Negotiating Comfort in the Metropolis: Peter Cook, Toyō Itō, and the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition, 1977 and 1988

This investigation approaches the annual Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition (1965-2020) as a productive cross-cultural medium of exchange that generates new architectural knowledge. It situates this international competition of ideas in a long history of transnational encounters, to identify the contours of the ideological shift from the consolidation of modernist ideals to their critique. The paper highlights the iteration of the lack of “comfort” of modernist architecture, tracing the origins of this critique by referencing the 1977 and 1988 competitions, during which the respective judges Peter Cook and Toyō Itō challenged architects to devise innovative housing proposals to attain “comfort in the metropolis.” It initially employs a synchronic approach to investigate the origins of Cook’s competition theme, the multiple winning entries, the judges’ final remarks, and the after-effects of the competitions to apprehend how discrete geographies negotiated the notion of comfort. Next, the paper juxtaposes the outcomes of both years of the competition to offer a diachronic analysis of how architects have conceived the house and the city differently through time. This investigation reveals that the mechanism of this longstanding, idea-based competition confronts two judges’ positions to understand their cultural and architectural differences.