Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [108]
A fierce argument rages between architects whose buildings are meant to stand alone as pure art, «object-oriented,» and those whose structures meld into their surroundings «contextually.» Mostly, city planners try to strike a balance between the two points of view.
In Japan, however, there is no «context,» only «objects.» Hasegawa Itsuko, the high priestess of the fuyu movement, has written: «At the opening [of an exhibition] we were shown a video of modern Japan. Scenes overflowing with people, cars, and consumer goods, scenes of chaotic cities and architecture, a confusion of media information, coexistence of traditional ceremonies and people's multi-faceted life of today-after seeing it once even I, who live amongst it, found myself completely exhausted.» The logical direction out of this chaos is escape from the dreary and prosaic Japanese urban landscape. Any touch of variety, even something hideous, is a welcome release. Upon seeing the Hinomaru Driving School, a black building with a huge red globe emerging from it, Shuwa Tei, the president of a Tokyo architectural firm, said, «It's so ugly and unexpected it's endearing.» Hasegawa sums it up: «Architecture that fits in with the city and leads people into various activities-through these alone we will not see liberated space... We must aim at developing a liberated architectural scene worldwide, by conceptualizing architecture between time and space.»
What this jargon means is that it is old-fashioned to design buildings that actually fulfill a useful purpose or improve people's lives, and it is more important to have buildings that are «liberated» from «time and space.» An example of a liberated building would be Saishunkan Seiyaku Women's Dormitory in Kumamoto, designed by Sejima Kazuyo and commissioned by Isozaki Arata for a project known as Artpolis. This building from the early 1990s, intended to house young women employees of a pharmaceutical company, won the Japan Institute of Architecture's Newcomer's Prize. Judges praised it for its elegant modernism, which Sejima achieved by squeezing four women into each room of the living quarters and having a large common space; she based her concept on the Russian Supremacist view of housing. Design an uncomfortable, even miserable, apartment block of the sort you might find in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, and the Japan Institute of Architecture will award you a prize for elegant modernism.
Fuyu, «floating,» could not be a better image for the rootless feeling of modern Japanese architecture. And designs abound for imaginary cities wholly unrelated to the real places where architects live. Recently, Isozaki curated an exhibition called «Mirage City-Another Utopia,» featuring fantastical buildings to be located on the uninhabited island of Haishi, off Hong Kong. As Kathryn Findlay has said, «Mirage City sums up the attitude that architects here have: detachment and distance from the places where they build.»
The second important development affecting architecture in Japan was the increase in money flowing to construction. On the crest of the monumentalist wave, Japanese architects had opportunities to design structures far more bizarre – and more numerous – than they could have imagined several decades earlier. Largesse from the construction industry funds glossy magazines and pamphlets advertising the work of Japanese architects to all the world.
Foreign designers find the wild and wacky fantasies of Japanese architects amusing, even enviable. What fun it must be to throw off the fetters and design as one might for a science-fiction set