Ryo Yamazaki on Building Consensus, Building Teams

Mohsen Mostafavi: Yamazaki-san, welcome. You have established quite an important reputation among architects, practitioners, and communities through your studio, where you have been able to create new forms of community interaction. What led you to start this kind of practice?

Ryo Yamazaki: I started studying at university in 1992, and I completed my master's program in 1999, so that was about seven years in total. I studied architecture and landscape design. During that time, I was influenced by several interesting things. I think those experiences later influenced the founding of studio-L in 2005. I summarized those influences briefly in some hand-drawn slides.

For me, 1995 was a particularly important year. One reason was that a major earthquake struck Kobe, where I was living at the time. Another was that, while I was studying architecture, Rem Koolhaas published S, M, L, XL. Those two events had a very strong impact on me during my student years. At the time, I was still a student, so I couldn't read English properly, but the content was really compelling. After that, I started going back and tracing the earlier work of people like Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi, such as the 1983 competition for Parc de la Villette. I also became interested in the movements that had influenced them.

For example, the Situationists had this idea of "producing situations." They considered questions like how architectural form can create situations, and also critiqued a society that turns everything into a spectacle. There was a strong resistance to a consumerist society, where everything becomes a kind of spectacle. These two ideas have continued to influence me greatly since I founded studio-L. In other words: 1) thinking about architecture starting from program, as Koolhaas and Tschumi did; 2) the idea of the “situation”; and 3) resistance to a spectacle-driven society. These three things ultimately had a major impact on me.

Another major influence on the founding of studio-L was the design office SEN, which I joined after finishing my master’s in 1999. That’s where I first experienced workshops. I worked there for six years, moving back and forth between organizing workshops and designing architecture and landscape. So, combining the ideas of situation, what you might call “anti-spectacle,” and thinking from program with the experience of resident-participation workshops, I founded the community design studio in 2005.

At that time, I felt strongly that autonomy—people deciding things for themselves and carrying them out themselves—was extremely important. And then, a few years after starting the studio, around 2010, Japan’s overall population began to decline. As the population declines, I sensed a strong need to enhance autonomy, since it becomes a serious social risk if people remain dependent on others or on a system. I’ve come to realize that it’s not enough to simply invite participation and collect opinions. We also need to enhance people’s autonomy. That is how this process began.

Mohsen Mostafavi: Six years is a long gestation period before starting studio-L. Can you explain what that experience was like, and how you started participating in workshops while working at SEN, Inc.?

Ryo Yamazaki: What I experienced at SEN was what in Japanese, we call gōi keisei, or consensus building. In workshops, when we asked, "What kind of architecture would you like?" or "What kind of landscape would you like?", many opinions would emerge. The task was to organize those opinions into a smaller number of ideas that could be more easily reflected in the design. Then, after returning to the office from a workshop, we would reflect those opinions in the design. So, what I really experienced was consensus building—how to do gōi keisei well. If everyone says completely different things, you can't reflect that in design, so I feel I was really trained in how to organize and synthesize those views.

Another influence, again, was Rem Koolhaas. I understood his practice as having two divisions: a research division and a design division, or even two separate entities. What influenced me was the idea that, instead of turning detailed research directly into design, you first establish a program as a design condition, and then think about the design from there.

So when I founded the studio, I had these two influences, but I decided to establish an office with a greater emphasis on workshops and resident participation. In studio-L’s workshops, I wanted to go beyond consensus-building alone and also focus on team building—that is, the formation of active agents and organization. The aim was not just to gather and summarize the opinions people express when they come together, but to create teams that actually carry out the activities they propose for themselves. I wanted to incorporate both of these into the workshop process.

With consensus building, rather than reflecting the consolidated opinions in the design right away, we organize them into programmatic design conditions, like AMO/OMA. However, because we felt that taking on the design ourselves would make it hard to separate ourselves from form, we collaborate with a different architectural office and ask them to take on the design. Our role is to handle consensus-building in the workshops and translate the result into a program. From there, we hand it over to a separate design entity.

The other line [on this diagram] is team building. As people talk and build consensus, they grow closer, form connections, and develop a desire to act together. This is something we actively promote in workshops. Through this process, teams form and begin deciding on their own, citizen-led activities. People start asking, “What kinds of things could benefit this facility?” or “What kinds of enjoyable activities would visitors and users enjoy?” As a result, the teams carry out a variety of activities within the completed building.

In a single workshop series, around 10 to 20 teams might form. For us, it is extremely important that these people actively use the building’s interior in diverse ways. This is crucial for autonomy. What’s interesting is the feedback loop: activities influence design, and design suggests new activities.

