Two rough concrete columns stand in a white hall the full height of House on a Curved Road, which Kazuo Shinohara sets on a Tokyo corner where a narrow residential street bends.
Of the things the poet and filmmaker Shirouyasu Suzuki wished for in his family's house, one was simply "a large room". Kazuo Shinohara, who declared that "a house is a work of art", completed it in April 1978: four levels of reinforced concrete, a basement and three floors over it, about 240 square metres.
Known in Japan as Uehara Magarimichi no Jutaku, the house is named for its plot, a sloping triangle in Uehara, Shibuya. Where the road bends, a heavy concrete plinth bends with it, while the volume on top keeps to right angles. From the street the parts are out of register. The base is rounded, the pale box above steps back, the roofline slopes, the windows are tall slots. Shinohara called it zure, a misalignment made on purpose: the elements stop sharing a theme and shed their usual meanings until the form is left, in his word, "naked". The house belongs to what he named his third style, which opens the small house to fragments of the chaotic city.
At the core is the ground-floor hall for living and dining, white and open through all three storeys. Two square concrete columns stand in it, about 45 centimetres a side, rough and unpainted, the imprint of their formwork still showing, so they behave less like structure tucked into a wall than like sculpture. Overhead, concrete beams span the void at staggered heights and run into the sloping planes of walls and ceiling, and where they meet in a cross, a modest home acquires an odd, almost urban scale. A glazed corner gives onto a small courtyard garden; along one side runs a kitchen of black tiles and stainless-steel counters.
Everything else is fitted into leftover space around the hall, which stays the main room, with public life held apart from private. In the basement are a library, a study, the entrance, a projection room and a former garage. Two bedrooms, the bathroom and the children's rooms fill the second floor; on the third, beneath the pitched roof, is the parents' bedroom. Stairs, narrow and wedged between walls, climb from level to level, each with a wooden handrail.
In the smaller rooms, colour sets a different density for each. The Suzukis wanted a coloured room; the house gives them more than one. A deep red room is lined in plywood shelves, green rooms fold their walls and ceilings in diagonal planes, and in a top-floor bedroom the roof's gable is outlined as a big triangle across the white wall. That room was deep blue before it was repainted white. Skylights and small square openings cut into these surfaces drop hard-edged patches of light onto the floors.
The hall served for meals with guests and for film screenings on its white walls. People from the arts came to the house, among them Shuntaro Tanikawa, a poet, and Yoshiharu Tsuge, a manga artist. Before any of them, the house was already on film: Suzuki shot its construction in colour, starting with the foundations, and the family later found the footage again.
