Dogma

Vico in Japan

This research consists in reconstructing and redrawing four projects by Vico Magistretti in Japan produced in the early 1980s. Three of these projects—the Tokyo and Osaka showrooms for Cerruti and the Tanimoto House in Tokyo were demolished. One project – a villa on Eastern Japanese coast was unrealised.

Looking at this body of work we have identified a recurring tension between figuration and abstraction. Figuration arises from Magistretti’s deliberate recourse to archetypal images drawn from different formal traditions; abstraction is the process through which Magistretti reduce these references to elements whose formal simplicity do not reveal their visual sources. This tension emerges in his Japanese projects, yet it can be extended to Magistretti’s entire ouvre, both as an architect and as a furniture designer. In his architectures the language of prefabricated structural systems is often tempered with hand-finished details, pairing construction elements resulting from industrialised production systems with components in either wood or metal and produced through handcraft processes. A similar dynamic characterises much of his well-known design work, where industrial techniques and materials are employed to produce objects governed by clear geometric principles and formal abstraction. Yet these objects are still capable of evoking shared cultural memories and traditions. For this reason, Magistretti’s architectural output has been identified as a form of “revised rationalism” In which rationality is constantly pondered against contexts and specific circumstances. Yet for Magistretti rationalism is above all the possibility of reducing both objects and architecture to their essential form.

This notion of essential form, as suggested by Gabriele Neri, is useful concept through which to read the between Japanese design and Magistretti’s furniture. Magistretti made his first reference to Japanese design with Kuta (1972–1980), a lamp conceptually conceived as a reference to the image of the Rising Sun—transforming a powerful national symbol into a modern lighting form, recurring to the figure of the circle that would characterise in different ways many of his Japanese designs. This project marked the beginning of a sustained dialogue with Japanese culture. In the years that followed, Magistretti continued to express this connection explicitly through the naming of several furniture pieces, such as the Nara table—recalling the historic Japanese city—and the Tani Moto storage shelves. The latter were named after the Tanimoto family, who had commissioned him to design two houses, reflecting not only a professional collaboration but also a deeper cultural exchange that informed and enriched his creative practice.

Within the topic of figuration vs. abstraction, a paradigmatic architecture by Magistretti is his first two projects in Japan:  the showrooms designed for the fashion brand Cerruti 1881, in Tokyo in 1974, and in Osaka in 1986. These projects emerged from an extensive collaboration with the fashion designer and entrepreneur Nino Cerruti, which, as reconstructed by Simona Segre-Reinach in her contribution, began in 1967 with the design of the Paris showroom. In order to understand the logic at work in the Japanese showrooms it may be useful to look for a moment to the Paris project, as this served as model for many of the showrooms that Magistretti realized in other places around the world. The Paris project already included the leather-bound objects and hanging cases that will be found later in his Japan interventions. Similarly, the general palette of almost mirror-finish polished white wall and dark leather-bound furniture, along with the Omega lamps (1960), were already established in Paris before the two showrooms in Japan were conceived.

The Tokyo showroom for Cerruti 1881 is a large rectangular space divided into two parts: a large rectangular showroom, and a smaller rectangular room at the back for the tailor. The larger room faces the street, with a fully glazed façade on one of the shorter sides and the entrance positioned in the adjacent building lobby. The larger room and the smaller room at the back are connected by a curved volume which conceals an existing column and houses the dressing rooms, while also providing access to the tailor’s room at the rear.

The main showroom is divided into four almost square parts, the centre points of which meet at a thick white column around which a circular, leather-bound display table is positioned. The room is almost exclusively occupied by a single type of furniture: a leather box approximately one meter high, within which clothing hangs on rails or is stored on leather trays. These leather boxes, which are reminiscent of luggage or travel cases, line the walls or are organized in groups of four and positioned as square-shaped, free-standing objects in each of the four sections of the shop. Along the street-facing window, these elements are staggered slightly in plan. Along one wall sits a tall black cabinet, and in one corner sits a low coffee table flanked by three Steelcase MaxStacker chairs. The entire space is illuminated from above by a semi-translucent ceiling and a series of hanging ‘Omega’ lamps (1962).

The Osaka showroom, located within the Hilton Plaza, occupies a smaller rectangular unit in plan compared to its Tokyo counterpart. One of the shorter sides is fully glazed and incorporates the entrance, establishing a direct visual connection between the interior and the mall concourse. This glazed façade extends a few metres beyond the corner along the longer side, reinforcing the openness of the space. The remaining walls are lined continuously with leather-upholstered wardrobes and shelving, forming a dense and tactile perimeter. Two dressing rooms are discreetly concealed within the rear corners of the plan, absorbed into the thickness of the storage wall. Within the boundary defined by the hanging rails and shelves, a series of distinct objects populate the central space. An existing column is entirely clad in mirror, dissolving its mass, reflecting fragments of the interior and defining a small-glazed entry lobby. Nearby, a fin-shaped desk adjoins a thin freestanding wall, from which a curved hanging rail extends toward the front of the shop, subtly addressing the glazed façade. This small leather-clad wall appears at once as furniture and as architecture: its material continuity aligns it with the wardrobes, yet its scale and spatial role grant it an architectural presence. At the centre of the rear wall stands a large circular display table, the Edison table, upholstered in leather and used to present folded garments. Suspended above it is the Sonora lamp, which anchors the composition vertically and establishes a focal point within the otherwise orthogonal arrangement. While deploying many of the elements already present in the Paris showroom, these two interventions also reveal a deliberate attempt to incorporate Japanese figurative references. These range from the circular form of the table encircling the column to the suspended white fabric blinds in the glazed shopwindow, which recall the traditional noren typically found at the entrances of small restaurants and shops.

