Purple Magazine
— Purple #43 S/S 2025
The Tokyo Diary Issue
kazuyo sejima
BOUNDLESS ARCHITECTURE
portrait
by TAKASHI HOMMA
PURPLE — Could you tell us about your Japanese influences?
KAZUYO SEJIMA — I grew up in Japan, and I’ve been influenced by its history and culture, of course. But what first made me interested in architecture was the 1958 Sky House by the Metabolist Kiyonori Kikutake. I saw it when I was very young, and I was amazed at how different it was from the suburban houses I knew. I realized it was possible to live differently. I found out about traditional Japanese buildings through the projects I admired in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. They were radical contemporary buildings at the time, but gradually I realized they were also very influenced by our history: buildings that adapt, that change with the seasons, that become one big room extending into the landscape. Traditional Japanese architecture is not monumental — it is timber instead of stone, lightweight, and alive. This is something that has always influenced my designs — I wanted to make spaces in which actions just happen to pass by.
PURPLE — How did you develop the concept of “soft boundaries” in your architecture?
KAZUYO SEJIMA — I have always been interested in dissolving the distinction between building and environment. Architecture sets boundaries, but at the same time it connects with its surroundings and can create new landscapes with what is already there. I have been thinking about how to make architecture like a park, a communal space where different people come together. In a park, activities share space, sometimes shifting or overlapping. There is visual continuity, but there are also gradients of collectivity and intimacy. The very first buildings I designed were two small weekend houses near Tokyo. They are called Platforms I and II because the domestic spaces are open and continuous with their rural surroundings. From that time onward, in every project we have done, we have somehow tried to find new ways to create a space with soft boundaries, but our approach has gradually changed. At first, we thought that by removing the separation between structure and partition, we could also remove hierarchy from the plan, creating fields of activity that brought the architecture and program together in a different way. This would allow activities to expand and contract within an interior landscape, and visitors could choose between many different routes. We began to look at how patios could both separate and connect the programs, and then at how the topography could help create rooms without walls. We also introduced valleys, hills, and stepped plateaus in the buildings we designed. Visually, everything becomes continuous; physically and acoustically, things are set apart. Programmatically, these loose boundaries create spaces of crossover and dynamic interaction. In recent years, we have become increasingly interested in how a building can adapt to a varied context around its perimeter, or even fragment and extend into landscapes. By creating an undefined edge, whether by way of loose compositions, organic forms, or decomposed volumes, it sometimes becomes difficult to feel where the building ends and the context begins. This seems very attractive to me.
