NO MAN EVER LOOKS AT THE WORLD WITH PRISTINE EYES - Ruth Benedict

Around the turn of the century up to the 1920’s , brick, real brick, was the building material that conveyed a foreign look for the modernizing Japan. However, as a building material it had disastrous results when the 1923 earthquake hit Tokyo. Brick has no seismic properties. Some, if not all apartments in Japan, built during the late ’60’s early ’80’s are clad in a reddish brick tile glued to the concrete walls. The come back of the brick-look in the late 1960’s is shrouded in mystery. There is probably some reference to it in Isozaki’s “Japan-ness in Architecture”, but alas the book is so dense, I never managed to finish reading it. Marshall Berman writes somewhere in his book, All that is solid melts into thin air, that modernism is at the same time an expression of and a rejecting of the process of modernization. It seems if at that time when building these apartments were build there was a collective agreement to adhere to Berman’s formula. Today these red brick-tile clad buildings are slowly disappearing. The buildings are being torn down, replaced with apartment blocks which, due to renewed building laws can go up to twice the height. The new reinforced concrete buildings are clad in tile too, but mostly in beige or grey. Maybe because the late Tokyo governor Ishihara didn’t like red buildings and now the consensus amongst those same people who decide what to clad on buildings (architects?) is not to use these red tiles anymore. 

For me the Brick House is a fuck-you to Ishihara, but for our client, a couple who both grew up in a red-tiled apartment the tile is an element of childhood nostalgia. In terms of the programme, on the ground floor there is a small office space, while the bedrooms are located on the second floor. On the third floor are the living spaces. A small staircase leads to the roof, a small guest room and an open deck with a tiny pool. 

Keywords: Red Brick, Tokyo, Ishihara, Modern Japan, Tokyo Apartment, Japan-ness in Architecture, Nostalgia.