08/09: Kyoto
Kanjiro Kawai House
Tucked into the Gojo-zaka pottery district near Kiyomizu-dera Temple, the Kanjiro Kawai House and Studio feels inseparable from its surroundings. Built in 1937 as both residence and workshop, it was home to Kanjiro Kawai (1890–1966), a leading figure of the Mingei (folk craft) movement. Preserved by his family after his death, the house is now a museum, but it still feels lived-in.
What gives that impression are not display cases or staged objects, but the everyday furniture and fittings that remain in place: the low table, simple stools, wooden and bamboo shelves, even the way light falls across tatami rooms and the courtyard garden. The massive climbing kiln (noborigama), built directly into the structure, ties the house to its function as a working studio.
Kawai’s approach to ceramics was rooted in play and discovery—he often spoke of “letting the clay speak.” That same spirit lingers in the house: not polished or monumental, but open, improvisational, and attentive to material life. Moving through the rooms, surrounded by this rich material culture, it’s easy to sense how making and living were folded into one continuous practice.
08/09-08/10: Kyoto
Side Notes
Okazaki Area and
Transformative
Public Space
Through Jin’s connection and his former colleague Tomomi Miyagawa’s kind introduction, we visited the exhibition Secrets of the Kimono: The Advent of Yuzen Dyeing at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. The exhibition explored a rich intersection of material culture, craftsmanship, technology, state intervention, and individual agency in shaping cultural movements.
The museum’s location, in the Okazaki area, is itself an equally rich site for studying spatial design. As suggested by Waddah, we observed how the open space in front of Heian Shrine transforms daily—from a handicraft market one day to a vintage motorcycle market the next—illustrating how shrine grounds in Japan serve as vital forms of public space.
Adjacent to it, the outdoor plaza of ROHM Theatre Kyoto (a beautifully designed building that gestures seamlessly between interior and exterior spaces, originally designed by Kunio Maekawa in 1960 and refurbished in 2016) becomes another vibrant public gathering space in the evenings. It was fascinating to see how these spaces are continuously activated and used by diverse demographic groups in multiple ways.
As we walked past the nearby Kyoto Zoo in the same area, I accidentally caught sight of a giraffe’s head moving above the fence from the street—a surreal and memorable moment, and a fitting example of how urban design can produce unexpected encounters.
Outdoor plaza of ROHM Theatre Kyoto
Underground
Architecture:
Waddah’s PhD research focuses on underground architecture. Coming from a curatorial background that often deals with representation, we initially associated the term “underground” with countercultural or interventionist forms of production. From an architectural perspective, however, it points to a distinct mode of design practice. Through Waddah’s introduction, we encountered two underground projects: one by accident: the new entrance of the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art by Tezzo Nishizawa Architects + Jun Aoki & Associates, located in the Okazaki area and adding another highlight to its already fascinating spatial network; and the other, the underground reception hall at Higashi Honganji Temple by Shin Takamatsu, just a five-minute walk from Kyoto Station. Both are compelling and effective retrofit models for heritage architecture and sites. We also observed a similar approach later on the trip in Tadao Ando’s design of his own museum on Naoshima Island, carved into a tiny heritage house, where excavation and concealment become part of the architectural language, an intriguing hinge between aesthetics and the island’s economic redevelopment model in the face of depopulation.