After the Crash: Architecture in Post-Bubble JapanThomas DaniellForeword by Hitoshi Abe, Afterword by Ari Seligmann Princeton Architectural Press, New York

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Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Sara Bader, Dorothy Ball, Nicola Bednarek,

Janet Behning, Becca Casbon, Carina Cha, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Russell

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Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Daniell, Thomas, 1967–

After the crash : architecture in post-bubble Japan / Thomas Daniell ;

foreword by Hitoshi Abe ; afterword by Ari Seligmann. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-56898-776-7 (alk. paper)

1. Architectural practice—Social aspects—Japan. 2. Architecture—

Japan—20th century. 3. Architecture—Japan—21st century. I. Title.

NA1995.D56 2008

720.952’09049—dc22

2008000244

Foreword

Study on the Edge by Hitoshi Abe

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1

Genealogies and Tendencies

Less Than Zero: Minimalism and Beyond

Re: Contextualism

Kazunari Sakamoto: Keeping the Faith

The Visceral and the Ephemeral

Kazuhiro Ishii: Meta-architecture

2

Domestic Spaces The Refraction House

Two Degrees of Separation

The Hu-tong House

Pushing the Envelope

Contents

8

10

12

21

28

31

37

45

53

57

60

63

18

50

3

New Prototypes Brand Recognition: The FOB Homes System

Reflecting Modern Life

Living Dangerously

4

Public Places The Sendai Mediatheque

The Glass Library

Immaculate Conception: The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art

Balancing Act: MVRDV in Japan

5

Revitalizing Metabolism Organ: Metabolism without Megastructure

Kisho Kurokawa in Malaysia

Mirage City: Another Utopia

69

76

82

91

97

102

106

117

122

130

66

88

114

6

Nature and Artifice Back to Nature

Strange Attractor: Yokohama International Port Terminal

Borrowed Scenery: Walking in the Footsteps of Laurie Anderson

7

Urban Views Fitting In: Small Sites in Urban Japan

Pretty Vacant: The Photographs of Takashi Homma

Letter from Kyoto

Afterword

More Lines by Ari Seligmann

Credits

143

147

155

163

170

176

186

192

140

160

Kazuo Shinohara, Tokyo Institute of Technology

Centennial Hall, Tokyo, 1987, sketch

1

The relationships between the approaches that make up the protean

landscape of contemporary Japanese architecture are best clarified by

tracing their historical lineages. Comprising a variety of intertwining

discourses—historical, phenomenological, technological, functional,

ritual—each design methodology evolved across many succeeding

generations of teachers and employers. While drawing to some extent

on aspects of Japanese tradition in their strategies of material assem-

blage and spatial composition, they all incorporate parallel influences

from a wide range of other sources—above all Western modernism and

Le Corbusier. An important conduit for the introduction of early mod-

ernism was Kunio Maekawa (1905–86), who spent 1928 and 1929 at Le

Corbusier’s Paris atelier, then became a mentor to Kenzo Tange (1913–

2005) and by extension to Tange’s students in the metabolist movement

of the 1960s and their own progeny. The expressionism of late-period

Corbu entered Japan via Takamasa Yoshizaka (1917–80), who worked

for Le Corbusier from 1950 to 1952. Several of Yoshizaka’s students

went on to form the idiosyncratic Team Zoo collective, whose work is

one manifestation of a crucial yet often overlooked stream of Japanese

architecture.

A key figure who explicitly rejected Western influences yet

appears on almost every branch of the family tree of contemporary

Japanese architecture, from the most understated “dirty realism” to

the most sophisticated diagrammatic minimalism, is Kazuo Shinohara

(1925–2006), whose influence is present throughout this book. Across

the four self-defined stylistic periods of his career, Shinohara addressed

tradition and modernity, banality and mysticism, vernacular archetypes

and futuristic sculptures. His effects on the discipline as a theorist,

Genealogies and Tendencies

19

After the Crash

designer, and teacher have been immense. Indeed, many of the former

students of Shinohara, and their own successors, make up what is

famously known as the Shinohara School. This term is now ubiqui-

tous in discussions of contemporary Japanese architecture but first

appeared in print in 1979 as the title of an article in the journal SD:

Space Design1 that linked the work of Kazuo Shinohara to Kazunari

Sakamoto, Toyo Ito, and Itsuko Hasegawa,2 all architects who have

been highly influential on the following generations. The article was

part of a regular series of critiques published under the byline Gruppo

Specio, the pseudonym of a small group of postgraduate architecture

students at Tokyo University. Gruppo Specio included Kengo Kuma

and Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama, then students in the studio of Hiroshi Hara

and themselves seen as part of the so-called Hara School (actually,

Hara Schule, due to Hara’s love of the German language), which over

the years has also included important contemporary figures such as

Riken Yamamoto and Kazuhiro Kojima.

