In its last edition, Open Work, a graduate advanced architecture studio offered at GSAPP Columbia and given by Pr. Enrique Walker, put forth a simple brief: “Join a team of four, and double the surface area of an assigned building.”

Prior to selecting studios at GSAPP, each professor was required to pitch their studio brief to all graduate students. While some professors went on to present a twenty-six-page brief, and exceeded their allotted presentation time, professor Walker, the director of the Master of Advanced Architecture and Design program at that time, chose only to speak for a couple of minutes. He presented only three slides, and a studio brief consisting of three paragraphs, one hundred words each. We would later find out that these deliberate and conscious self-imposed constraints were one of a handful of generative design tools we would encounter in the months to come.

Selections by the graduate students were made, and I landed my first choice, Pr. Walker of course. Upon joining the course, we split up into groups of four, and were assigned one of three open-ended Japanese buildings designed by three Metabolist architects, namely, Kisho Kurukawa, Fumihiko Maki, and Masato Otaka. Our team, consisting of Aude Azzi, Nidhi Kacholia, Theodoros Kantarelis, and myself, landed Otaka, perhaps the most obscure and arguably the most talented of the bunch. Much like all occurrences in Pr. Walker’s studio, four was not just an arbitrary number. One person would be too much of a protagonist, not unlike the solo architect/genius sketching their brilliance on a napkin. Two people would create a stalemate, a two-sided deadlock that impedes the design process. Three would embody the dynamics of a majoritarian democracy, where essentially, two voices overpower the third. And four, four was just right in its ability to facilitate a productive conversation, which was in Pr. Walker’s eyes, the most important generative design tool available to us.

The studio series was inspired from an eponymous essay by Umberto Eco in the sixties in which he challenged the classical notion that an author channels an idea on to an audience, who in turn, passively receives it. Eco argued for the birth of the reader, effectively an audience that receives an idea and interprets it according to their own educational, social, and cultural backgrounds. Eco also explained that communication is open ended. As an example, when the modern toilet was introduced to provincial areas in Italy, farmers, not knowing what this invention was designed for, used it as a tool to wash olives. And it is this very propositional, responsive and active dynamic between the user and the designed object that Metabolism argued for. The movement, arguably the first strictly unique Japanese modern architectural movement, began in Japan in the 1960s, reaching its height and declining within the next decade. It embraced biology as a metaphor, and technology as the means to create architecture that facilitates growth and change. Thus, the movement, in its call for open ended architecture that would embrace impermanence, promote flexibility, time obsolescence, and welcome uncertainty, made it a prime target for our studio.

We began by studying the works of Masato Otaka and producing a genealogy of his built work. We found that Otaka’s design methodology integrated two systems, a rigid/static cast-in-place structure, and a more dynamic prefabricated system that was intended to grow along with the building’s needs. Of these systems, we extracted three structural system categories within which Otaka operated: The Artificial Platform that created a new ground plane on which to build, The Pre-Grid System which employed a system of post-tensioned prefabricated modules, and the Elevated Frame method in which a secondary structure is suspended on a primary structure. Since our assigned architect, Masato Otaka, was an obscure figure, our next step was to travel to Japan in order to visit and document Otaka’s surviving built oeuvre in order to select a building as a site for our intervention. After an exhausting ten-day trip to Japan, visiting eighty-two buildings, and sampling even more flavors of KitKat, team Otaka elected to intervene on Chiba Prefectural Library, built in 1968, that employed the pre-grid system of prefabricated post-tensioned concrete modules.

Having visited the building, we found that unlike most Metabolist buildings, Chiba Library did in fact grow. However, the expansion did not occur in the prefabricated system that Otaka had designed, rather, it was the cast in place volume that housed the stacks that grew. Thus, the need for growth or expansion was a functional one as the library needed to house more books, rather than an ideological or metaphorical one. As it stood, the library was more of a building than a system of growth.

*Photograph of Chiba Prefectural Library | Published by Japan Architect in 1968*

The ensuing intricacy of Team Otaka’s conversations were inversely proportional to the simplicity of the brief – to double the surface of the building – and the simplicity of the solution we finally reached. We argued that the move from the diagram to reality concealed any implication of growth or openness. Exploiting the flexibility of the prefabricated modules, our first operation was to strip the building down in order to bring it back to the diagram. We proposed to dismantle the prefab pieces and reassemble them, much like a Lego set, in order to establish a roof or datum. This move facilitated the doubling of the surface of Chiba Library by allowing us to expand the cast in place structure as well as to activate the interstitial spaces between both systems. Thus, our self-imposed constraint of keeping and reusing the prefabricated structural system allowed us to use, preserve, and monumentalize Otaka’s original structural design.

By the process of dismantling we collected an inventory of the pieces of the system which included 446 full cross beam modules, 4 half beam modules, 48 capitals, and a total of 54 columns of varying heights. At the end of our surface-area doubling exercise only 19 pieces were left unused.

Projects in academia, and although much harder, in practice, are opportunities to initiate and discuss ideas. In Open Work, we entered into a conversation with Otaka and other Metabolists in an attempt to speculate on flexibility, growth, and openness in architecture. Some sixty years later, these notions are still rich areas for exploration and debate. Ultimately, perhaps structure can never truly be a valid solution for an architectural enclosure, as form is static and function is not.

*Catalogue of total pieces of the prefabricated modules*

Written by: Omar Bacho
Images by: Omar Bacho, Aude Azzi, Nidhi Kacholia, Theodoros Kantarelis

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