A house divided.

Rarely today are architects commissioned to design a monument, particularly to a subject so abstract as time. This little building brings a sense of drama and occasion to a grey Japanese town. Architecture is sometimes taken very seriously in Japan, nowhere more so than in the prefecture of Toyama, to the west across the island of Honshu from Tokyo. The prefecture asked Arata Isozaki to advise about the choice of architects f or their 1992 Expo. He was subsequently asked to suggest seven European architects to make permanent buildings in 14 towns within the province, The aim was partly to get external perspectives on Japanese life and culture different f rom those received f rom the United States since 1945.

Benson & Forsyth were chosen for two of the projects: the local museum at Jyohanna (AR April 1994, pp64-67), and a little monument to time in Oshima. The problems were very different: at Jyohanna, there was a strong landscape and urban identity; Oshima on the other hand is a nowhere place, with no clear beginning or end. Set in a featureless alluvial plane, it consists of a few factories and a far-flung scatter of suburban blockwork houses, but Benson Forsyth began to discern 'an older pattern of clusters of traditional dwellings located on slightly higher ground and surrounded by rice fields and exquisite frames for growing loofahs and drying rice grass'.

The project, like all the others in the programme, called for an examination of relationships between tradition and the present, and what Benson Forsyth call 'the prevailing, blanket notion of "progress"'. Their Divided House attempts to juxtapose past and present. The two are divided by a wall with a stair in it that points directly at the Pole Star. This establishes the longitude of the building, locating it in space and time. The latitude is suggested by the angle of the stair within the wall, which provides the other spatial coordinate and locates little unknown Oshima on the same parallel as San Francisco, Washingtoh, Malaga, Algiers and Rhodes.

To the west of the double in-situ concrete wall is the half based on abstractions of the traditional agricultural frames which so caught the architects' eyes when they searched for character in the locality. On the other side are the rational Euclidian certitudes of the cube and the cylinder. Over the whole floats a grid of steel squares which relates the place to its position in the geometry of the globe.

The traditional side is the strangest and the most immediately striking. The frames are made by carving and laminating vertical timber ribs, each to a particular profile, so that the whole three-dimensional object acquires a volumetric presence that curiously combines the characters of wobbly haystack and some sort of rather cuddly animal. The conflation is emphasised by the thatch of rice-straw which gives the piece a fuzzy hair-like top. Below this, layers of bamboo poles follow the ribs' contours and fold over each other at major changes in curvature, like the straw roofs of some haystacks or the way in which the petals of a fuchsia gradually become longer and longer towards the middle and the bottom of the flower to reveal the full complexity and beauty of the whole. Inside this, half, light falls through the bamboo slats to make the space into a great internal sundial, where the streaks of sunshine and shadow mark the passage of the day on the bare concrete wall and the smooth wooden floor.

On the eastern side, a cylinder is contained within a cube made of black poured concrete at first floor level. Its skewed pyramidal hat pokes up through one of the squares of the grid that floats over the whole. The cylinder is reached up the elegantly slatted stair that thin the wall. It arrives g that looks straight at the Pole Star through a long slot. The landing opens to the left into the top half of the bamboo covered space and to the right into the cylinder itself, which is provided with vertical slots which give orientation to the points of the compass. In this space, the soft, regular rhythms of the human heart are reproduced electronically. Non-mechanical devices for measuring time like a water clock, candle and sand-timer are to be built into the wall.

The architects have suggested that 'the experiential synthesis of the past and present can only be achieved by moving through the whole piece, in other words by the passage of time'. In a curious, very quiet and poetic way, the building is both a set on which the drama of time and place is gently enacted, and it is simultaneously itself an actor in the drama.