Modern architecture has replaced gradients with boundaries. Instead of soft transitions, we have grown accustomed to hard separations between inside and outside.
In this issue I’m looking at two houses by Sou Fujimoto and Ryue Nishizawa: House N and House in Shochikuchu. They reinterpret two concepts from traditional Japanese architecture: the engawa and the tori-niwa, and what these spaces reveal about comfort, circulation, and the way we inhabit climate.
I’m also trying something new.
Starting this week, I’ll be hosting a live session every Sunday at 21:30 CET where I’ll go deeper into the ideas explored in these newsletters, discuss projects, answer questions, and think through architecture in real time. Here’s the link:
Link
Hope you can join me.
Please enjoy, and as always, thank you for your support.
The Sketch: Engawa vs Tori-niwa
How Fujimoto and Nishizawa reinterpret two opposite spatial concepts from traditional Japanese architecture.The Thought: The Spaces We Lost
Why galleries, patios, verandas, and alleys once played a central role in negotiating comfort and climate.The Work: The Death of Intermediate Space
Why contemporary housing replaced inhabitable thresholds with decorative balconies.
1. The Sketch
Engawa Vs. The Tori-Niwa
Original photo by Iwan Baan
I’m pairing these houses because both reject the modern obsession with sealed interiors. Instead of separating inside from outside, they create gradients of privacy, exposure, and comfort.
But they do it differently, because they draw inspiration from 2 fundamentally different spaces of traditional Japanese houses. For House N, Fujimoto draws from the engawa. While Nishizawa reinterprets the tori-niwa in his House in Shochukichu.
Engawa
Tori-niwa
The engawa and the tori-Niwa are almost opposites. The engawa extends the house outward, creating a place to linger between interior and garden. The tori-niwa pulls the exterior inward, transforming circulation into an environmental passage linking street, house, and courtyard.
Original photo from the Office of Ryue Nishizawa
Nishizawa frames the project as a reinterpretation of the tori-niwa. But unlike the traditional tori-niwa, this space is not truly infrastructural. It is too calm, too detached from the street, too optional. In many ways, it behaves more like an engawa.
A true tori-niwa is not merely adjacent to circulation. It is circulation. It is crossed daily, negotiated constantly, exposed to friction between domestic and urban life. Nishizawa’s version is gentler, more contemplative. Because of its nature although it provides an intermediate space between indoors and outdoors, it doesn’t force the user to use it to go from one to the next.
Meanwhile, the greatest achievement of Fujimoto’s reinterpretation is bringing the engawa into a dense urban setting. Traditionally, the engawa belonged to perimeter, landscape, and suburban domesticity. With his house N Fujimoto compresses that spatial condition into one of the most constrained situations possible: the dense urban plot.
House N in its urban context.
Original photo by Iwan Baan
Modern housing treats circulation as wasted square meters to be optimized. These projects instead use it to negotiate climate, turning circulation into an inhabitable environmental gradient that helps occupants adapt to changing conditions.
The engawa in house N
Original photo by Iwan Baan
What interests me most about these projects is that comfort is not treated as a fixed indoor condition.
Model of house N showing the engawa- You can get the printable files here
Instead, comfort emerges through gradients: shade, airflow, exposure, enclosure, movement, and choice. These houses suggest that architecture does not need to seal us off from climate to make us comfortable, but rather help us negotiate our relationship to it.
I explore this idea further in the next section and in the video below:
Do me a favor, if this issue has made you think, share it with someone who believes architecture should create better ways of living, not just better images.