Yomei Bunko Kozanso

Yōmei Bunko Kozansō: The House Built for Looking at Things

Most buildings that hold a great collection are designed around the problem of storage. Kozansō was designed around the problem of viewing.

It is the largest of the four registered structures at Yōmei Bunko: wooden, single storey, 393 square metres under a tiled roof, standing at Utano on the northwestern edge of Kyoto, a short climb above Ninna-ji. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a villa in the sukiya manner, built for the purpose of examining the archive's holdings, composed of a main house section and a guest hall section, with a tea room called Tekian inside.

The date is 1942.

Read that again with the collection in mind. By 1942 Japan was at war across the Pacific, materials were rationed to the point where the archive's second vault, finished two years earlier, had already been forced to abandon part of its design. And in that year Konoe Fumimaro built a sukiya villa in the woods so that people could sit down and look at his family's documents properly.

Why the Building Had to Be This Kind of Building

The Konoe family heads the gosekke, the five houses from which Japan's imperial regents were drawn. For close to a thousand years its members held the highest offices at court, and the residue of that work is paper: diaries of ritual and precedent kept generation after generation, letters, household accounts, poem sheets, copies of other families' books, all of it held together by a house rule against dispersal. What survives runs past a hundred thousand items and includes eight National Treasures and around sixty Important Cultural Properties. At the centre is the Midō Kanpakuki, Fujiwara no Michinaga's own diary from the early eleventh century, written at the height of Fujiwara power and still in the hands of his direct descendants, inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

These are not objects you put behind glass and walk past. A handscroll is read by unrolling it across a low surface, a shoulder's width at a time. A poem sheet is looked at close, at an angle, in the light available. A tea utensil is picked up. The whole material culture the Konoe archive documents assumes a particular kind of room: floor-level, side-lit, quiet, with space to lay things out and people sitting rather than standing.

Sukiya is the architecture of exactly that room. It grew out of the tea house, and where the formal shoin style of samurai residences is about hierarchy and display, sukiya is about restraint, natural material left legible, asymmetry, and light handled with care. Slender members. Unpainted wood. Rooms sized to a conversation.

So the two parts the Agency identifies make sense as a working plan rather than as a floor layout. A main house, and a guest hall for receiving people. Yōmei Bunko's own account of its compound calls this building the reading and assembly hall, and gives its area in the old measure as something over 120 tsubo. The archive has two vaults for keeping things and one building for the act of looking at them.

A Modernist Does Sukiya

The designer was Hasebe Eikichi (1885–1960), and this is the commission where his presence at Yōmei Bunko becomes genuinely surprising.

Hasebe graduated from Tokyo Imperial University, spent his career in the building division of the Sumitomo conglomerate, and in 1933 left with Takekoshi Kenzō and twenty-seven colleagues to found the firm that became Nikken Sekkei. What he is known for is the Sumitomo Building in Osaka, the Osaka Securities Exchange, the Nippon Life headquarters, St. Mary's Cathedral. Steel and concrete, at scale, for institutions.

Sukiya is the opposite discipline. It is carpenter's work at its most exacting, a tradition with centuries of accumulated convention about which timber goes where and how a post meets a beam, and it is unforgiving of anyone treating it as a style to be applied.

The Agency's assessment of what he did here is careful and worth taking at face value: within traditional construction methods, new attempts by the designer Hasebe Eikichi have been made throughout, and there are things worth seeing in the details as well.

Two claims sit inside that sentence. The first is that he stayed inside the tradition rather than importing modernism into it. The second is that he moved anyway, in a great many places, and that the movement shows at the scale of the detail rather than the scale of the plan. That is a difficult thing to do and a difficult thing for a database to say. It is also, for what it is worth, the same architect who two years earlier had hidden a reinforced concrete frame inside a merchant's storehouse a hundred metres away, and who put a fireplace chimney on the office next to it. Hasebe seems to have been consistently interested in what happens when a building speaks two structural languages without translating between them.

Tekian, the tea room, sits inside all this. A tea room is the smallest and most rule-bound space in Japanese architecture and the one where an architect's judgement is most exposed.

Getting In

Kozansō is the building you can actually enter, and that alone makes it the point of a visit.

Yōmei Bunko is a working research archive rather than a museum. Visits run in two windows a year, roughly March to May and September to November, arranged by telephone in advance, for parties of twenty or more, with a fee starting at ¥1,500 per person. A tour is guided, and it takes in an exhibition of collection items in the display room inside the repository and this villa. Photography indoors is not permitted, which is a real constraint and also, on reflection, the correct one for a building whose entire argument is about looking at things directly.

The register entry says the details reward attention, so give them some. Sukiya rooms are read slowly: the grain left visible in a post, the way a window is placed to bring light onto a surface rather than into your eyes, the reveal where two materials meet. Whatever Hasebe was attempting will be in that register, not in the massing.

The registration is dated 9 October 1998, announced on the 26th, number 26-0030. It is the last of the four consecutive numbers, 26-0027 through 26-0030, that the archive's buildings occupy, and since the numbers follow construction order, Kozansō closes the sequence. The criterion is that it is a model of design. Registration, introduced in 1996, is the lighter of Japan's two heritage instruments: it records a building and requires notification before major alteration, without the restrictions attached to designation as an Important Cultural Property or National Treasure. For a building still used to receive guests, that matters.

One caution about the date. The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives 1942, and that is the authoritative figure. Some secondary accounts of Yōmei Bunko put Kozansō's construction in 1944. The database is the record that governs, and the discrepancy is left standing rather than argued away.