Japan’s first architecture journal focused on detail, Detail (Shokokusha), is half a century old. To mark that, “Full Scale | Japanese Architectural Detail 1964→2014” opened yesterday, June 4, at Hikarie (2-21-1 Shibuya, Shibuya Ward), eighth floor, CUBE 1, 2, 3. Hearing that photos of Palaceside Building and drawings the same size as the building were on show, I looked in at once. It was still the first day, busy with architecture students.
The “Full Scale” corner is just off the eighth-floor elevators; the first exhibit inside the entrance, No. 1, was our Palaceside Building. A close-up of the south wall facing the Imperial Palace, and its drawing.
The caption reads: “In an age of gaskets, fixing glass directly to steel is simple. And if thick glass is used at full strength, gaskets need not be costly. Yet no large office building had gone through with it. The saving on sash was, as expected, put into aluminum louvers. Using the downspouts as mullions to hold the louvers is also without waste. — Detail No. 11.” The journal, still young, seems to have run the piece in 1966 as Palaceside Building was completed.
Detail was founded in 1964, on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics. The show’s theme is “While grasping the building as a whole,
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how do you decide the junctions where things meet.” From the vast body of work in Detail over half a century, outstanding modern Japanese details are shown in full-scale (1/1) giant drawings and photos. Besides Palaceside Building there are ten works in all: Printemps Ebisubashi, Tokyo Cathedral St. Mary’s, House of White, My House Continued, Row House in Sumiyoshi, Minobusan Kuon-ji Treasure Hall, SPIRAL, Kasai Rinkai Park observatory rest house, and Sendai Mediatheque. It is an event in which Shokokusha, the specialist architecture publisher, looks back over 50 years and toward a new era; drawings one knows from the office or magazines, blown to full size, give a strange crossing of drawing and real thing.
The run is the 4th through June 16, no closed days, 11:00–20:00 (last day until 17:00). If you are in Shibuya, do look for Palaceside Building among the full-scale exhibits.
“God is in the details”: the key to architectural design is detail. How, while seeing the whole, do you decide where things meet? Since 1964 the journal has followed architecture from the detail, presenting review and process in rich visuals — 50 years of the house’s confidence.