The essays in this first section are provisional attempts to iden-

tify some of these evolving lineages and constellations of reciprocal

influence.

1. Gruppo Specio, “Shinohara sukuru no kenchiku” [The Architecture of the Shinohara

School], SD: Space Design 7901 (January 1979): 223–28.

2. Sakamoto studied under Shinohara, later becoming his teaching assistant and even-

tually a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT). Hasegawa spent a period

working for metabolist Kiyonori Kikutake before doing postgraduate studies at TIT,

later becoming an assistant in Shinohara’s studio. Ito worked for Kikutake at the same

time as Hasegawa and, despite never having any official ties to Shinohara, maintained

a close relationship with his circle.

20

21

Less Than Zero Minimalism and Beyond

In Hi-energy Field (30 September to 17 October, 2004), an exhibition of work by young artists held at Tokyo’s Tamada Projects Art Space, one of the objects on display was a table. Although completely mundane in shape and function, it was surreal in its proportions: a single sheet of per-fectly flat 3-millimeter-thick (0.1 inch) steel, 9.5 meters (31 feet) long and 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) wide, supported only at its four corners by steel legs 1.1 meters (3.6 feet) high. Seemingly an optical illusion or magic trick, the extraordinary span was achieved by prestressing the tabletop and legs, giving them a slight curvature that then became straight under the table’s own weight.

Designed by Junya Ishigami, a young Tokyo-based architect, in a sense this table represents the culmination of a trajectory that many Japanese architects have been following for more than a decade. The post-bubble period has been dominated by architecture that tends toward simplicity, flatness, insubstantiality, and even banality. Like Ishigami’s table, forms are reduced to the absolute minimum, surfaces are trans-lucent or bleached of color, structure appears disturbingly inadequate, materiality is ignored or contradicted. With results that often seem intended as no more than temporary art installations, there tends to be an inverse relationship between formal purity and physical longevity. The overall effect is an apparent effortlessness that, of course, requires a huge amount of effort to achieve.

The lucid, ephemeral beauty of this approach owes much to the buildings and concepts of Toyo Ito and Kazuo Shinohara and can argu-ably be traced back to sukiya carpentry and the delicate refinement of the traditional teahouse. This historical connection is most obvious in the essentially two-dimensional quality of the architecture. Just as the

Genealogies and Tendencies

After the Crash

spatial composition of traditional Japanese buildings can be almost entirely comprehended from their modular floor plans, much of this con-temporary work comprises little more than flat diagrams of astonishing simplicity. These abstract schematics—simple geometric shapes, grids, spirals, parallel bands, concentric boxes, occasionally even freeform curves—are translated into built form with a minimum of articulation and elaboration. The cross sections provide almost no surprises; the spaces are effectively vertical extrusions of the plans. Designs that do display complexity in section generally have a complementary simplicity in plan, suggesting that the generating diagram has just been rotated 90 degrees.

Indeed, the impact of this work is entirely reliant on the clarity of the organizational systems, although this does not necessarily imply functionalism: in many cases functional efficiency is sacrificed for the sake of maintaining the consistency of the diagram. The value of these diagrams lies in their instant comprehensibility. While defining spatial and programmatic relationships, they also act as logos or icons, graphic symbols that have a strong visual appeal—notably, to competition juries, as clearly evinced in many recent prize-winning projects. For example, two new community centers, Onishi Hall (Gunma, 2005) by Kazuyo Sejima and the unbuilt Environment Art Forum in Annaka (Gunma, 2003) by Sou Fujimoto, appear to be nothing more (and nothing less) than the bubble diagrams an architect might make on the first day of design. The genius of the work lies in the materialization of the buildings without any loss of the childlike clarity present in the early sketches. The strength of this approach is even clearer in two recent competition-winning museum designs: the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa, 22

23

Genealogies and Tendencies

2004) by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) and the Tomihiro Museum (Gunma, 2005) by aat+ (Makoto Yokomizo). Despite being very different in their execution and experiential quality, they have an anal-ogous planning strategy: simple geometric shapes floating within an equally simple frame. This basic arrangement has been directly trans-lated into a physical object that simultaneously defines form, space, structure, and program.

