibition which used two of the five row houses in the centre of Kyoto City, where buildings and apartments stand side by side.

In addition, a reception desk and a rest area were designed for the alleyway that runs alongside the venues. Although the contents and uses of these structures vary, they are all made of waste wood from different demolished townhouses. We hoped that they would provide an opportunity to think about the circulation that takes place in the city.

A Ship Drifting in an Alley

For this venue, it was decided to build reception areas and a rest area in the adjacent alley. The reception area is located in the alley facing the street and is designed as a long, narrow tunnel with cantilevered eaves to hide the side of the building facing the alley. The reception area was expected to serve as a device to change one's mood, as the facade of the tenement building that will be the venue for this exhibition will appear when one passes through the tunnel. Since it was a temporary structure, it could not be tied to the ground, so a large amount of scrap timber was bundled together as weights to support the columns. The massed weights also served as benches and exhibition stands.

The canopies are red, the colour of the KYOTOGRAPHIE identity and serve as signage from the street. The area is also the site of the Yamaboko float, which is a large boat-shaped float that is paraded during the annual Gion Festival. As the name suggests, the float is in the shape of a large boat and the tent is a reference to the wave-like shape on which the Ofunaboko rides, as well as to the shape of the boat's sails. I hoped to establish connections between the contemporary exhibition and the historical Kyoto festivals.

I wondered if I could draw out the sense of place of this site, which will be demolished and replaced by condominiums and buildings in the near future. Alleys in Kyoto are often thought of as one of the symbols of the city, and I think they are a very special places. Some alleys have gates and nameplates at their entrances, clearly demarcating the boundaries. They are mainly used as passageways, but they also exist as important public places for the residents of the tenement houses, where wells and plants are placed. Alleys are public spaces with a mixture of closed and private spaces, and are important urban spaces that have helped to construct Kyoto's close-knit human relationships.

Display Walls Suspended in Midair

Atsushi Fukushima's "Bento is Ready" is an exhibition that reflects the daily life of the photographer, who used to deliver lunch boxes to elderly people living alone. In exhibiting the work in a machiya (townhouse) in Kyoto, it was necessary to avoid a nostalgic complicity between the lives of the elderly and the machiya as a venue for the exhibition.

An exhibition wall was created to allow visitors to experience the trajectory of Fukushima's photographs, creating a new datum within the room. The exhibition wall is set back from the walls, floor and ceiling to create a sense of distance from the building, reducing the points of contact with the house as much as possible, while still relying on the machiya as a background. The exhibition wall itself is an unbalanced structure that cannot stand on its own and requires the machiya for support. This is similar to the situation of the lives of elderly people who cannot live alone. The work was created to be ambivalent, the use of scrap wood from machiya suggests it might always been there but it is also suspended in the air as a separate entity.

A Floating Mass of Columns

Since it was decided that the video with interviews with the residents of the surviving machiya townhouses would be played from iPads, it was decided to create a large object-like display stand for these in contrast with the flatness of the screens.

This display stand was made entirely from recycled structural elements from demolished machiya houses in Kyoto City, roughly the same amount of elements as from a single dwelling (15 to 20 m3). These elements are gathered into a mass and, by minimising the number of points where the elelments are placed on the floor, the timbers are made to appear as if they are floating, increasing their perception as a mass.

The number of machiya townhouses is decreasing, but the reuse of materials from the demolished buildings will increase in the future. I wanted to engage with the idea of renewing the value of the scrap wood by transforming it into something different.

By transforming such enclosed yet expansive spatiality into a public place for the exhibition venue, we hoped to expand the experience of Kyoto's urban structure and instill a perception of the exhibition venue within the city.

NOTES

Many thanks to Shunsuke Kimura of Studio Shunsuke Kimura for his help in posting this project.

Another project by SSK has been added to our archive here.

Photographs © Yosuke Ohtake. Drawing by SSK.

Published 28th June 2023.