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Aida, Takefumi
(b Tokyo, 5 June 1937). Japanese architect, teacher and writer. He graduated from Waseda University, Tokyo, in 1960 and obtained his MArch in 1966 and DEng in 1971. He began teaching architecture at Shibaura Institute of Technology in 1962, becoming a lecturer in engineering there in 1966 and subsequently assistant professor (1973) and professor (1976). In 1967 he opened his own office in Tokyo. A founding member of the counter-Metabolist group ARCHITEXT (1971), Aida was one of the New Wave of avant-garde Japanese architects, expressing his theories in both buildings and writings. His journal articles clearly state his desire to question—if not overthrow—orthodox Modernist ideas of rationality, order and suitability of form to function. He likened architectural design to an intellectual game, and he was one of the first to equate deconstruction with the art of construction, for example in his Artist’s House (1967), Kunitachi, Tokyo, in which all the elements have arbitrary relationships with each other. In other buildings he focused on the creation of architectural experiences that reflect immediate events. In the Nirvana House (1972), Fujisawa, Annihilation House (1972), Mutsuura, House Like a Die (1974), Tokyo, and PL Institute Kindergarten (1974), Osaka, for example, he placed considerable emphasis on the act of ‘encounter’ between different elements, forms and textures, linking conscious and unconscious responses in such a way as to afford pleasure to the user. He is perhaps best known for a series of ten designs for ‘Toy Block’ houses built at seven sites near Tokyo between 1978 and 1984; Toy Block House III (1981), Nakano, for example, is composed of simple, abstract elements similar to children’s building blocks. A later work, Kazama House (1987), Kawaguchi, is a beautiful composition of white and pale-grey parallel wall planes orientated east–west to focus views on to a group of trees; sandwiched between the planes are ‘spatial layers’ of rooms and aluminium shoji screens, with additional layering provided by ‘house-shaped’ screen walls on the exterior.
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