Another Magistretti’s project in Tokyo, is a house commissioned to the Milanese architect by the Tanimoto family because their admiration for his work with Cassina, as well as his growing portfolio of private houses built across northern Italy. The house was built in 1984 and demolished in 2015. Despite the street-facing façade giving the impression of a fortress—the house is almost completely obscured from the street by a high wall, on the corner of which a large metal plate holds a pyramid of stone spheres, referencing the cannonballs of the Castello Sforzesco—the interior organisation is more legible from the garden, where the plan unfolds in a centrifugal aggregation of distinct spaces.

The house is arranged over three levels: a basement garage, a ground floor with garden access containing more private rooms, and an upper level at street height with communal spaces. The lower garden level houses bedrooms and the tea room, while the upper level contains the lounges, dining area, and kitchen, all opening onto expansive views that extend to Mount Fuji. The tearoom, sized for six tatami mats, is the only explicitly Japanese space, the roof deliberately curved to echo the adjacent street wall and forming a singular figurative element within an otherwise Western spatial framework.

Externally, the architecture is made of a composition of volumes—some cubic, others cylindrical—grouped around a square-plan pyramidal roof. The roofs, finished in copper with deep eaves, recall traditional Japanese houses while simultaneously echoing Magistretti’s earlier Casa Bassetti in Azzate. The interplay of abstract geometric forms with figurative detailing demonstrates Magistretti’s subtle negotiation between Western and Japanese architectural languages. Entering from the street, visitors descend a sequence of steps into the centre of the plan, immediately facing the garden. Bedrooms are divided into two wings: the children’s bedrooms occupy regular square plans to the left of the entrance, while the master and guest bedrooms are housed within two cylindrical volumes. The tea room sits at the lowest point of the ground floor, facing its own private garden, distinguished by its curved copper walls. Although the house is formally divided into two primary above-ground levels, these distinctions are not directly legible internally. Instead, the interior reads as a dynamic landscape of half-level changes and half-height walls, producing a spatial complexity rarely found in traditional Japanese architecture. Materials reinforce the sense of Western domesticity. Walls are finished in white-painted plaster and lined with European birch, while floors are of teak. The interior spaces are as usual punctuated with Magistretti-designed furniture, meticulously arranged according to the architect’s drawings. The result is a synthesis of abstract volumetric rigor with figurative cues drawn from both Japanese and Italian precedents, producing a house that, as requested by the client, was distinctly “western”, spatially complex, austere yet with figurative nods to architectural references both from Japan and Milan.

In 1987, while work on the Tanimoto Tokyo house was in-progress, the same client commissioned two adjacent holiday houses to be built on a promontory jutting out into the sea in Aburatsubo, nearby Tokyo. Although the houses were never built, multiple drawings, sketches and documentation show them as separated yet based on similar organisational principles. House A is the larger of the two. In plan, it is defined by two offset squares, which are further subdivided into four squares based on a post-and-beam structural system. One of these smaller squares has been slightly enlarged and is capped with a similar pyramidal roof to that seen in the Tanimoto Tokyo house. House B has a smaller footprint and is comprised of one square, which is further subdivided into four. One of these quarters is enlarged and capped with the same pyramidal roof as House A.

These two legible, similar forms unite the two spatially separate houses within the overall ensemble. Both houses have a pool running perpendicular to them, reaching out to the sea. The interiors of the Aburatsubo houses do not exhibit the same spatial complexity as those in Tokyo. Yet, as in the Tokyo house, the bedrooms are on the lower floors and the living spaces are on the upper floors, with access to terraces and pools. Also in this case, the architecture is dominated by clearly intelligible geometrical form—the modular square in plan and the pyramid for the roofs— and yet the structural system behind these volumes is closer to traditional Japanese construction, as demonstrated by the subdivision of the larger square into smaller spaces with walls running between columns.

As already argued, in all these projects the use of archetypical forms is constantly countered by the simplicity of the formal vocabulary. Perhaps this approach is not only present in Magistretti’s work but is the distinctive feature of Italian design in general. Within this tradition, the legacy of modernist tropes such as standardization and modularity are inflected by the presence of clearly recognizable figures. The tension between abstraction and figuration is thus a reminder of the unresolved struggle between repetition and difference that is present in the tradition of Italian architecture and design.