Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic For a few brief moments, the entrance to Toru Shimokawa\u2019s home in Kurume looks, smells and feels recognisably \u2013 almost classically \u2013 Japanese. The mixture of light and dark woods; the waft of cedar and plum blossom, the hard-fought quest for insularity amid the tight jostle of neighbouring houses. No traditions feel in immediate danger of being broken. Shoes are removed at the tiled genkan entranceway before the high, deliberately disconnective step onto tatami; a knee-level ikebana arrangement has been set to honour the guest; an uneven pillar of sanded mulberry softens the corner into a shoji\u00a0screen-lined entrance room.But the illusion of familiarity is brief. Once I am up on\u00a0the\u00a0tatami \u2013 and now officially \u201cinside\u201d the home \u2013 the\u00a0first of Shimokawa\u2019s gentle architectural ambushes is\u00a0triggered: \u201c1,950mm high,\u201d beams the 42-year-old architect, raising his hand to the room\u2019s low wooden ceiling and clearly enjoying both the engineered sense of\u00a0confinement and the visitor\u2019s instinctive duck of the\u00a0head. \u201cThis was my first home,\u201d he says of the house he was born in, \u201cso I wanted\u00a0to experiment with it.\u201dIn fact, this house is not the actual building he was born in but another, completed in 2015, that sits on the same site. The house\u00a0makes for a far more conservative take on many of his more radical creations, but still bears the hallmarks of a\u00a0design practice that marries traditional architecture with\u00a0modern interventions in a career that first made its presence felt in 2009 when he was named in Wallpaper* magazine\u2019s architects directory as one of the 30\u00a0most exciting names to have emerged around the world. This is now the 20th year since he decided, with no formal training, to start an architectural firm. \u201cI was never taught about architecture,\u201d he explains. \u201cBut looking back now at the things I was sketching as a child and a teenager, what I was drawing was architecture,\u201d he says.\u00a0Current and past projects include an art gallery in Fukuoka, a buckwheat soba noodle restaurant, a little nirvana of thatch and waterfalls a 30-minute drive away in\u00a0Dazaifu, a hot-spring project at Niseko Weiss and the reconstruction of a shrine. His work is increasingly concentrated on high-end private homes around the country whose owners, from tech entrepreneurs to psychiatrists, share his view that classic Japanese architectural styles are\u00a0there to be simultaneously cherished and tweaked. And yet, even as his new commissions arrive from the wealthy playgrounds of Karuizawa, Niseko and elsewhere, he is unmoved by the magnetic fields of Kyoto or Tokyo. Shimokawa remains resolutely committed to being a Kyushu-bred architect in Kyushu.Shinichi Takaki is the owner of the Yasutake Soba noodle shop, in Dazaifu, which was completed in October 2024. \u201cMy impression of Shimokawa is of a pure person in terms of architecture,\u201d he says.\u00a0\u201cWhen we first met with him at his home, I had the impression that his architecture would not deteriorate, but just become more beautiful. So I asked him to design my restaurant. He is very passionate in his pursuit of beauty, and how to move people\u2019s hearts in various different ways. He is a maniac for beauty.\u201d\u201cToru Shimokawa has managed to reconcile the craft techniques of carpentry and the use of traditional and historic materials with an aesthetic that is clear, crisp and\u00a0contemporary,\u201d says Edwin Heathcote, the FT architecture critic. \u201cIn a nation still in thrall to the fetish of the new, where houses often last barely a generation, Toru Shimokawa traces a line between past and present, retaining existing fabric where possible but also acknowledging that history can be embodied in the process and knowledge of making, as well as in the finished object. His approach to landscape, the flow of space between interior and garden and the subtleties in the architectural delineation of those barely visible boundaries create an exquisite architecture in which history is profoundly present, even if his buildings appear\u00a0utterly and elegantly modern.\u201dShimokawa\u2019s home has proven the perfect fulcrum for his tweaking. The confined Japanese-style room at the entrance, for example, is a calculated onslaught of the very traditional: it is influenced by the dimensions and scale of Japanese tea houses. It feels low by modern standards. He opens the small door into the main living room, and suddenly all that temporal and physical constriction is released. Minimalism has sped through the epochs. The ceiling, no longer flat and low, sweeps upwards to the full, glorious height of the house. The floor is tiled. The windows are huge. The airflow feels entirely different. There is no downlighting, only standing lamps with cords that vanish into the floor. Decades of evolution in Japanese home design gust along the floor and up into the ridged wooden rafters. A large ceramic hibachi squats at the heart of the room, subtly aglow.Shimokawa\u2019s home sits on a residential street a few hundred metres from the broad, winding Chikugo river in northern Kyushu. This the most southern of Japan\u2019s four main islands \u2013 a stunningly beautiful part of the country known for its food, hot springs and as the main producer of Japanese green tea. Kyushu\u2019s most famous architectural son is Arata Isozaki, the Pritzker Architecture Prize winner of 2019. Kurume is a large suburb of Fukuoka city: potentially forgettable if it did not punch so far above its weight as the home of Seiko Matsuda, the \u201ceternal idol\u201d pop superstar, and Kiyonori Kikutake, a founding member of Japan\u2019s Metabolist architectural movement and designer of the iconic Edo-Tokyo museum.And yet Shimokawa grew up in a world unconnected with architecture. His father and mother, he says, had unrelated jobs and, unlike most others, Shimokawa did\u00a0not go to university. Entirely self-taught, he did not have the resources to tour Japan looking at architecture, and so he looked more locally around him and learnt what\u00a0he could from books. \u201cWhen you are in your teens or 20s, you look at the things that are closest to you,\u201d he explains. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have money you just see as much architecture as you can. So after doing what I could on a\u00a0small budget I would study in books. But the more I studied, the more I began to see the difference between good and bad. If you know what is good, you already have a base, so you can build on that.