Lines that Share Ambiguity—Reflections on the Saiko Yamada Exhibition "parallel tunes" (TOTO Gallery MA)

1. Introduction

What stayed with me most strongly after seeing Saiko Yamada's exhibition "parallel tunes" was the flat plane before the architecture rises.

The "plane" here does not refer to the "floor plan" as an architectural technical term. Rather, it refers to a place where different things are temporarily placed on the same surface—drawings on paper, large pictures pasted on walls, the surfaces of models, or the walls and corners where images are projected.

The venue featured huge models, photographs of completed works, and videos. In particular, the 1/5 scale model of her own house was more like half-architecture than a model, demanding that the viewer move their body to see it.
However, after walking through the venue, the place I wanted to return to was, as expected, in front of the drawings. Yamada's architecture seemed to remain barely free not by being completed through becoming three-dimensional, but by being returned to the plane again and again.

Since I was also able to hear the familiar gallery director's talk this time, I will include those points in my reflections.

In the exhibition description at TOTO Gallery MA, Saiko Yamada's architecture is introduced as something where "nature, people, and things resonate with each other." Furthermore, regarding "daita2019," Yamada herself states that the staircase crossing the atrium, the bookshelves extending across floors, and the long curtains each form a corner of life with their own melodies. What Yamada aims for is not a harmonious symphony, but a polyphony where both chords and dissonances sound simultaneously, and for that reason, she is exploring ways to connect to a "colorful and noisy world."

This explanation quite clearly indicates how to view this exhibition. What is important in Yamada's work is not that everything is beautifully unified. Rather, it is that different things continue to exist in the same place while remaining different.

In that sense, Yamada's drawings are not merely blueprints for completion. In the director's talk, it was explained regarding "miyazaki" that although architecture changes due to construction periods and costs, if everyone reaches a "consensus" through the drawings once, they can always return to that point.

At Yamada's office, they proceed with drawings and planning together, returning to the drawings many times during the design process. I think this is quite important. The drawings are not just images held by the architect. They become a common understanding for the client, staff, and stakeholders to recall "what this architecture was aiming for." However, this is not a common understanding to eliminate ambiguity. Rather, it is a plane for sharing ambiguous things while they remain ambiguous.

2. Cranach-esque Lines

I would like to take a slight detour here.
This is because connecting the Cranach theory by Takashi Fukumoto of the National Museum of Art, Osaka, makes the character of Yamada's drawings a little clearer.

In Fukumoto's theory, the issue of lines and contours becomes important when considering Cranach. If Dürer's lines are lines that clearly distinguish subjects and intellectually organize the world, Cranach's lines work in a direction that shakes and disturbs the boundaries between things rather than clearly fixing the contours.

Guido Messling, a curator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, also positions Cranach as a painter with a delicate and enchanting character, distinct from Dürer, who is described as "depicting everything in a sublime, meaningful, and rich flow of lines."

Fukumoto also argues that while clear outlines help us know nature, excessively fixed outlines can also become inflexible stereotypes or prejudices.

It might be reckless to apply this contrast directly to architecture. However, there is indeed a function of lines in Yamada's drawings that makes one want to call them "Cranach-esque." Yamada's lines are not lines that finish by classifying subjects such as this is a pillar, this is a wall, this is furniture, and this is a garden. Rather, they are lines that place pillars and furniture, gardens and interiors, architecture and things, and color and life on the same screen without completely separating them.

What is interesting about Yamada's drawings is not that they lack organization. It is because they resist being over-organized. There, strange, slightly cute, and slightly unstable forms, which exist before becoming clear blueprints, are treated as shared objects for thinking about architecture.

3. Her Own House "daita2019"

"daita2019" showed this most strongly. The director explained that this house is Yamada's own home and an important starting point as a residential work. A private residence is a place where an architect can most directly reflect their own ideas, and "daita2019" would later go on to win awards. In this exhibition, that house was shown in a very large 1/5 scale model.

The director also explained that he wanted us to look at it while moving back and forth between the drawings while immersed in the model. In other words, in this exhibition, the model and the drawings are not separate materials. The model is a three-dimensionalized drawing, and the drawing is a plane for returning to the model and the actual work.

"daita2019" has a house shape. However, that house shape is not a symbol that safely indicates the typicality of a normal residence. According to the director's explanation, this house is divided significantly between the residential side and the garden side, and it unfolds in three layers while being dug out like a semi-basement. On the garden side, there is a framework made of single pipes used for scaffolding and the like. It is said that the garden is constructed with about 50 single pipes, including pillar-like members, beams, and braces.

