Between Shoes and Walls: Reflecting on Ashihara Yoshinobu’s Last Lecture

Ashihara Yoshinobu (1918 - 2003)

Professor Ashihara's last lecture at the University of Tokyo (1979)

What makes a space “inside”? Where does “outside” begin? For Yoshinobu Ashihara, these weren’t just architectural questions but quiet provocations about how people live, feel, and interact with their built environments. His last lecture at the University of Tokyo in 1979, The Order of Space: Inside and Outside, is a masterclass in architectural thought—not just about walls and ceilings, but about values, climate, culture, and the deeply personal rituals of space.

Ashihara begins with the basics: architecture defines space through floor, wall, and roof. But his focus quickly turns to perception. A wall does not just separate; it creates meaning. Taking off shoes at the entrance, so commonplace in Japan, is not a small habit, but a spatial statement. It marks the transition from the public to the private, from the open world into the realm of self and family.

This is where Malaysia offers a familiar echo. Across our diverse cultural landscape, it is customary to remove one’s shoes before entering the home. Whether it’s a kampung house, a suburban terrace, or a high-rise condo, stepping over the threshold barefoot is a shared gesture, a small but potent marker of interiority. That this custom cuts across ethnic and religious lines says much about our own intuitive understanding of space. In contrast to many Western norms where shoes remain on indoors, Malaysians broadly maintain a ritual separation between inside and out, not just physically, but socially and symbolically.

Source: KASHIWAYA MAGAZINE

Ashihara draws an interesting contrast between the Japanese ryokan and the Western hotel. In the former, the moment you take off your shoes, even if walking through common areas or the lobby, you’ve entered an “interior” order. In the latter, shoes remain on, and private space begins only behind the locked door of the individual room. The spatial logic is different, shaped by deeper cultural assumptions.

Rumah Perak, IIUM

In Malaysia, we juggle both. The kampung house, with its raised floor and open serambi, plays host to a porous, flexible boundary—neither fully inside nor out. The air flows, voices travel, the community is close. Yet in modern housing developments, with their gated communities, high walls, and CCTV-fed guardhouses, we begin to emulate the enclosed, compartmentalized logic of the West. The shoes may still come off, but the walls grow taller.

Universiti Malaya main gate

Taylor's University lakeside campus

Even in our institutions, this spatial ambiguity plays out. The University of Malaya feels like a walled garden, its gates, signage, and buffer zones all suggest a crossing into another domain, very much like Ashihara’s Japanese university. In contrast, private institutions like Taylor’s Lakeside or Sunway blur their borders, inviting the city in with open retail spaces and accessible lakeside paths. One model emphasizes retreat and enclosure; the other, flow and permeability.

Ashihara’s reflections on walls—thin and sliding in Japan, thick and defensive in Europe—also resonate here. Our architecture is shaped by heat, rain, and economic constraints. Traditional Malay houses breathe through ventilation panels and louvers. Shophouses stretch narrow and deep, oriented toward shading and cross-ventilation. But newer buildings—especially commercial and high-rise ones—often mimic international trends, with sealed glass façades and artificial climates, detached from local sensibilities.

What Ashihara teaches us is that space is never neutral. A wall is not just a barrier. It is an expression of worldview. A floor is not just a surface. It is a threshold of culture. And whether or not we realize it, Malaysians are constantly negotiating between these ways of seeing. The kampung and the condo, the surau and the Starbucks, the pasar malam and the mall—all sit on different axes of inside and out.

Ultimately, Ashihara reminds us that architecture is about listening. Listening to the climate, to habit, to feeling, to the invisible codes that tell us when to take off our shoes, when to close the door, when to let others in. In that sense, Malaysia doesn’t have to choose between the ryokan and the hotel. We already live in the overlap.

Reference Ashihara, Y. (1979, February 2). Final lecture: Department of Architecture, University of Tokyo – Part 1: The order of space: Inside and outside (L. E. Riggs, Trans.). Ashihara Design. https://www.ashihara.jp/da/html/lect0101e.htm