Niels Olsen: Your design method is based on communication, which is a key part of the process of creating museums and cultural institutions today. The idea of the museum as a hermetic treasure box can be challenged if the building process is guided by discussions with local communities rather than just with clients and stakeholders. In your writing, you also describe this aspect of your practice as a resistance against architecture’s absorption into the visual media machine from the 1980s onwards. The Shōnandai Cultural Center, a hybrid of a children’s museum, a theater, and a garden, embodies a playful openness that stands in complete contrast to Western models of cultural institutions.

Itsuko Hasegawa: While Western discussions of democracy and fairness regarding common space have inspired me, Shōnandai was influenced by my childhood experiences with the traditional Japanese way of thinking about community space. Yaizu, my hometown in Shizuoka prefecture, is a fishing town a little southwest of Tokyo. When there was a big catch, everyone gathered in the garden to cook together. At festivals, children would dress up in costumes and take the stage, and at the beginning of spring everyone would gather at the beach to celebrate. Semi-outdoor shared spaces such as Shōnandai are rooted in the sense that these people have come to terms with the pleasant climate and culture they have inherited. Before Shōnandai, most children’s museums in Japan were run by big corporations and related very little to how kids actually played. During Shōnandai’s planning stages, many elderly residents were afraid about the idea of a large-scale modern building in their neighborhood. For this reason, I decided to locate most of the public programs on the lower level, basically below ground. I designed all the pavilions and the furniture, and detailed all the railings, signage, and exhibition displays. After I completed the building, I became the director of the children’s museum for ten years. A lot of work was involved, from developing exhibits and catalogues to planning events, ordering ethnic costumes and hats for children, and adding and fixing exhibits.

NO: Usually with a public building that size, the garden becomes a separate typology from the building. At Shōnandai, the reverse is true: the building is defined by the garden and landscape. In what way does this express your idea of architecture as second nature?

My idea of second nature is maybe different from other people’s use of it in literature. When Shōnandai was commissioned, in the late 1980s, there was a little hill, a mound, on the site. During the competition, that mound was destroyed. I proposed that we create a new mound to reflect the site’s history. Many people questioned my proposal and wondered if it was necessary to recreate this hill, and that’s when I formulated my idea of architecture as second nature. It’s an idea of maintaining and preserving local communities’ lifestyle, the way residents and the elderly live. It shouldn’t be mistaken with tradition. In this sense, my design also reflected my doubt about whether we should place a modern building on that site. It was much more about creating a park for the community instead of a modern monument. This idea also has to do with my upbringing. Because of World War II, my mother and I left the city and started living in a house in the countryside. Until I was eight, I grew up with the ocean in front of me and the mountains behind. I spent my early childhood in the midst of abundant nature, gazing at the sea, the sky, the moon, and the mountains. My mother, who grew up in a temple, taught me Buddhist ways of thinking, and we drew wildflowers and collected plants together. Until junior high school, I wanted to become a botanist. So, when I thought about what comfort was, I had the idea that comfort equals nature. I have been pursuing architecture as a new nature — architecture as topography, and landscape architecture as a second nature.

NO: To hear that your mother drew wildflowers is very interesting. I’m curious about your hand drawings, how you make the sketches to illustrate your ideas.

She made her own Kimono and my clothes by dyeing the pictures she had drawn on the canvas. My idea has always been to connect nature and architecture, to make them into one. This really began when I started working and was required to think about public institutional buildings. Shōnandai was the largest piece of land I had worked on, and when you consider how the architecture should sit on a large piece of empty land, you need to start thinking about the relationship between inside and out. Sometimes botanical representations helped me conceptualize that.

NO: The notion of care is significant in your work. Could you tell us more about the Shiranui Hospital, Stress Care Center in Omuta, Fukuoka Prefecture, which you completed in 1989. It proves that hospitals don’t just have to be big boxes — it’s organized a bit like a village, with lots of smallish linked buildings.

