“Disprogramming,” “Plan-less,” “Non-movement,” “No Style”: Dialectic Strategies in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition (1965–2019)

Abstract

A provocative competition theme set by a single judge is the key to the success of the long-running Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition (1965 to present), a yearly housing ideas competition from Japan that has seen more than 17,000 entries from around the world. From Bernard Tschumi to Kengo Kuma and Rem Koolhaas, judges in this international competition have frequently used the dialectic principle in writing up their competition brief as a means to position themselves in ongoing architectural debates. By deliberately starting from the negative entity – dis-programming, plan-less, no style – these judges aimed to stimulate contestants to think anew about the more commonly used notions of “programming”, “plan” and “style”. This paper examines the intricate competition logic behind the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition to illustrate how these dialectic strategies have successfully resulted in solutions not contained in either “plan” or “plan-less,” “style” or “no style”. It takes as a tangible case study, the 1996 edition of the competition in which judge Kazuyo Sejima set the theme of “possibilities of non-movement” and challenged contestants to investigate the static aspects of architecture in a world increasingly dominated by speed, new media, and interchange. Instead of considering this immobility as a limitation, “non-movement” served Sejima well to think anew about “movement”, a strategy with which she challenged other architects to widen the possibilities of architecture. Through a detailed analysis of the twelve winning entries (viewed as different cultural responses/translations of the common design problem) and the judge’s final comments (understood as a more nuanced understanding of the original competition theme), as well as the published the winning entries and final remarks this paper aims to shed light on how different solutions to the problem of “movement’, propelled by “non-movement”, opened up new, global perspectives on housing in an age of rising digital technologies.