Hillside Terrace by Maki Fumihiko

Maki's Hillside Terrace

by Fumihiko Maki 

The Hillside Terrace project, a medium-density mixed-use development of apartments, shops, restaurants, and cultural facilities, took exactly 25 years from the first plans I drew in 1967 to the completion of its sixth phase in 1992. Although I have designed buildings and complexes far greater in physical scale over the past several decades, no other project has occupied my thoughts so continuously over time as Hillside Terrace has.

The flow of time can be measured against its diverse buildings and their relationship to the city of Tokyo as it grew to envelop them. Changes in the project's architectural character, materiality, and expression from phase to phase also reflect shifts in my own consciousness with the passage of time.

The opportunity to design Hillside Terrace — a commission I received almost immediately after setting up my architectural practice in Tokyo — was my first chance to confront the idea of modern architecture engaging, even creating, its urban context.

Though I was unaware of it at that time, the project would bring me a deeper understanding of the "collective form" phenomenon that had fascinated me in my early years of architectural study, strengthening the notion that architecture and cities share a distinct relationship to time.

In the mid-1960s, the Daikanyama district still retained traces of the wooded hills for which the greater Musashino region was once known. After each rain, the air was heavily laden with earthy scents. Zelkova trees rose high over the low townscape. Downtown Tokyo, though geographically close, was still perceived as a distant place.

It was in this context that my clients, the Asakura family, who for many generations had owned a 250-meter- (850-foot-) long strip of land along Daikanyama's main road, asked me to design a number of apartments and shops to be built in separate phases. I was still in my late thirties when I started on Hillside Terrace, and I felt quite fortunate to be given the opportunity to design several buildings on a single site at that age.

I realized that in designing a group of buildings, I could also generate exterior public spaces of a particular character.

Spatial character usually determines what is public in the city. A metropolis can provide overwhelming spaces unavailable in small cities or villages. However, public spaces in cities do not exist just for crowds or communities; they are also places that allow people to enjoy solitude.

Our urban spaces become much richer when there are many different layers of public spaces and meanings. In a metropolis, people take strolls, just as people in the countryside go to mountains or rivers; in that way, they are able to establish a special, spatial relationship between themselves and portions of the city.

The extent to which streets and other public spaces suitable for walking are provided can be considered an effective index in determining the quality of urbanity in a city. Sadly, the contemporary city is being gradually divested of such public character.

There are certain limits to the types of spaces that an architect can provide; at best, the spaces they design can form a relationship with parts of the city bordering on the site to create landscapes that many people can share. Cities like Tokyo today possess few standards of urban form.

Architects are required to create new landscapes in an urban environment full of heterogeneous elements. The challenge is the same whether the project in question is a single building or a complex of buildings: the creation of topos in the city through the medium of landscape.

Looking back, I believe that the process that led from Hillside Terrace's first phase to the sixth phase suggests not only the changes in our notion of public space and the evolution of modernism, but also what I would call "the landscape of time."

The singular sense of place that people strolling among the various buildings and outdoor spaces of Hillside Terrace feel is no accident. It is the result of a deliberate design approach that has created continuous unfolding sequences of spaces and views, taking advantage of the site's natural topography and, indeed, enhancing it with subtle shifts in the architectural ground plane.

The various green areas, plazas, sunken gardens, exterior stairs, sidewalks, and transparent entrance halls are interconnected by views to one another, giving an impression of substantial depth and extent across the site.

One does not physically experience urban space by simply gazing at buildings or looking at them from above — space is experienced only through sequential movement. Like music, movement in space can be a source of elemental joy, something to which one can give oneself up entirely.

At Hillside Terrace, long views pass through multiple spatial boundaries created by topography, stairs, roads, trees, and low walls. Several possible loops are offered for passage through the site and back to the street, and glimpses of greenery seen around the corner are just as important as fully transparent views for suggesting a path.

Although their architectural expression has varied in response to the times, the buildings of phases one through six share a consistent scale of massing, using a combination of staggered, cubical volumes, generally one and two stories tall, with apartment blocks frequently lifted above street level on transparent and/or recessed ground-floor volumes.

Several unifying spatial elements, such as corner entrances and interior stairs echoing exterior topography, are repeated in different guises to create a sense of continuous townscape while allowing localized variations.

Within such an evolving framework, I have viewed each individual building design from the perspective of its urban presence and meaning — aiming to discover in this process a modern language for the creation of group form.

source: www.architectureweek.com

other links:
Maki and associates
www.hillsideterrace.com