While in New York, Sejima, who will turn 54 in October, discussed her work on the Biennale with me. (Having just come off a tobacco-deprived flight from Tokyo, she would occasionally dart outside for a quick cigarette.) Along with architects, she invited artists and engineers who work with the fundamental elements of light, sound, and water, and she allocated each participant an individual space—in either the ancient, cavernous Arsenale or the late-19th-century Palazzo delle Esposizioni—to design and control. “She gave us complete freedom to do anything, but I understand that freedom has to be directed,” Spanish architect Antón García-Abril told me. During their initial meeting Sejima said to García-Abril, whose architecture is characterized by large, forceful forms: “Why don’t you break the scale of the space? Why don’t you insert some of your big elements inside?” Happy with the suggestion, he designed an installation of two 65-foot beams, one balanced on top of the other, and both at a diagonal to the columned, longitudinal space of the Arsenale. Sam Chermayeff, the SANAA architect managing Venice, said his boss had carefully plotted the rhythm of the visitor’s experience. “Sejima sees it very intuitively: dense, open, light; heavy, open, dark. She orders it that way, almost as if she were squinting.”
The first display in the Arsenale is a 12-ton boulder that was shipped to Venice by Chilean architect Smiljan Radic. Like García-Abril’s beams, it had to dominate the space in order to succeed. “We made a 1:1 model out of cardboard and garbage bags, to make sure it was big enough to hold the room,” Chermayeff said. While virtually every architect relies on models, at SANAA they are generated in almost ludicrous profusion. (For the Kanazawa museum, more than a thousand were fabricated.) Beginning with a lucid two-dimensional plan, SANAA uses small models to explore multiple possibilities and refinements; as the choices narrow, the remaining alternatives are mocked up in increasingly large scale. The models allow Sejima to determine whether her hunches, once materialized, will comfortably house the human body. Model building is the practical way in which her signature contradiction between mind and body is resolved. “Her thought about the physicality of the body is very abstract,” says architect Toyo Ito, in whose office Sejima apprenticed for six years. “Usually, when you become too detached, it is too much. But because of her physicality, the architecture is also comfortable. When you visit a place, you feel something. It is not just an abstract object.”
In a conversation several years ago, Ito recalled that as a young architect, Sejima “cried a lot. There was a time we had a group meeting in the morning, and I criticized her in front of everybody. She came to me afterward and said, ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ and there were tears in her eyes.” Female architects were extremely rare in Japan at the time; they are still not the norm. Unlike many successful women, whose personalities show the strain of achieving prominence in a male-dominated culture, Sejima is unhistrionic, empathetic, and warmly gracious. Perhaps it is a tribute to her parentage: Her mother (whose aristocratic family once owned an important castle) is well educated; and her father, an engineer, had an unusually enlightened attitude for a Japanese man of his time. “My name is Kazuyo, and normally, a girl has a name ending in ‘ko,’” Sejima once told me. “‘Yo’ is a little bit different. My mother said my father gave me that name because he wanted me to make my own way.” At the office in Tokyo, she is acutely sensitive to her colleagues, most of all to Nishizawa, who is 10 years her junior and easily overshadowed by her charismatic persona. (It is telling that in the firm’s name, which stands for “Sejima And Nishizawa And Associates,” the conjunctions are capitalized along with the proper names; the relation between the personalities are as important as the people themselves.)