Usually, a garden is easily thought of as nature outside of a building. However, the garden of "daita2019" is not so much nature itself as it is constructed from scaffolding frames, much like a construction site. The garden is not a completed exterior, but a place with a temporary quality where things can be hung, added, or repositioned later.

The stairs, too, are not merely devices for moving up and down. There are outdoor stairs on the garden side, and a long landing and curved stairs lead to the dining terrace. Beyond that is a large steel door about 4030 mm high, and climbing further leads to a laundry terrace and then to the bedroom on the third floor. The director mentioned that in this house, one can go directly from the third floor down to the garden on the first floor, and that what looks like an entrance at first glance is actually a stair landing, meaning there is no clear entrance.

There are also multiple entrances and exits. An entrance is a system that separates the inside of a house from the outside. It is a place that draws boundaries: inside from here, outside from here, guests from here, family from here. However, in "daita2019," that boundary is not fixed in one place. The act of entering the house is not about passing through a single door, but an experience of moving diagonally through the garden, stairs, terrace, and dining area.

The interior is also not neatly divided room by room. Bookshelves warp along the stairs, connecting the first floor to the third. Curtains also hang heavily across floors. The director explained that there are few partitions, creating a strange space that feels like a single room as a whole.

Here, the bookshelves are not just furniture. They are like topography that extends along with the stairs. The curtains are not walls that completely divide the rooms either. They are soft lines that blur the space across floors. Scaffolding, stairs, bookshelves, curtains, terraces, steel doors. While each is a part of the architecture, none are fully subordinate to it. Each has its own melody, running parallel while eyeing one another.

4. The Colors of "miyazaki"

Let us consider Yamada's treatment of color here.
In the director's talk, it was explained regarding "miyazaki" that the client had a background in graphic design, that the house was overflowing with color charts and colorful elements, and that the drawings were intended to show that the columns, floors, walls, chairs, tables, and kitchen occupy the same positional relationship as the architecture so that they would not "fade away completely."

The color here is not meant to elegantly unify the entire space. Rather, it is a resistance to things sinking into the background. A red column asserts its existence as a red column, a blue surface as a blue surface, and a green plant as a green plant, all on the same plane. Yamada's colors are not tools for unification, but coordinates, name tags, and small cries to call things back to the same plane.

5. "EXPO 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan Rest Area 3"

This function of color also appeared in her model for the Expo. The model for "EXPO 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan Rest Area 3" looked less like an architectural model and more like fragments of a drawing that had stood up on their own. In the director's talk, it was explained that although there is actually a roof, the roof was removed for the exhibition model, and the main body and trees were composed on a plane, creating a model that seemed to have escaped from a drawing.

Indeed, that model was not an accurate structural model, but had a shape that one might call both cute and strange. The trees and parts of the rest area were placed somewhat like toys, yet they were not mere toys; they had the power to change how the entire venue is read.

I think we should not take this sense of "cute" or "strange" lightly. Borrowing the term "tamed irrationality" that Fukumoto uses in his discussion of Cranach, there is a certain kind of tamed irrationality in Yamada's models as well.

Fukumoto argues that Cranach's paintings were expected to discard conventional ways of perceiving things and suggest other possibilities. Similarly, Yamada's Expo model does not explain architecture solely through accuracy, but tames the irrationality of architecture into a form that is a little strange, a little cute, yet shareable. In other words, it does not exclude things that are hard to understand, but makes them into a form that everyone can look at while they remain hard to understand.

6. The Pillars of "nu:kuju"

I would also like to focus on the pillars, or perhaps stakes, of "nu:kuju." In the director's talk, it was mentioned that because there was no anchor point in the vast site, the height, size, and spacing of the fences were considered by using the contours of the mountains and the lines of the terrain as clues.

Regarding the orange pillars in particular, while they may look like simple pillars, time was spent on their design, and it is said that these pillars represent the differences in elevation and the terrain. Color is important here as well. The orange pillars do not blend into the landscape. Instead, they place dots in a landscape that is too vast, catching the viewer's eye. Things that are usually too large to see, like the contours of mountains or changes in elevation, suddenly become readable through the colored stakes.

7. Sou Fujimoto's Forest

This point is also related to the fact that Yamada was at Sou Fujimoto Architects. It is introduced that Yamada became interested in architecture while studying landscape design, and after joining Sou Fujimoto Architects, she studied architecture at the Tokyo University of the Arts graduate school. If I were to sum up what is "Fujimoto-esque" in one word, I think it is the sense of bringing architecture closer to a forest.

