0 CommentsKlein Dytham architecture (KDa) is a multi-disciplinary design practice established by Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein in Tokyo at the dawn of the 90s. Tom Van Malderen spoke to Mark Dytham about their Tokyo adventure...
You and your partner both have a European background. Can you tell us a bit more about your decision to establish your practice in Tokyo?
There was no plan, it just sort of happened. Astrid and I were both at the College of Royal Art in 1988, London was booming and before leaving college we were both offered jobs in big architectural practices. We thought it would be sad to go straight into practices and both really wanted to go to Japan. Astrid won a travel scholarship from Richard Rogers at the Royal College of Art, I won a travel scholarship from a new town called Milton-Keynes (UK), so we both decided we should go of to Japan. I am a modernist at heart and I felt the roots of modernism really came from Japan through different modern movement architects looking at the temples, at the screens, there was a simplicity coming through from the traditional building methods. I really wanted to see both the craziness of Japan and what I see as these roots of modern architecture.
We weren't sure if we had enough money to survive for 3 weeks or 3 months, we really didn't know, but off we went! We got little assignments to do but we wrote to ten architects and every one of those saw us and off things went. It's amazing, something like that would have never happened with British architects: you never get to the door! I think it was seeing that anything was possible in Japan because there is no visual planning here as a young architect, compared to say working in the UK where you’ve got all these visual planning laws which were established by people who are not architects, or it's the planners who decide what materials, what window shades, what bricks, though you’ve got to be contextual in an environment were buildings are several hundred years old. Quite correctly so you can't just do what you want. The fact we ended up working for Toyo Ito for a couple of years and then establishing our own office, really by mistake, is another story but that wasn't the aim.
Whilst working for Ito, a client was looking to renovate an older apartment building and he thought we would be suitable for the job as Westerners. It was very unusual to renovate things in Japan at that time, but because I am British and there were the renovations of the warehouses in the Dockland areas going on in London, we renovated this apartment building - that is how we opened our office.
There are a lot of cliches amongst Europeans about Japan. Are the cultural differences so striking?
I like living and working here. I think it is very much like the UK here. The way Japanese people negotiate - they are not direct, they are curving, they sort of meander, - is very British, very different to say the German style. In central Tokyo it is pretty much low-rise, it is not urban, I mean it is very crowded but buildings are only 3-4 stories high in the central town. Also, the Japanese people are probably some of the most untidy of people, like me actually. There is a misconception that everybody lives in this ultra clean white house with nothing, you know what I mean? People think all the restaurants are bleached wood and white, there is no restaurant like that! The aesthetic really comes from the traditional tea-house or temple, Japanese people love this layering. There is a type of work called Wabi Sabi which has to do with the patina of used things like a door handle, when it is a bit dirty, when it has been worn over time or something, they like that and every restaurant you go to is so not Japanese. When you go back to the UK and you go to Japanese restaurants there are always these minimal interiors, minimal service and there are only a few restaurants like that here. It is coming from our images of temples and lets say tatami rims and things like that, also the magazines, when the houses are built they are empty, I guarantee when you go back they are packed full of crap. You can see this in the piece of work Tokyo Style by Kiyoshi Suzuki that shows fifty homes. He said that in the next six months I will come and take a photo of your house, I am not going to tell you when I arrive and I must take the picture as it is because that is his point. You don’t entertain at home, you entertain in a restaurant or a hotel, no one comes back to your home - so it is a mess. It is not like in Europe where you have to be fully equipped to invite people around and it’s about what furniture you have, what plates you have, what cutlery you have.
KDa is well known for playing with and sampling the powers of advertising and brand culture. Elle Japan describes your work as 'bringing fun to the city and making us all happy'. A lot of other designers seem to find it difficult to bring humour into their work without losing seriousness...