It is an approach that owes a clear debt to Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque (2001). Significantly, Sejima and Yokomizo both worked for Ito early in their careers. Among other projects, Sejima was in charge of the influ-ential Pao: A Dwelling for Tokyo Nomad Women installation (1985), and Yokomizo oversaw Ito’s equally influential contribution to the Visions of Japan exhibition (1991) at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Just as these two architects have been refining and extending aspects of the work of their former employer, it is not surprising to learn that Ishigami spent five years working for Sejima, notably on the Kanazawa museum.

In recent years, however, Ito has become disturbed by his own influence on this widespread fascination with luminous, weightless objects. In 1998, architecture critic Takashi Hasegawa defined what he called the “transparency syndrome” in houses designed by the younger generation:

Structures framed with steel or wood, extremely large openings, an unusual

concern with transparency, a few vertical walls that are white and flat, neu-

trality everywhere, and absolutely no pretence of structural strength. . . .

Overall, this series of houses gives an ephemeral, light impression, yet on the

other hand each one looks like an undistinguished version of work by the

Junya Ishigami, Table, 2004

After the Crash

this page

top left: Kazuyo Sejima, Onishi Hall, Gunma, 2005, plan

top right: Sou Fujimoto, Environment Art Forum in Annaka,

Gunma, 2003 (unbuilt), plan

bottom left: SANAA, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary

Art, Kanazawa, 2004, plan

bottom right: aat+, Tomihiro Museum, Gunma, 2005, plan

24

opposite

Toyo Ito, Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai, 2001,

concept sketch

Genealogies and Tendencies

25

1920s avant-garde, the influence of which subtly infuses their shapes. . . .

These houses are being designed by young architects who were mostly born

after 1960. Faced with this type of design, my sense of taste goes numb and I

lose the ability to speak.1

A few months later, Ito wrote an essay in which he quoted Hasegawa’s statements and acknowledged his own complicity:

Although editorial selection may play a part, houses of this flavor are cer-

tainly conspicuous. Of course, many of these characteristics apply to my own

architecture, and I am aware that due to my advocacy of lightness, ephem-

erality, and transparency, I must bear some of the responsibility for this syn-

drome among my colleagues born only twenty years after me. Nevertheless,

I have to sympathize with Hasegawa’s loss of taste and speech. I suppose

this is because it seems to me that many of these houses by young archi-

tects share a feeble introversion. Of course there are some to which this does

not apply, but so many have a light and transparent aesthetic sophistication

throughout. However beautiful and delicate, they do not engage the exterior

and are somehow negatively closed to reality. Put another way, while persist-

ing with the critique of modernism, I think an overwhelming number of these

houses fail to clearly demonstrate any criticality of their own. I think that very

few attempt a positive engagement with reality.2

In the decade since he wrote this, the younger members of the Japanese avant-garde have been increasingly preoccupied with crisp, monochrome boxes. Yet Ito has indirectly responded to these trends within his own work. The turning point was the completion of the Sendai Mediatheque,

26

After the Crash

the epochal project that sealed Ito’s reputation as the definitive architect of the cyberspace era. Developed in collaboration with Japan’s leading structural engineer Mutsuro Sasaki, the design was, among other things, an attempt to architecturally express the amorphousness and volatil-ity of information flows. Ito had initially seen the resulting structural arrangement (undulating, hollow tubes supporting open, flat plates) as a future prototype for other public buildings, yet during construction he was made keenly aware of the huge physical effort required to achieve his desired “floating” imagery:

As the architecture progressed I began to see that it wasn’t something that

could be built just anywhere at any time; it was a “one time proposition”

that could only be constructed here. That idea became stronger when I wit-

nessed the enormous amount of welding work on the large steel tubes. . . .

Mediatheque is a space made by hand, so much so that there is almost no

repetition in the use of materials.3

This experience triggered a swerve toward opacity, weight, and structural expression. Ito’s work since then is by no means a return to conventional building types but instead has reinvigorated a design approach that, in our cyber-saturated culture, had begun to run the risk of cliché. He has continued collaborating with Sasaki to develop inno-vative and expressive structures based on natural archetypes such as trees, mollusks, ripples, and caves. There is an overt weight and struc-tural logic to these new designs. The pavilions of the Relaxation Park in Torrevieja (projected completion 2009), for example, celebrate their own spiraling timber and steel envelopes. Designing the astonishing freeform