A House for Everyone: Architects Challenging the Post-War Myth of 'The House for The Nuclear Family' in Japan, 1954-2005

The design of the detached house has been the focus of architectural developments in post-Second World War Japan. An acute housing shortage caused by war damage, a rapid economic recovery, a fast-growing middle class, and a government push for homeownership created new design opportunities for architects, which (in turn) propelled a lively debate – largely played out in architectural magazines – as to what makes a good house. Focussed on how architects used the design of their own houses to experiment with new images of ‘house’ and ‘family’, this text explores two chapters in this decades-long housing debate. It explains how the introduction of a new constitution prompted a critical examination of Japanese lifestyles and the promotion of reforms based on Western ideologies. These reforms resulted in the introduction of a prototypical two-bedroom-with-dining-kitchen floorplan (2DK) in public housing with two divergent effects. While the housing industry extracted from this floorplan the Western ideology of privacy and individuality and made a private room for each family member the rule (nLDK), individual architects favoured the observations of real domestic life that lay at the basis of this floorplan. Two architects’ own houses will serve as case studies to illustrate architects’ continuous efforts to propose houses for alternative lifestyles and families beyond this new, post-war nLDK ideal: Kiyoshi Seike’s My Home (1954) and Atelier Bow-Wow’s House & Atelier Bow-Wow (2005)