\u201dBy the age of 21, he decided to set up an architectural design firm. \u201cAt first, I didn\u2019t have any work, because there was no way anyone was going to commission a 21-year-old who didn\u2019t know anything and hadn\u2019t studied architecture,\u201d he says. \u201cBut then someone suddenly invited me to do a small job and that turned into more interior design work, and then houses and so on.\u201d He is reluctant to acknowledge that his style has been shaped by any particular influence. \u201cI don\u2019t think there is an architect who thinks completely originally,\u201d he says. \u201cEveryone \u2013 Tadao Ando or Kazuyo Sejima \u2013 is imitating someone else. When I think about what is the basis of good architecture in Kyushu or Kyoto, I realise that old temples and shrines are the purest form. I learnt from visiting temples, shrines and Japanese architecture, and\u00a0that has become my natural style. But that alone is not enough for the modern age.\u201d\u00a0Shimokawa is married to a formally trained architect who has worked with him since 2008. Although the architectural firm bears his name, in the house next door, which the pair have converted into a design studio and office, the husband and wife\u2019s desks sit side by side.\u00a0Within the Shimokawa story, the rebuilding of homes close to the architect\u2019s heart holds a particular importance. His first great formative project was the house his\u00a0parents eventually moved to, which he radically rebuilt in concrete in 2007. On that front, Shimokawa is in excellent company. Many Japanese architects cite the rebuilding of their parents\u2019 home as being among their most significant projects \u2013 for many it is the first moment they are handed full creative control.That pattern is common because one of the great defining features of Japanese home ownership in the postwar period was the expectation that most residential homes would at some point be torn down. \u201cIn the past, Japanese people used to scrap and build over the course of\u00a020 to 30 years \u2013 completely different from Europe and America,\u201d says Shimokawa, who says that Japanese housebuilding was dominated historically by the idea that a house\u2019s value would automatically fall. He now sees Japan\u2019s economy pushing its architecture to a critical turning point where gradual improvement is replacing this instinct. \u201cThe Japanese way of thinking is changing. We are now in an era when we have no choice but to renovate, because the costs are higher. My own mind is also changing. Young people think about fixing things, or making things that last.\u201dBack in the living room, one experiences the second of Shimokawa\u2019s ambushes. The roof of the main living room extends out and back towards the genkan to cover a large external terrace. This sets up, he says, a visual ambiguity between inside and outside, purposefully playing on what has always been a diamond-hard Japanese distinction between the two. Inside is you and yours, outside is everything else. But with the shoji screens opened, there isa view from the entranceway through three zones of the house into the garden \u2013 a Japanese-style rockery punctuated with plum and other trees. The effect of the through-view is heightened, he says, by having elevated the house about 1.5m above ground level. \u201cYou are inside, then\u00a0you see outside, then you see the living room, and then\u00a0beyond that the outside,\u201d he says, relishing the idea that\u00a0this builds what he calls an \u201cendless relationship\u201d between the garden and house.He leans back on a chair and sips tea from a cup designed by Takayuki Watanabe, a ceramicist who also fashioned a spectacular sphere that perches on the piloti as one passes along the serpentine garden path.\u00a0\u201cI have done a lot of experimentation,\u201d he says, in evident joy at the home he has created for his young family. Along the way, he has attained a quintessentially Japanese feel for detail. For example, sliding doors are generally moved by gripping a small oblong indentation. Shimokawa has replaced that oblong with a brass ingot with an inset figure of eight of his design that perfectly guides the fingers to the optimum location to move the door. \u201cI spend a lot of time thinking about things during the design and construction period,\u201d he continues. \u201cBut once I hand it over to the client, that\u2019s the end isn\u2019t it? It feels good to look at this and know it is your own home.\u201dIt is easy to forget that this is, for all its overwhelming minimalism and power to surprise, a family home. His wife accepts a compliment about the lack of clutter by indicating an austere cupboard in which she says everything is hidden away.The third great architectural trick of the Shimokawa home is its kitchen, which is sunken 60cm below the living room and separated by a broad wooden counter. On the garden side of the counter are four low wicker stools\u00a0 \u2013 this is the family table. On the other are the sink and cooking surfaces. Whoever is cooking is not only at the exact eye level of any inhabitants of the stools, but is able\u00a0to look back across the living room in a way that creates an infinity-pool garden view.\u00a0The effect of all this is both subversive and inclusive. And, in its purity of execution, a triumph of design. Food\u00a0is served comfortably from the kitchen and cleared\u00a0instantly down into the sink. Yes, it may sound odd to organise a family table like a panel, but the practical\u00a0reality of Japanese family life is that one adult is\u00a0generally busy in the kitchen as the children eat. \u201cI thought it would be better if we were closer to each other\u2019s eye level,\u201d explains Shimokawa simply. A traditional family table may feel inclusive, but lived reality tells you it\u00a0isn\u2019t always so. Shimokawa\u2019s sunken kitchen admits something of modern life that traditional architecture has pretended is otherwise.\u00a0torushimokawa.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic For a few brief moments, the entrance to Toru Shimokawa\u2019s home in Kurume looks, smells and feels recognisably \u2013 almost classically \u2013 Japanese. The mixture of light and dark woods; the waft of cedar and plum blossom, the hard-fought quest for insularity amid the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":268992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-268991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268991"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268993,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268991\/revisions\/268993"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}