Just as in Japanese we have the phrase “gossiping around the well,” even now you can find such scenes in wider areas of roads centered on wells in the area of Ueno in Tokyo. Housewives come out in small groups to draw water for drinking, for cooking, for laundry or for bathing and chat about any and everything. It wasn’t so long ago since such scenes were commonly seen.
Japan has always lacked wide open spaces. Instead, it has such urban spaces as tsuji, or rather crossroads. This word can refer to a four-way intersection or to a road with heavy traffic. At such places would traders place their goods for sale and street stall vendors ply their trade. In the Edo period (1603-1868) there were even crossroad doctors who would offer treatment for people’s teeth.
Hearing such stories make us feel strongly just how lively were those roads of long ago. If I close my eyes, I can see old women sitting in shops lining the road and the groups of housewives bantering away with them, youths dancing with fans, bearded old men raising glasse of sake, young and old, men and women alike happily engaged in festive dancing. Where people meet commerce develops, and where commerce develops traffic increases still further. Roads were a place where people lived out a good part of their daily lives.
As the years passed, roads have gradually lost those enjoyable things. Our roads now have thinned out to become means of transport alone.
It has been said that as roads have faded into obscurity, the shops that line them have become all the brighter. They have elaborated themselves into shops for business, restaurants or bars for eating and drinking, theaters for plays and clubs for dancing. But while these buildings are perfectly suited to meeting a specific purpose, their advantages are as such purely mechanical. They are not in fact places pleasurable to humans.
It is as if the roads of long ago, full of such variety and life, have been squeezed to extract only their essences. The roads are left as dried out carcasses, while the extracted essences are too pure in value to be enjoyed as they are in any way.
Variety is split into means and ends. The pleasures to be found on the road are divided up and fixed into place as buildings. Wide roads have had their edges carved up into independent destinations. What remains of the roads is just a means to reach those destinations.
The interiors of buildings are also split into means and ends. Rooms have become the primary focus as the ends for which buildings are constructed. The amount of floor space given over to other spaces is limited as far as possible. The reason is because such spaces are not part of the purpose of the building – they are just means to join the ends (the rooms). Examples of such means are corridors, stairs or elevators – in fact, the “roads” inside buildings.
Over twenty years ago, when I had first started out as an architect, I wanted to design buildings with those long-ago roads as a model. Such a lifestyle would see pleasure arise from what you happen to be doing at the moment, rather than seek efficiency from preset objectives. My idea was to aim at such a lifestyle, just like those roads of long ago. I began then to plan out a building founded upon paths made up by corridors and stairs rather than rooms. Would it be possible for those routes to expand out and form something beyond themselves? “All buildings have their beginning in roads.” This is the first thesis I came up with.