Building material attention: tsukaikata and the epistemology of use in Japanese architectural planning studies, 1922–1973

Amid the twentieth-century eastward transfer of architectural knowledge, Japanese architects confronted a problem of epistemic location — did design knowledge reside as scripted function within a corresponding object, and what did that premise make of inhabitants as subjects of design? By synthesising fieldwork drawings produced between 1922 and 1973 by Japanese architects across interior, building, urban, and territorial scales under the analytic of tsukaikata / tsukawarekata [使い方 / 使われ方, way of using / way of being used], this paper defines building material attention as a set of epistemic competences cultivated through fieldwork drawing, via which architectural knowledge was rendered as a relational achievement between material form and the tacit dimensions of embodied experience. I demonstrate how these competences relocated design knowledge from prescribed function within the object to the materially traceable relations through which objects became operative. In doing so, I argue that the interdisciplinary formation of ‘kenchiku keikakugaku’ [‘建築計画学’, ‘architectural planning studies’] had, by the mid-1950s, institutionalised the empirical study of inhabitation as a warrant for design, constituting a distinct pragmatist epistemology of use that preceded and subsequently intersected with the consolidation of environmental design in the US.