Back in the year I was born, a critic named Koji Taki wrote a famous book called The Lived House.
I interpret it as a study on how to embed the reality of “us living in this world” into architecture.

Yes. Reality is hard to grasp.

The more you try to create it through planning, the harder it becomes.
In fact, the more you try to shape it directly, the more you risk moving away from reality.

Taki tried to find clues to this in old folk houses.

Exactly.

Taki found in them “a balanced structure between the house and the context that makes it real” (*1) or “a structure where living and building become one and the same” (*2).

They can be seen as the same thing, but here, let’s focus on the first idea.

Yes — in other words, how the house itself is created.

Nowadays, many homes exist as products.
As you know, building a house often means arranging pre-made components, like assembling a kit.

No one would call that a folk house — perhaps because something essential to folk houses is missing.

In the past, people built houses using materials gathered from their surroundings, and neighbors often helped.

The context of building a house — who builds it, with what materials, and how — was familiar and strongly tied to the house itself.

I believe that was what gave it reality.

Exactly!
“A convenient yet unsettling world, surrounded by finely divided, incomprehensible systems.”

Many modern houses are created within this worldview, so perhaps it’s no wonder they feel unreal — or even a bit unsettling.

I think the answer is to bring back the questions of “who builds, what they use, and how” closer to home.

Of course, times have changed — we can’t just copy the past.

Instead, within the contexts of modern life, we need to pause and think carefully about “who,” “what,” and “how” (*3).

To do that, we must also develop the eyes to see and the hands to make these things real again.

It is hard, because we’ve gotten used to a completely different worldview of making things.

But bringing back this sense of reality is also incredibly important for the environment in which children grow up.

Summing up everything we’ve talked about, it would be a house designed with the structures of folk houses Taki described — but reinterpreted for today.

That is, a house where “who builds it,” “what they use,” and “how they build it” are carefully considered to bring reality back.

And it connects to last time’s discussion on folk house ingenuity, too — because that ingenuity came from the residents themselves thinking carefully about how to use the resources at hand.

I believe that’s why those techniques carried reality within them.

Yes.
That ties into the idea of “a structure where living and building become one and the same”, but let’s save that for another day.

As for “21st Century Folk Houses,” I’ve only just begun exploring the idea — so I hope we can keep thinking about it together.