Building Blocks: This adaptable, economic armature for genuinely mixed urban development is an inventive and enlightened response to the chaotic conditions of Japanese cities.

COELACANTH & ASSOCIATES

Coelacanth's housing for rent in Kamishinjo near Osaka is an important realization of ideas that have inspired some parts of the profession ever since the '70s, when N. John Habraken published Supports. He explored the idea of generating flexible housing systems that could offer tenants choice of the configuration of their own dwellings, spatially and in plan. Habraken believed that industrialized building processes would offer components that would give everyone much more freedom of choice. But industry was unwilling or unable to produce the systems, and developers, both public and private, generally lacked the will to try to make the ideas work.

Now, Coelacanth has managed to build quite a large version of such a scheme in the middle of Kamishinjo, which has the generally awful texture of many Japanese city centres, dense and very crowded, with quite low buildings that jostle and take no notice of each other. The site is very tight, and has an odd shape, a bit like a cubist tadpole. Functionally, the building has a proper urban organization of functions with four floors of flats over shops and offices at street level. There are terraces on the roofs, and some of the dwellings (which vary in size) are double height, making the whole complex as complicated to assemble as a three-dimensional wooden Oriental puzzle.

Of course, there have to be continuities in the block, principally the staircases and plumbing stacks. Structure is of precast concrete panels, 2.4m wide, creating small rooms that usually open into each other. Clearly such a flexible system can be adapted for other difficult sites, and it is to be hoped that it will gradually develop overtime. The jury was much impressed by the ingenuity of the system and welcomed its potential.