I’d been talking to young doctors who were all complaining that in the Japanese hospital system you have these beautiful locations but you can never go outside. We chose a seaside site, despite initial reluctance from some stakeholders — they thought patients might jump into the sea. Based on my own childhood, I knew it would be therapeutic because of the sun glistening on the ocean, the tides rising and falling, the rhythmic sound of the waves, the scent of the sea reaching each room, and the sound of raindrops falling on the roof — all of this would offer a source of comfort in the face of long-term illness. The project follows the seashore in the shape of a long bow, and takes the form of several small houses arranged in a row. The corridors have a varied appearance, and each room faces the ocean. Between the rooms are passageways leading to the balcony, thereby allowing the wind to enter and connecting the houses to the sea. The furniture is movable, so each person can control the degree of openness according to his or her mood of the day. It was a very low-cost project, built by local craftsmen using local materials — somebody criticized it as looking like Asian informal urbanism!

NO: Your architecture seems completely novel in its rhetoric. I don’t see the merging of tradition and innovation one finds in the work of many other postwar Japanese architects. And the materiality is sometimes unusual, such as the use of clay in Shōnandai. How do you confront the handmade with the generic?

In terms of the relationship with tradition, though I may not have expressed it in a direct form through architectural design, Shōnandai is truly an earthen building, a fusion of traditional materials with new materials such as aluminum and titanium. For Shiranui Hospital, we used local materials and craftsmen who were the cheapest and most readily available in Omuta. Big construction companies were only involved on a limited basis, because we were really trying to do something very new. Since we were working with this idea of architecture as topography, there was actually a lot of use of Japanese plaster craft — when you have these urban buildings, they plaster the walls. It’s a very specific trade.

NO: You worked with Kiyonori Kikutake and you also assisted Kazuo Shinohara for many years. What did you learn from them?

From Kiyonori Kikutake I learned the traditionalism that he thought about in the early days of the Sky House, his passion for communicative architectural design, and his pursuit of architecture to the very end. I worked with him for five years and then I joined Shinohara’s lab as a research student. I was very attracted to his House in White, which sublimated traditional Japanese housing into a symbolic expression. Later I became Shinohara’s university employee for ten years, supporting his work. My activities were very wide ranging. There were things he wasn’t so good at, like the engineering side, which I would end up doing. And he was often sick for long periods during the design and execution phases, so I had to step in and take his place in those meetings.

Seng Kuan: What was it like working with them? They were of the same generation, coming of age in the immediate postwar period, and both known for strict, rather severe styles. It must have been very demanding, no?

The two were quite different in many ways. Kikutake was much easier to communicate with — we were working together, it was a cooperation. It was difficult to have conversations with Shinohara in terms of my own design work. He was hard to engage. He didn’t seem very interested in what the younger members of the laboratory were doing. [Laughs.] When I repeatedly participated in the laboratory of the well-known Professor Yoshiya Uchida at the University of Tokyo, I had a lot of time to exchange ideas about architecture with young people.

NO: You’ve said that your discovery of Postmodern architecture sparked your career, specifically when you learned of Hans Hollein’s claim that “everything is architecture.” How do you look back on this paradigm shift, and what discourses inform your practice today?

When I was working at Kiyonori Kikutake’s office, I went traveling in Europe, and visited Alvar Aalto’s office, for example. That was the beginning of my interaction with Western architects. They often invited me to their exhibitions, lectures, classes, workshops, and juries. So I was aware of Peter Cook, Hans Hollein, and other architects of my generation. For Western architects, Postmodernism was a look back at their history, and sometimes a deconstruction. For Japanese architects, Postmodernism was about dismantling authority — an awareness shared by Western architects — but also about rediscovering Japanese culture and tradition after a century of tsunami-like Western influence. This is evident in different ways in the work of architects of the same generation — Kijo Rokkaku, Kazuhiro Ishii, and others directly express what is Japanese in their architectural forms. There is also the use of traditional materials and techniques such as roof tiles, diatomaceous earth, and plastering. However, there are not only such tangible expressions, but also invisible elements and modern expressions that have been transformed from their traditional forms. The openness of Shōnandai, as I mentioned earlier, is linked to the Japanese community, as is the pattern of light on the perforated metal, which is connected to the glittering surface of the sea and the shadows of the trees falling on the shoji screens. The United Kingdom and Japan in particular seem to share a sense of attachment to plants and culture, which you can see in the shared community gardens and glasshouses in London’s residential neighborhoods and its suburbs. In retrospect, it was not so much individual discourses that influenced my practice, but rather the previous generation of Japanese architects, such as Kenzo Tange, Sei’ichi Shirai, Kiyonori Kikutake, and Kazuo Shinohara, and their approaches, discourses, and debates as to what tradition means in Japan.

