Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [107]
The town of Shuto in Yamaguchi Prefecture (population 15,000) set out to build a community meeting place. The town fathers consulted with the construction-department head at the prefectural office, and in a scenario reminiscent of Nagi's, the department head called in his college buddy, the architect Takeyama Sei, who proposed a concert hall. While this was far from the original purpose of a meeting place, and though Shuto villagers had little need for a concert hall, who were they to argue? The Shuto Cultural Hall (Pastora Hall) opened in 1994, a huge concrete block in the middle of rice paddies, with a rooftop performance space large enough to seat 1,500 people.
The next step after «planning» is «design.» Commercial architecture accounts for most of the new buildings in Japan, which is of course true around the world, and in Japan these are designed largely by in-house designers working for giant construction firms and architectural agencies. These buildings share a common grayness, uniformity, and cheap commercialism. As for independent architects, their work generally falls into the two familiar styles: manga (comic-book fantasy) or massive (overwhelming office block).
The leader of the massive camp is Tange Kenzo, whose solid, single-piece constructions aim to impress with weight and majesty. This style dominated in the 1960s, when he designed the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, and at first it featured traditional Japanese forms duplicated in concrete, such as pillar and post, or jutting roof beams. A turning point came in the 1970s, when Isozaki Arata insisted that it didn't matter if a building looked Japanese or Western. Japanese culture, he argued, had no core, so the architect was free to quote wittily from any tradition. This was the beginning of the manga style, with its emphasis on curious shapes and fantastic decorations. Architecture came to be seen as «contemporary art,» as a form of sculpture.
The architects Ito Toyo, Shinohara Kazuo, and others took the next step when they invented the term fuyu-sei, «floating,» to describe a type of building made of punched metal, colored plastic, and glass with a quality of temporariness and impermanence. This self-consciously trashy, cheap, shiny look caught on like wildfire, and it dominates mainstream architecture in Japan today, even inducing a «massive» builder like Hara to add fuyu touches to his New Kyoto Station.
During the high-growth decades of the 1960s and 1970s, two developments influenced architects in Japan. Kathryn Findlay, a British architect working in Tokyo, put it this way, «From the 1970s a number of Japanese architects felt that it was necessary to divorce architecture from society, economies, and city planning, and become a self-referential art.» So in the first development Japanese architects considered that they should not be constrained by the buildings' environment. They felt no need to harmonize their buildings with cities, no requirement to site them vis-à-vis rivers or hills, and no need to take a backward glance at history. In a sense, Isozaki was perhaps right when he declared that Japanese culture had no core.
Of course, when architects sit down in front of their desks and start drawing, who knows what extraordinary visions may flow from their pens? Dreaming up castles in the air is part of what they are supposed to do. But in most modern contexts local history and the natural environment have tempered their