Mohsen Mostafavi: Wouldn’t you need team building in order to create consensus? What is the difference between consensus building and team building, and what is the relationship between them in that first process? Normally there is a client, and the client comes up with a program. In your schema, that program is interpreted by the community and then developed by your studio. Is there a client? What is the role of the client? Because the program also carries the budget, the decisions, and so on. Could you explain the relationship between team building and consensus building, the role of the client, and therefore the financial responsibilities in the development of the program?

Ryo Yamazaki: Regarding the first question: traditionally, participatory design meant asking users or residents what shape of building they wanted, or what colors they preferred. But if you ask those sorts of questions, the designer loses autonomy and can’t really design. So instead of asking what form or colors people want, it’s better to ask what kinds of activities they want to do there. You listen to the activities, and then you give them form. That’s something I learned over time. So when we’re doing consensus building, people naturally say things like “a Japanese-style space would be nice,” or “a Western style would be better,” or “I want a building in this color,” but we try to restrain that a bit and instead ask, “What kinds of activities do you want to do here?”

As for team building, people often say they want a place where they can do this or that—read books, chat together, go for walks—but in reality, they often don’t do those things once the building is completed. So when people say in workshops, “We should do this,” we encourage them to form teams that will actually carry out those ideas themselves. Once the building is finished, they act as pioneers, using and activating the space through real activities. In architecture, people often say that space affords activity—that spatial affordances draw out certain behaviors. But it’s not just space; team activities themselves can also afford new actions.

Then there is the client. In our case, about 90% of our projects are public works, so our clients are local governments. Many local governments are now learning about community design, and fortunately, many have read our books or otherwise accessed our materials. As a result, they no longer assume that civil servants can perfectly define building uses or internal programs on their own. In a time marked by cultural change, great uncertainty, and increasing demand for citizen participation, there is a growing recognition that a program can’t be considered complete even after consulting experts. I have the impression that more and more municipalities are developing this kind of attitude. The role of the client hasn’t fundamentally changed, but clients are more willing to adjust budgets and design conditions based on workshop outcomes. That said, Japan has about 1,800 municipalities, and perhaps only around 100 have reached this level of openness. So not all municipalities have become this flexible.

Mohsen Mostafavi: What’s the typical size of a team compared with the number of people involved in consensus building? In developing the program, how do you create room for the unexpected, for something out of the ordinary? Is studio-L the studio of situationism, or is it the people who are producing the situationist actions in relation to the program?

Ryo Yamazaki: Regarding the first question: typically, around 100 people participate in a workshop. Depending on the project, the age or gender balance may be skewed. These people form teams of about five to ten members each. We don’t try to divide them evenly into groups from the start. After several workshops—usually around the fifth session—we ask them to form teams with people they get along with or who share similar interests. Through gradual reshuffling, they organize themselves organically.

As for helping participants become creators of situations, we invest a lot in their learning. We ask them to plan activities that combine two things: something they personally enjoy, and something that benefits visitors to the facility. Over about three workshop sessions, we host what we call “consultation settings,” where we go back and forth, bouncing ideas off each other. Each of the ten teams comes to us one by one, and we talk through their proposals together.

We repeat this process about three times, and then, before the building is even complete, we have the ten teams conduct a social experiment elsewhere. They try out their activities, observe participants’ reactions, reflect on whether they were nervous, and then further refine their ideas. We continue these dialogues and cross-team discussions until an activity feels genuinely creative. We also encourage teams to listen to one another and draw inspiration from what other groups are doing, through group-to-group discussions among participants.

Mohsen Mostafavi: I’m wondering if you have ever been surprised. Are there one or two programs a team came up with that made you think, “Wow, I never thought of that”?

Ryo Yamazaki: There was a project at a train station—not in Nobeoka, but in Kawasaki. Businesspeople would come home exhausted through the ticket gates, and one team decided to cheer them up by saying "Otsukaresama deshita!" and singing and dancing in front of the gates.

It was a group of about ten people who got permission from the station staff to sing and dance there. The core team was only five or six people, but they invited participants from a local facility that employs people with disabilities, practiced singing and dancing together, and then performed together to cheer on the commuters. It was quite interesting.

What they said was that people labeled “disabled” are usually the ones being helped in daily life, always saying thank you. This created a situation where, instead, the businesspeople were the ones saying thank you to them. That activity was both enjoyable for the participants and felt morally right—a combination of fun and social value. That, to me, captures the essence of what we are trying to do.

(To be continued in Part 2)