Tokyo evolution.

Over the last 25 years, Fumihiko Maki's Hillside Terrace development in Tokyo has evolved into a rich urban mix, inspired by an enlightened concern for the public realm. Here, the final phase of the scheme is described in detail.

First begun in the late 1960s, Fumihiko Maki's Hillside Terrace in Tokyo is a fascinating case study in urban development as an evolutionary process. The complex of apartments, shops, offices, galleries and public spaces has been assembled incrementally, each phase evolving in response to both the lessons of the previous one and the new demands of Tokyo's rapidly changing urban ecology. Within this fluctuating matrix, Maki has constructed a series of individual buildings that make up a coherent, organic whole. Moreover, far from being repelled by Tokyo's undifferentiated sprawl, Maki has sought to distil its inherent dynamism. As Alex Krieger has noted 'For Maki, modern Tokyo remains "a city without heaviness, where fluctuation, fluidity and lightness prevail". While others bemoan such phenomena as being antithetical to monumentality, order and sense of stasis assumed to characterise the pre-industrial city, Maki understands that such qualities have long been synonymous with urban life. His career-long interest in urban form has not been centred on traditional urban imagery, but on how specific urban aggregations portray, or better yet, facilitate social interaction'.(1)

Over 30 years ago, the site of Hillside Terrace was a strip of sloping forested land in a fashionable suburban area of Tokyo known as Daikanyama. At that time, the site was colonised by a group of simple timber houses belonging to the Asakura family. As the family saw Tokyo spreading out and land values soaring, they realised that they would be obliged to develop their land in order to retain it. Yet they also wanted to adapt the land gradually and create a place where they could live comfortably for generations. In 1967, the family commissioned the office of Fumihiko Maki to devise a masterplan for a phased development of residential and commercial buildings.

Despite the passage of time, several themes and principles have remained consistent throughout the project. Among these are Maki's concern to maintain an intimate scale of both exterior and interior spaces and the interaction of facade and street through active public spaces. Sequences of broad, varying paths, platforms and stairs give Hillside Terrace an inviting, leisurely character, with common pedestrian areas acting as transition spaces to shops grouped around them. This contrasts with the privacy and separateness of the residential apartments on the upper levels.

The various phases of the complex are unified by their attempt to synthesise modern construction with a more traditional Japanese planning strategy, which considers and respects the specific character and boundaries of the site. The land has strong historic associations - evidence of habitation as early as the seventh century is provided by a small shrine perched on a sacred mound or kofun. Preserving - or at least reinterpreting - the cloistered, contemplative spirit of the place was considered imperative and is implicit in the notion of incremental development.

The latest and probably final phase (Phase VI) was completed in 1992. It comprises three buildings of varying heights, and follows the pattern established by previous phases with commercial space at lower levels and offices and flats above. The public components of Phase VI are the most ambitious yet, and include an art gallery, media activity centre, tea room and interior water court. Unlike its predecessors, which are located on the south side of Old Yamate Boulevard, Phase VI occupies a site on the north edge. The three individual pavilions are arranged around a secluded niwa or courtyard, In Japan the niwa traditionally provides public urban space, but also retains a private dimension. Yet Tokyo's soaring land values have ensured that the kind of public space common in Western cities simply does not exist. In view of this consistent and wilful neglect of the public realm, Maki's apparently modest gestures assume an increased resonance. Here, the niwa aligns with a private road between the Danish Embassy (completed in 1979) and the buildings of Phase III on the opposite side of the Old Yamate Boulevard, opening up a new vista perpendicular to the main road.

Although the four and five storey buildings of Phase VI are slightly taller than the existing ones, the street scale is maintained by a sharp projecting eaves at a height of 10 m (in line with an original planning restriction, since lifted) which serves as a datum for the development of all other compositional elements. The crisp Euclidean volumes are stepped back on the upper levels, fragmenting the overall mass and articulating the individual spaces within. Taking advantage of level changes in the site, the shops at lower levels are grouped together, extending and enhancing the public space. Beyond the pivotal niwa, are a cafe and exhibition forum; beyond these a gallery. The forum and gallery are organised around a white interior court with a reflecting pool. The intentionally circuitous nature of the plan encourages visitors to experience the two spaces as one. Tucked in at the very back of the niwa is a small private villa.

Compared with the pristine, Modernist formality of earlier phases, Phase VI demonstrates Maki's more recent preoccupation with layering and textural variations. The spatial layering in plan of the existing buildings has evolved into a vertical layering of light transmitting materials, thin protruding eaves and a more fragmented volumetric play investigating what Maki has called the 'optimal, light nature of Modernism'.(2) Perforated aluminium sheeting on the facades admits light while preserving privacy, recalling the membrane-like skin of Maki's 1989 TEPIA Science Pavilion.

Taken as a whole, Hillside Terrace is a remarkable fusion of influences. Krieger has described it as 'an abstracted medieval European townscape distilled to its most primary characteristics and the qualities of depth, transparency and light found in traditional Japanese architecture. Maki has, in a sense, closed a circle by which a Western-inspired modern Japanese architect unearths and reincorporates the qualities that the early European Modernists found so inspirational in the traditional Japanese house'.(3) Yet perhaps Hillside Terrace's most important lesson is that, over time, Fumihiko Maki has brilliantly distilled Tokyo's turbulent context into a serene and enriching urbanism.

1 Alex Krieger, '(Ongoing) investigations in Collective Form: Maki's Quarter-of-a-Century at Hillside Terrace', Japan Architect, 1994-4, p244.

2 Fumihiko Maki 'Hillside Terrace Complex'. Space Design, No 340, January 1993, p120.

3 Alex Krieger, op cit, pp242-243.