The Implementation of the Concept of Atmosphere in Kazuyo Sejima’s Architecture

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa are founding partners of the firm SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates) and renowned for their refined simplicity, spatial fluidity, and thoughtful integration into urban contexts. SANAA has developed the architectural ‘atmosphere’ as its design methodology and called it as a landscape (the contemporary scenery) for people. The objective of this paper is to explore the examples of ‘Atmosphere’ in their projects and SANAA’s design methodology to define Atmosphere and discover new design vocabulary for Atmosphere. As a methodology, the interpretation of SANAA's own statements and explanatory texts and exploration to find consistency in fragmentary and multi-faceted statements were conducted. In addition to the analysis of speech, in approaching the atmosphere as an embodied substance, it was attempted to trace and discover which architectural representations are closely related to the concept of atmosphere in the design result. The analysis result had shown that SANAA used three main approached for atmosphere as follows: 1) an expression strategy to reset the hierarchy, 2) an expression strategy of transparency and abstract simplicity to clearly express the architectural concept they want to convey, that is, the essential nature of the project, 3) a strategy of tricks to induce discovery. SANAA has been pursuing a new freedom and has incorporated multiple values into it and tries to embody the concept of atmosphere via the various representational strategies: hierarchical reconstitution of space, transparent and abstract simplification, and non-deceptive trick.