Interview with Heike Hanada

Translation of interview published in Arkitekten, journal of Swedish Association of Architects.

By Tomas Lauri

Translation by Roger Tanner

When Heike Hanada comes to collect me from my hotel in the morning, she says she has slept badly. She hasn’t been worried about the design itself. She’s certain of that. What’s occupying her mind is the realisation of the scheme and the speed with which she needs to put together a big enough, smooth-running practice of her own.

“I can’t stay here in Weimar. I’m aware of that. I’ll have to move to Berlin. But when?”

She has already roped in a number of important persons – engineers and architects – both as advisers and as associates.

She is eager to get started. Heike Hanada has not followed the usual path, working her way up through different architects’ practices. Instead she has bided her time, slowly developed her own spatial philosophy, as a free artist and as a teacher of architecture since 1999 at Weimar’s Bauhaus University. She has been waiting for the right moment to take the step of becoming a practising architect.

The delay was not coincidental. She withdrew from building at the end of the 80s. The big IBA exhibition in Berlin in the 80s, not least, disappointed her.

“All those false fronts that time achieved. There was no relation between inside and outside. A façade, if it is to work, must rest on something, bear some kind of relation to what’s inside. It was meaningless ornamentation.”

Is ornament a crime?

“No. I’m hugely interested in what ornament can achieve with space. As in my glazed façade. I’ve proposed three layers of glass. They will overlap and overshadow each other depending on their patterning. There will be shifts between dark and light sections, simultaneously with all the play on transparency and translucence. Light becomes a manifold co-creator in the façade. You get a façade with proper depth, a façade which is more than a surface, which tells people something about both the inside and the outside.”

Heike Hanada has named her scheme Delphinium, referring to the pattern she intends using on the façade.

The ancient Greeks wrote “dolphin” with a wavy, stylised character which she employs freely, sinuously and irregularly as a basis of the pattern.

She assimilates Asplund in like fashion, waxing enthusiastic about his touches of asymmetry, how he can suddenly break a static order with humour and elegance.

“I’ve used Asplund’s elements of form, especially the circle, to modulate up a new order. A much more fluid order in which the circle is only hinted at, never complete, and in which elements like axes and rotunda have a different place in the composition.”

There is something deconstructivist about her way of working. She agrees with that. But it is toned down. It has never been her intention to take a form apart in order to create a new and overstated one out of the pieces. The focus is not on form but on flows. She has designed a building which, above all in section, reminds one of the way in which a city opens and closes itself. A building with a row of interlinked and yet definite rooms. A reading room smoothly merges into an atrium where a staircase leads to a number of silent study units. It is like a piazza which can be linked to an alley which in turn debouches into an inner courtyard. It is not clear where one room ends and the next one begins. The room sequences, the relation between open and closed, continue far beyond the shell of the building.

At the same time Heike Hanada has been intent on keeping everything functionally clear and simple. No dead ends and backwaters. Open and light.

“A building scribed among the clouds,” as she puts it.

She calls it a transformer. Not something trying to insinuate itself into the townscape. The building takes its place without dominating. It engages in a dialogue with the city.

The interesting thing about the plot, she finds, is that it is of a kind which will be common in future, with less and less land going spare. A string of decisions will have to be made concerning what is to be demolished and how one can or should adapt oneself when building. It is a tricky balancing act in which conservative conclusions come easily.

Before landing in Weimar, Heike Hanada spent a number of years in her husband’s native Japan. Those years gave her a new fundamental vision of what a modern city can be like.

“Japan has taught me that you can’t look statically at a city. There was something peculiar about the idea that you couldn’t make new impressions on a city and allow the new and the old to meet together. When a new building stands next to a new one, the different periods are made articulate, the new enriches the old and vice versa, resulting in a powerful wholeness.”

How much should you pull down in order to build new? Many people find that a sensitive issue.

“There is no reason to add new expressions just for the sake of doing it, but we mustn’t be afraid of adding new values to the city.

“I pretty soon dropped the idea of retaining the low side buildings. There’s nothing remarkable about them compared with Asplund’s library, and their surroundings aren’t the most inviting either.”

Heike Hanada’s first impulse was to create an inner courtyard between the new and old buildings – something open, low and intimate. This would mean parts of the new building facing south and the Observatorielunden hill coming into view.

“I found it difficult to place a large building right next to Asplund’s library. To me the inner courtyard and the low-rise entrance section between the high buildings are a way of marking a distance, creating a rhythm and a tranquillity in the townscape.”

Heike Hanada’s second impulse was to link the library to Observatorielunden.

“That gave the long and narrow, elongated tall shape that cuts into the hill. It was also a good thing, I realised, the new extension not having the same monumentality as Asplund’s library. That would only disrupt and impede a dynamic townscape.”

Can your building be said to have any prototypes?

“Prototypes are hard to avoid nowadays. We are living in an international media landscape. Sometimes it frightens me, how quickly students learn to imitate a widespread international style. I keep telling them there must be other answers, less direct and pictorial.”

She mentions Alvaro Siza as one source of inspiration, with his open and at the same time distinct rooms. Otherwise the Japanese SANAA practice is definitely her personal favourite, not only because they actively address questions of transparency and translucence. SANAA is one of few instances of a more feminine architecture.

“I hope my library will feel feminine, even if I don’t have a pronouncedly feminine aesthetic.”

But what about Asplund?

“The first time I came into contact with him was in the 80s. He’s been close to me ever since. Him and Sigurd Lewerentz. The Woodland Cemetery is an altogether fantastic place. When I was in Stockholm with my students I stood for over an hour, just admiring the entrance. I dare say they thought I was a little bit off my cookie.”