We're not really worried about that. More than humour we try to bring that twist to our projects which make people smile. People remember a good time, they like smiling. Why not? Why would we build architecture for architects? We don't buy many architectural magazines. I don't do things for belly-laughs or a big joke, the twists are quite subtle in one way but we are conscious we don't want to get the people tired about our little quirks or whatever patterns or graphics that could be used. We're aware that 95% of the people in the world don't have a design education and we want them to understand and enjoy our buildings. I am not saying make simple architecture for people who don't know anything about architecture but I think we can engage people in a very sort of friendly way - people sort of forget that. We don't super intentionally do that but if we do a cafe and have this orchid pattern on the façade, it happens because the owner of the café just had an orchid named after her. We got this big grid façade and thought it would be nice to put a pattern on it. When you are inside the building you can't read the graphic, it is just an array of random squares which are pink. Outside you don't quite get it unless you're standing right in front of it but at night when the lights are on it is sometimes there and sometimes it's not - if that is making any sense. We like to say we don’t have a style but we have a spirit to bring across, architecture and design should be kind of fun and humorous. I don't know why it has to become so serious because it costs sooo much money! I was so scared of telling the client: I am spending 10 million dollars, can I have fun as well? We always get away with it in meetings when people have a laugh and it helps to carry things through a bit. I think the other thing with our design is that we first arrived here in Tokyo we couldn't really write or speak the language properly. So the designs had to say everything to the client, we couldn't do the hard sell, so the project had to say everything. The client had to look at our model and the drawing and get it. When you submit a competition you can't be there with the judges so the drawings have to say everything. When you've finished a building you can't stand outside and say look at that, the detail is great, the building is about this, the building has to say it. That is really important. Looking back, that is one of the reasons why our work is evolved in that way that it is very easily read - because we couldn't explain it. Another re-occurring element in the work by your office is the application of screens, where ornament is no longer a consequence of but rather a starting point for construction?
Is that again a reflection on Tokyo culture or is it because of the interactive element for the passer-by?
At Idee workstation, we used screens because one building is looking right onto another. In many cases including the R3 Ukishima project the building looks straight onto this damn-boring convenience store, it is a horrible façade we don't want to see. We had to create some kind of environment so we put up the screen. You get a feeling for what is beyond but are also self-contained, I think that is a thing which comes out of necessity in Japan. Again that is because of the view and the close proximity of other buildings. I think the sliding screen internally comes from lack of space to some extent. We just like to see what is beyond something, is it more intriguing? and bigger? It is not consciously coming from a Japanese screen with the semi-translucent paper but there may be an unconscious sensibility found there.
For example in your Sin Den house project, an element as thin as an applied graphic onto the façade starts working like a screen and creates an interplay with the window configuration of a house...
That almost came out the sense that we built a very cheap box on a really tight budget for a young couple who wanted their living space combined with their hair salon. It is a wooden box painted black but instead of putting a sign on it we have put this hair dressers portrait on it. Jo, a person from our team, keeps on sketching and doodling these faces and we said lets get that onto the building and lets do it all over the building. Again it didn’t dawn on us that the next door building has some ivy and creepers on it, when you look at the other filigree of electrical wires and handrails and stuff everywhere on the surrounding back street facades it kind of gives that building a detail of that kind of scale. Again we didn't come from there, it was a sub-conscious score. The graphics came from the notion of hairdressers and tattoos, the language of these fashions. Then we used a few of the remaining guys that paint these big Japanese cinema posters by hand to come by and paint it on.
KDa is not only making architecture a social, interactive performance that takes place in the street but at a certain point you decided to found DELUXE, a cross over event space, as part of your office. What triggered off this idea?
Deluxe was a reaction to coming from the Royal College of Art where there are 32 departments of which architecture is one amongst fashion, painting, sculpture, glass, ceramics and film making all these trades are amidst these 32 amazing artistic disciplines. When we set up office on our own, we didn’t realize how much we were influenced by this. Every day we walked through the gallery where a crit would be on, car styling guys or fashion people rubbed off on us in terms of the way you draw, the way you make models, different materials you can have. The Royal College forces you to do things on your own, there is no help, there is criticism, nobody would tell you what to do, it is a tough place.
It didn’t dawn on us that we needed that input into our work. With four of us sat in an office there is not much input no matter how many magazines you get, so we talked to a graphic design company we sometimes work with and decided to share a place and to get some more people together but space in Tokyo is very difficult. We found a warehouse and it was on a one year contract, but we took a risk. Other companies came: a composer, a computer graphic guy, a D.J, and a beer company too. We all got together and made Deluxe. It really came out of the reaction that we needed some other things around us. We are not born in Japan so it was a way for us to make a network. We knew we could stage events there, gallery shows, we could invite people round. Also we could bring interesting people into our space to inspire our staff and us, that is how that started. The events grew bigger and bigger, and our offices grew bigger and bigger - something had to give. Then I was looking for a restaurant space for a client, they didn’t take it, it was 5 minutes up the road, the same size of Deluxe, so we thought why don’t we move our events to what became Super Deluxe. We also knew that one day Deluxe was going to shut for redevelopment so we need to move it somewhere. So Super Deluxe became our night office and we all hub our day offices around it. The six companies still evolve around that space. That s why my throat is hurting, I was there till very early this morning.
