2 The backyard gardens in Boston New York and Philadelphia have 6-8 ft high fences.

3 The ‘inward-looking’ house did not start with the Romans, and was developed simultaneously all of the world, how euro-centric.

4 Good fences make good neighbors. The absolution of privacy that is currently trendy in the name of ‘community’ is absurd, most people do not want to live in a glass box. Eveb the Farnesworth house has curtains.

The typology of entirely inward looking, layered housing is fundamentally Roman in conception and pervasive throughout history. It is rare that a sense of space is actually about space itself in mathematical terms. Everyone has their preferences, but I don’t find the volumetric composition of what was shown in alternative pleasing in any way.

Color palette is a symmetrical argument, and perhaps the one that is most closely associated with culture. What Japanese culture recognizes as a natural color palette is not western. I happen to love it (as did Wright, Scarpa, Neutra, Schindler, Breuer, and every other modernist who visited Japan in the first half of the 20th century) but some may not.

Having actually lived in a New York townhouse (as well as a London townhouse) I can tell you that the urban density is in no way comparable. The smallest townhouses in New York are roughly triple the size of this built area and many (most) run to four or five times the built area. There is no parallel to Japanese urban density in the modern world.

Mr. Kimura’s work has consistently seemed to be divisive here. I suppose that is a sign of quality. People who are making cereal boxes elicit scant debate. Personally, I am a fan of this studio.

Terry Glenn Phipps

In case no one was paying attention, the lot line and building code are realities. Bay at the moon in solicitation of your morning slice of sky until hell freezes over and you won’t make any more space in Japan.

One the things that I really appreciate about Mr. Kimura’s work is that it is authentically Japanese while taking into account that there is something called the occidental world where great architects have been practicing too. It is fascinating for me to see the spatial concepts that modern architects in the west (FLW, etc.) cribbed from the tradition of Japanese spatialism (as juxtaposed with obsession with symmetry and duality in other Asian architecture) finally boomerang back to Japan refracted into something that is both fresh and genuine.

There is a big difference between this architectural language and the essentially western thinking (however clever and audacious it may be) of practitioners such as Toyo Ito or Tadao Ando. This is satisfying domestic architecture tuned to the needs of its place, its time, and striking all the right notes.

I challenge anyone to post a building in an urban context of equal density that achieves more than Mr. Kimura’s work does.

Terry Glenn Phipps