Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [109]
The structures decorated with sheets or domes of perforated aluminum designed by Hasegawa Itsuko, Queen of Monuments, dot the landscape from the far north to the distant south. Her work, which epitomizes the manga school, also provides an opportunity to deploy the academic doublespeak used to glorify her aesthetic. The architect described her Nagoya World Design Expo Pavilion as follows:
A distant view of this building emulates a misty landscape, with layers of perforated metal panels and see-through screens reflecting the atmospheric colors of the clouds and seas. The garden is reminiscent of the spiky rocks in Guilin, China or a group of chador-covered Muslim women. It is actually a rest area with custom-designed chairs made of perforated plywood and shaded by milky white fabric tents. Imaginary trees made with expanded metal sheets and FRP (Fiber Reinforced Plastic) change their appearance constantly by reflecting sunlight. A deformed geodesic dome «high mountain» is also clad with FRP and perforated metal sheets, and surrounded with a great sense of nature.
Let's think about this. Hasegawa's «great sense of nature» includes a «misty landscape» made of perforated metal sheeting, a «garden» of brightly painted plywood, and «trees» of aluminum and plastic cutouts borne on steel columns. Words cannot do justice to what this structure really looks like: a jumble of functionless, pseudo-tech decoration, with columns sprouting sheets of metal and plastic cut into squares and ovals. This is nature on the Death Star, not on earth. Pure manga.
And why not? What is the Nagoya World Design Expo Pavilion anyway but another monument with no inherent purpose? A clutter of sterile decoration is as good a design as any other, although what this has to do with nature is a mystery. Hasegawa s masterpiece is considered to be the Shonandai Cultural Center, built for the city of Fujisawa. It consists of a hodgepodge of huge spheres, littered with bits and pieces of glass and aluminum, with her trademark metal and plastic trees.
This she calls «architecture as a second nature.» She goes on to say, «We thought that if we architecturally recreated a primal hill (which existed on the site before development) and established vestiges of nature hidden in the urbanity, then we could possibly find a new nature in the man-made environment.» This, she believed, would help us move «from the 20th century history of exploitation to a more soft-edged symbiotic unity.»
Let's return to our study of how to build a monument. Having achieved a «soft-edged symbiotic unity» in the design, the next step is to build, for construction is the whole point. The budgets sometimes make this comically clear: in an extreme case, the city of Ono in Kyushu had to fill its museum with replicas because no money had been set aside to buy art. The contractors, commonly chosen by closed bids, feed a percentage of the profits back to local politicians. Bureaucrats, architects, and laborers on the work crew all benefit.
Trouble arrives later, when the bills come due. Monuments are albatrosses for the cities and towns that commission them. Osaka has lost so much money on its waterfront projects that the prefecture has gone bankrupt and survives financially only by borrowing from the central government. The optimistic prognosis for the new Tokyo Bay projects is that expenditures will break even in 2034! Subsidies may cover construction, but they do not cover the management of monuments, as small towns have learned to their horror.
The operations headache goes back to the fact that most monuments do not satisfy any real need. In the case of Shuto's concert hall, the operating cost in the opening year was ¥30 million. This hall was one of Takeyama's greatest hits, combining architectural interest with high-tech acoustics, but since the village didn't need