And is Pecha Kucha a direct offshoot of that?
At Super Deluxe we didn’t have enough events, we decided all 6 directors should take a night a week to try to make an event. We decided to take an event we have in our office every couple of months, invite some folks around, have some canapés and show some slides like most offices do I think. If we take that to Super Deluxe and we invite other people, we need about a hundred people eating and drinking to make Super Deluxe tick over for one night. So invite twenty people and they each bring five friends, that’s a hundred folks. But if they’re all like me they’ll talk and talk, that would be sad and would go on all night. So 20 slides, 20 seconds a slide, 20 people, and it opened the 20th of February, starting at 20 past eight, we wrapped the whole thing up in about 20 minutes it was nothing other than that, no other big plan and it was a way to keep Super Deluxe going. We opened the first night with about 100 people and next week will be our fiftieth event in Tokyo and we still get over 300 people. We never thought it would last for 50 events, and we never thought this event would happen in 107 countries. There was no business plan for that at all. We never asked anyone to run an event, we never sent out any press releases. People ask us, as was the case with design week in Tokyo, Icon magazine took it back to London, somebody took it to San Francisco, Artrid was speaking in Bern in Switzerland: somebody took it there, and off this thing went. We created a monster we are trying to control now. We will pop over to the upcoming event at the Salone Del Mobile in Milan. It’s quite insane. We have a new website and are setting up a foundation as we are sponsoring the whole event right now: funding the website and staff to look after it. So we are setting up a foundation which will be in place soon and are trying to use the network we’ve got in a really interesting way to connect people together. Any money we raise with the foundation we want to give back to the presenters, for social projects in their cities. Yeah it is nuts…but we are still architects, ok!
So, I'm wondering, are you guys still in Tokyo now and then?
For at least 80% of our time. We try to travel not more then once a month. Astrid has one month and I get the other for a lecture or something. Then we travel for work, but we try to cut it down before it gets too much. But I think we need all of this spin, it kind of informs our work. It dawns on us more and more that architecture is not just about the design - that is a part of it - it is about how to get people to come to a space, what you do with the people in a space, it is that programming. It is about designing a situation: Deluxe was a situation, Super Deluxe is a situation. We designed a framework where Pecha Kucha nights can happen in a physical space and now in a virtual space. Designing a situation is a really important thing for us. You have to understand that you have to run an event space and you’ve got to be involved to understand how important that is. Once a building is built it is not finished, that is the start it is not the end point. Clients come to us and they want us to build an office or a café, but for all the things we do, the wedding chapel, the bath house…it is so much more about how it is going to be used, how people circulate, not circulation patterns but how it works in the context of the whole. The word of mouth thing: the reason why the wedding chapel is having ten weddings a day now. The building is its own advert in a way and the word has spread and that is really important for us.
In contrast to many other design studios, your webpage only shows executed work. Is that in line with what you just explained? That it is fundamental to your practice to get it made? That your projects go beyond their design on paper?
Yeah, I mean if you come to one of our lectures, we don’t show any drawings. After College with people like Peter Cook and Zaha Hadid, all these people would be drawing and showing drawings (now they are building). I think we are in a very lucky position where we can build things, I think it is really important to show the built work. We don’t do much paper work, it is all built and made and that is what we like to show. There is a final question I wanted to ask you. How do you deal with issues of sustainability? Sustainability is a real buzz word at the moment. We have always been conscious of it, trying to keep things low cost, make them cost effective. We try to keep a clear head, within the same spirit of recycling we try to re-use. The TBWA/ Hakuhodo project for an advertising agency uses an old bowling alley. It is a forty-year old building and we probably managed to get another 5 to 10 years out of it by putting this very famous advertising agency there. Nobody reuses buildings in Japan. If we can offset that time we can reduce carbon dioxide being used to knock it down and rebuild it. If you can extend the life of a building by a couple of years that saves you a hell of a lot of carbon. Rather than us putting up a super green façade with double walls and all the other paraphernalia, just by using an old building we save a lot of resources. You’ve just got to keep it balanced and be aware that buying a hybrid car may not be as environmentally friendly as you think. We can learn a lot from the way that Japan used to be a traditionally very low energy use country. After the war they were a very poor country, there was actually not much money at all. Everybody uses fluorescent light bulbs everywhere. They (the Japanese) have been low in energy use here since day one. Having said that, they put these vending machine outside their house that uses more than one house; so that balances out. But it's those contradictions we like about Japan...
