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  • Essay / Chuorinkan and Kignae Houses in Tokoyo, Japan - 610

    The Chuorinkan House and the Koganei House are both in the suburbs of To Kyo and were designed around the same time. Although they differ structurally and visually, they represent one approach to the problems they involve. The starting points for both are deliberate quotations and rearrangements of architectural compositional elements that can be described as representative of the early modern period. I've used the same type of design approach in other work. For example, quotes from motifs used by Le Corbusier and Charles Rennie Mackintosh can be found inside PMT Building No. 1 (JA, September 1978). Project W and PMT Building No. 2 involve reorganizations of elements of Le Corbusier's La Roche-Jeanneret house in Paris. And the facade of the PMT factory in Osaka repeats the facade of Le Corbusier's Villa Stein, in Garches. The objectives of these citation and reorganization operations are (1) to produce a collage effect of heterogeneous elements and (2) to visualize surface elements. Although the Chuorinkan House resembles PMT Building No. 1 in that its facade consists of o...