Like a forest, it is unclear where a room begins and ends, and dense places and sparse places, inside and outside, nature and artifice create a gradation. In the Fujimoto exhibition at the Mori Art Museum, "open boundaries," "amorphous," and "many many many" were cited as the core of Fujimoto's architecture, emphasizing the opening of boundaries, ambiguity, and multiplicity. Also, at the Serpentine Pavilion, a grid of 20mm white steel frames was called a "transparent terrain," conceived as architecture like a transparent landscape between nature and artifice.

However, Yamada is not simply repeating Fujimoto's themes. If Fujimoto's architecture is about blurring boundaries within transparent three-dimensional forms, Yamada's architecture is about rearranging boundaries on colored planes.

Fujimoto's forest is white, light, and abstracted like a cloud. Yamada's forest is much noisier. It contains scaffolding pipes, bookshelves, curtains, laundry, furniture, plants, animals, and even future extensions. If Fujimoto attempts to dissolve architecture into the environment, Yamada does not erase the things within the environment. Rather than making them transparent, she uses color to bring the existence of these objects to the forefront.

8. "After the Future City: Alaya-vijnana and the Demiurge" Exhibition

Here, if we connect this to Yamada's work exhibited at "After the Future City: Alaya-vijnana and the Demiurge" held at the University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts, the perspective changes even further.

This exhibition was held from May 29 to June 7, 2026, at the Chinretsukan Gallery of the University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts, and Sae Yamada was among the participating artists. It is suggestive that while the exhibition was divided into architecture and art sections, Yamada was displayed in the art section.

The term "Demiurge" evokes a creator, a maker of the world. But if we place Yamada "after the future city," she is not a Demiurge who completely designs the world from above. Rather, she is a Demiurge who prepares a surface for disparate things to begin to relate, drawing lines, placing colors, and driving stakes into it.

In that sense, Yamada's drawings are not preliminary sketches for architecture, but a shared surface before the world has settled into a single form. On them, things that might become architecture, furniture, or landscape are placed without having their roles fully determined yet.

If Dürer-esque lines are lines that clearly divide the world, Yamada's lines are, in a Cranach-esque way, lines that slightly delay that division. They do not reject clarity, but rather preserve the relationships that would be lost by becoming too clear.

9. The "Lines" of the Video Installation

The video installation also dealt with this issue of planes and boundaries. What left an impression was that the videos were projected not just on the front of the walls, but by skillfully utilizing corners and architectural edges. The TOTO venue introduction also describes the 4th-floor exhibition as "immersing yourself in the world of the work through four videos."

What was interesting to see in practice was that the videos were not confined within the screens. By being projected across corners, the architectural boundaries became lines that folded the video rather than cutting it. In other words, the venue itself was treated like a single folded drawing.

Once you realize this, the way you see the entire exhibition changes. Drawings place different things on the same plane, models rise slightly from that plane, and videos return the three-dimensionalized venue back to a folded plane. The stake-like supports of "nu:kuju" act as points of color rising from the plane, changing how the topography is read.

The scaffolding, stairs, bookshelves, and curtains of "daita2019" show the house not as a collection of rooms, but as a place where multiple melodies run simultaneously. Here, plane and solid, drawing and model, color and structure, life and landscape are not one-way streets, but are traversed back and forth repeatedly.

10. Parallel Lines Do Not Intersect

The title "parallel tunes" is also interesting in this sense. Parallel means parallel. Parallel lines do not intersect. However, parallel lines exist on the same plane. I think that for Yamada, connecting does not mean mixing into one. It is about things that do not intersect sharing the same plane while remaining uncrossed. Columns and furniture, plants and architecture, life and structure, nature and artificiality, present and future. Things that would normally be divided into separate categories are, in Yamada's drawings, sounding simultaneously while glaring at each other.

That is why the drawings were so good in this exhibition—not simply because they were attractive as pictures. They most clearly revealed what Yamada's architecture is trying to do.

11. Finally

Before making architecture three-dimensional, return the world to the same plane once. Untie the hierarchies created by three-dimensionality and place different things on equal footing. Do not let things sink into the background through color. Use corners and boundaries not as ruptures, but as folded planes. And sometimes, drive a stake into that plane to raise up unseen topographies and relationships.

Sae Yamada is not just erecting architecture. She is repeatedly returning a world that has become three-dimensional back to a plane. On that plane, things remain unorganized, un-erased, and close to each other without intersecting.

And when a line is drawn, a color is placed, and a stake is driven in a certain place, the world begins to look a little different. I think the reason Yamada's architecture looks so lively is that the lines that are still being drawn and the colors that are still being placed remain within the completed building. (End)

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