S P O T ／ SPOT-289

Sawada Mansion

沢田マンションさわだまんしょん

From across the street it looks like a piece of a city that drifted loose and ran aground—a sprawling, terraced concrete mass of balconies, ramps, ladders, and plants that has earned the nickname 'Japan's Kowloon Walled City.' Sawada Mansion is a five-story (part six) apartment block in Kochi, and its strangeness is entirely deliberate, and entirely amateur. Beginning in 1971, a couple with no architectural training—Kano and Hiroe Sawada—built the whole thing themselves, mixing and pouring concrete by hand, mobilizing their own family, and extending it piece by piece for over a decade. There were no blueprints. 'The plan is in my head,' Kano is quoted as saying, and the result is a glorious labyrinth: a homemade crane parked on the roof, vegetable plots and even rice grown up top, a fishing pond on the fourth floor, an underground garage below. Legally it is an illegal building—no construction permit was ever filed—but roughly a hundred people still live here, and the structure has become a pilgrimage site for architects and urban explorers alike, the ultimate monument to self-taught building. It is, crucially, a real home: visitors stick to the exterior and the ground-floor passage, and the residents' quiet lives come first.