Micro-homes: Japan’s big idea

It isn’t, frankly, very sustainable. But the Japanese don’t really like second-hand houses. It is a little difficult to imagine if you live in London, where the most desirable properties are in Georgian or Victorian squares, or in New York, where it’s brownstones or lofts. Not to mention the decadently decaying frescoed Italian palazzi of Rome or Venice.

Yet, just as some of us can think of nothing more sensually stimulating than new-car smell, to the Japanese, nothing smells better than a new home.

The catch is that the Japanese all want to live in the same few cities. And space here is short. Inheritance tax levied on land means sites are often subdivided as they are passed on. The result is that plots are getting tighter and houses are getting smaller. The wonderful names some of the plots attract – “Eel’s Nest”, “Flagpole” – tell the story on their own.

Huge numbers of new houses are being built on plots barely big enough to park a car and the result is what is known as jutaku, the phenomenon of the detached but often truly tiny house.

While these may seem outrageously unsustainable, cramped and weirdly free of context, the phenomenon has also led to the most remarkable ecosystem of architecturally designed – and architecturally sophisticated – houses anywhere in the world.

This housing model – the slender, freestanding house – presents architects with a kind of design laboratory and, rather than limiting their creativity, their small size seems to provoke ever greater inventiveness. The phenomenon is documented in Naomi Pollock's book, Jutaku: Japanese Houses, which reflects the odd beauty parade of the houses themselves. There is no information beyond the architect, location and area, no interpretation or critique, not even any interiors – even though these are often astonishing in their spatial invention – just a seemingly endless procession of remarkable façades.

The lack of hierarchy suits the format just fine. Here are houses by some of Japan's most revered architects, Kengo Kuma, Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban and Terunobu Fujimori, alongside others by the best young practices, including Atelier Bow-Wow and Sou Fujimoto. Just like an actual street, it can be difficult to tell if the avant-garde masterpiece you're looking at is by a young gun, an old hand, a corporate practice or a bright builder. There is no hierarchy beyond the visible.

Despite what seems an extremely specific cultural situation, there are myriad lessons that architects elsewhere could learn from these houses. Perhaps the most interesting is the parsimonious attitude to space.

The move that has taken root globally – of the kitchen and dining area becoming the principal living space of the house – has become ingrained in Japan and taken to its logical conclusion, in which it not only supplants but entirely replaces the living or reception room. A single space becomes genuinely multifunctional and, as the Japanese do little entertaining at home, it can be relatively small and completely private.

The slender plan also makes the corridors and circulation spaces that houses in the west still seem to suffer from (a century after modernist planning declared them dead) not only unnecessary but impossible. Instead the stairs become another kind of living space. Rather than a simply functional transient area, the stairs can become a kind of vertically staggered room, shelves for living.

Just look at the astonishing House NA in Tokyo built of stacked glass boxes that interlock to create a series of small platforms at different heights, in which floors become tables or desks, bars or beds. It is a remarkably efficient use of space in which the various levels or stages replace the furniture and consequently the clutter that would otherwise ruin this clear glass minimal house.

The stairs themselves often lead up to a flat roof so that the culminating room in the journey through the house is external, a platform for viewing the city and one that is integrated into the architecture rather than a garden that is clearly separate.

Modernist idea

Also interesting is the contrast between those houses that attempt to shut the city out and face in towards a private courtyard and those that prefer to make the cityscape an element of the interior by absorbing it in what looks like very public, very glazed rooms. If the former is more redolent of a kind of Middle Eastern tradition, the latter arguably represents the culmination of a modernist idea of the dematerialisation of the walls.

Other examples, meanwhile, dispense with windows altogether. Another Apartment’s so-called Long Window House in Tokyo doesn’t appear to have any windows at all, while the wonderfully self-explanatory 1.8M Width House (also in Tokyo) is nothing but one long, full-width window.

Then there are those that are tailored to the strangest sites. Eastern Design Office’s On the Corner house (in Higashi Omi) is a riff on German expressionist angularity – a razor sharp corner that slowly flares into quite a substantial dwelling but creates a cutting edge worthy of a sashimi knife.

Or there’s Satoshi Okada’s shimmering, metal-clad House in Hamadayama, Tokyo, which appears to be an extrusion of a parking space.

You could argue that many of these houses are pure indulgence. Certainly there are ingenious solutions to cramped city centre sites but there is also an inordinate amount of architectural showing-off – a look-at-me formal sculpturalism that seems so at odds with Japan’s apparent culture of modesty. Many of the jutaku houses may be tiny but they are not designed to blend into the background of the city. This phenomenon is a paradox - a celebration of individuality in a culture that reveres self-effacement, an apparent architectural minimalism founded on the eye-watering waste of demolition and rebuilding each generation.

Yet it is impossible not to be thrilled by their invention and sheer originality. This is architecture as experiment rather than as home, as urban stage set as opposed to the domestic quotidian, and even after seeing dozens of these houses in the flesh it is difficult to judge quite how easy they might be to live in. What is not in doubt, though, is that they spur on architects and clients in a weird kind of competition to keep creating ever more intriguing and ever more striking buildings. They appear to be good for architecture and are a large part of the reason young architects get to experiment so widely, preparing them for bigger and often genuinely radical public buildings. They are a test bed of ideas. But how comfortable is it to sleep on a test bed? Jutaku: Japanese Houses (2015) by Naomi Pollock, Phaidon, £14.95

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic.

– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016