Fredi Fischli: It’s interesting to hear how you characterize Postmodernism as a way of working with what already exists. That chimes with today’s move toward adaptive reuse, and the idea that we shouldn’t build anything new at all, but instead repurpose existing buildings. You’ve spoken about care and participation — how do maintenance and renovation work in Japan, both with respect to your own buildings and in general?

In order to make big spaces, especially when you work with reinforced concrete, you end up using alot of material and building thick walls because of the seismic risk, as required by Japan’s construction code. It’s difficult to realize big spans with concrete. The approach taken by Kikutake — which is one I basically agree with, and which I’ve continued to follow in my own work — was primarily to use lighter steel-frame structures for large public and institutional buildings. In many ways they’re simpler to maintain. The same goes for my timber buildings from the 1970s. They are now 50 years old. As well as being easier to maintain, wood-frame buildings are easier to modify.

SK: An important monument of the Metabolist Movement, and one of Kikutake’s most celebrated buildings, was the Miyakonojo Civic Center in Kyushu. Hasegawa-san, you worked very intensely on that project. It had this huge steel roof that seemed to fan out. Unfortunately, the region isn’t wealthy and couldn’t maintain the building — it was demolished in 2019.

Another of Kikutake’s projects was Tatebayashi city hall, built for a small municipality north of Tokyo. The building is a hybrid between steel-frame and reinforced-concrete construction, and was one of Kikutake’s earlier attempts to make a large-span civic building. Tatebayashi town hall is fairly well preserved because a certain effort was put into its maintenance. If you think of the building’s life span as 50 years, you need to take care it during that time, depending on the materials and the characteristics of the building. Currently, there is a very active movement among young Japanese architects to preserve and renovate wooden townhouses. This is a great initiative. And this is wonderful work. It’s so great to see that happening. The work of younger architects outside of metropolitan Tokyo is not getting the same kind of exposure in magazines and exhibitions. So through the NPO that I run, I continued to give lectures to local architects in the Kansai region of western Japan, including Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, as well as the Tohoku and Sanin regions, Shikoku and Kyushu, to learn about the state of local architecture. I took up Tokyo, which is busy with development, and Kyoto, which leads high regulations and protects traditions, and discussed the state of cities with many people who are involved in urban architecture and the environment via Zoom.

NO: In Switzerland, until the late 70s, it was impossible to practice as a female architect without a husband who shared authorship, and the profession is still dominated by male architects today. Your rigorous oeuvre is an important influence to a younger generation. How was your career affected by inequality? How did you build up such an autonomous position?

Zaha Hadid said that in the West women also needed a partner to be active. Japanese society has a less strict class culture than Western society, and though, by many measures, Japanese gender literacy is the worst, discrimination against women has probably taken a slightly different form than it has in the West. When I started working in housing, I had the good fortune to be designing timber structures, and the men in the traditional profession of carpentry were generally kind to a young female architect. I was fortunate to start my career as an architect because of the unique inclusiveness of traditional Japanese society.

FF: Your professional trajectory is very impressive. What is your working life like today?

I am 82 years old now. Something changed whenI turned 80. My way of life was very different before. When I was running an office with a large staff, I always went to work first thing in the morning. I checked and corrected all the work that the staff had piled on my desk. And that continued all day, and I also went to building sites. There were also foreign visitors and overseas business trips. But, after I turned 80, various things started to happen. My knees are not as strong as they used to be, so it’s harder to move around. I tire more easily. So now, on average, I work in the office about three days a week. The rest of the time, I work remotely from home. But I still enjoy traveling around Japan when I need to, which is wonderful.