Festival dell'architettura

Sometimes the beauty of a landscape can be evaluated by the presence of the rock. Often, the rock is not so evident, because it has protected by a blanket of terrain or hidden under a weighty turf. At times, it emerges along linear segments, skirting old walls or deep crevasses. More frequently, the rock appears splintered, pierced, fragmented. I come from a country in which the rock emerges in a sublime way, where the mountain is venerable because of its magnificence and its wilderness. Sometimes this mountain becomes transfigured, as a monument to something divine, which pervades evenly nature, keeping out men.

In Japan, Mount Fuji is revered as a divinity, so that the city appears as a uniform platform without any quality, on which towers this tall cone, a platonic figure, almost mystic, which tends to the sky. 

However, when we are in the dense city, whose image can be described as a carpet of houses, Mount Fuji disappears and we can see it only by raising ourself with the spirit or taking the elevator. In order to make a comparison with Japan, in Finland the look is able to encompass a great area, marked by the street-bush-lake sequence, where cities are only small components, but precious for their urban configuration. Inversely, in Japan the structural complexity of territories can be understood only from a precise height.

The importance of the eye height in the Japanese architecture is evident from the contemporary works of Kengo Kuma e Waro Kishi, among others, but also from the ancient Zen Buddhist temples and houses of Tea, where the height of the gaze reveals a particular way to experience the architectural space. In fact, in the Japanese living, people are seated on the tatami, which is a textile floor covering. For this reason, the inhabitants’ view level is lower than the standard.

These premises explain the peculiar section of the Japanese buildings, the height of the curtains and the position of the windows in the façade of the houses. The prints of Hiroshige Utagawa, for example, show this peculiar way of seeing. They frame only a portion of space, i.e. what can be seen from the bottom, in a cross-legged position, nevertheless they reveal also the Japanese attention to detail, together with a surrender to a more general vision. Similarly, the Japanese city is particularly well-finished from a closer look (i.e. at a small scale), but at a large scale (i.e. from above) the urban fabric does not comply with any type of ordinatio (formal order).

According to Gunther Nitschke, in Japan urban space is not constituted by formal or geometrical elements but it is the outcome of all the activities performed there, while according to Charlotte Perriand, “gli aspetti vitali sono insiti proprio nella discontinuità, nelle fratture, nei compromessi, che i giapponesi accettano come base di una nuova ricerca di continuità”. As to Manfredo Tafuri, the Japanese city is composed of “pezzi isolati al di fuori di anche parziali complessi unitari o sistemazioni cittadine”, so that “alla fertilità e alla prepotente espressività dell’architettura corrisponde l’assenza quasi totale della pianificazione”.

Therefore, in Japan the urban design has a peculiar declination: it is intended as a syncretic – not synthetic – mosaic of heterogeneous parts. This approach clearly emerges looking at the Spiral Building (1985), designed by Fumihiko Maki. This edifice could be intended as a strategic pole, i.e. as a node in which the seesawing dynamics between built form and urban space are concentrated. Here the autonomy of the architectural components, which compose the volume, is a metaphor of urban syncretism, so that the building façade – composed through the tecnic of the assemblage – can be compared with the urban shape of Tokyo, a kind of collage-city.

The Japanese city didn’t exercise on the architects of Modern Movement an attraction as much intense, as the architecture of the ancient edifices. In particular, the sublime sense of restraint, together with the inclination toward a lyric and eternal form can be found in those Japanese houses, which come from both Meiji (1867-1912) and Taisho periods, as Yoshijima House in Takayama (1907). The house, belonged to a sake manufacturer, is divided into five groups of rooms, disposed around two gardens, defined by engawa, i.e. porches, which were a sort of filter – open in the summer and closed in the winter – to those gardens. The residential building is organized – as traditionally in Japan – according to a sequence of open spaces, not connected by corridors, raised from the ground and walkable with bare feet. All spaces are modular and flexible enough to change their end use at least three times a day, according to different demands: you can place a portable table for dinner, some cushions zabuton or a futon, in order to receive guests or to rest. The domestic space of the house is characterized by the presence of sliding partitions and removable curtains (light or heavy according to the seasons); large wardrobes, used to store mobile furnitures; tatami, a sort of soft floor covering, whose dimension (1m x 2m) defines that one of the entire building. The main room of the house is destined to the business and is placed beyond the entrance; it is a double-high space, covered by a large aerial framework, which sustains the roof. Without doubts, the framework astonishes for the modernity of its spatial conception, which calls to mind some bold structures, as the main room of Taliesin III, designed by Frank L. Wright after his travel to Japan, the Terragni and Cattaneo’ frameworks, the Five Architects’ buildings, the Ungers and Dudler’s obsessive spaces; the Purini and Thermes’ metaphysical trusses. The roof framework seems to be a symbolic structure, which represents the family status, but its role is also that of connecting the sliding partitions (made of rice paper) with the timber beams. 

Among the contemporary Japanese projects, what are those inspired to the ancient constructions? Surely, certain works of Kengo Kuma and Tadao Ando in Tokyo, such as the Suntory Museum (2007) – which combines the Rationalist grace of the glassy shrines with the wooden weaves, inspired by the ancient Nipponese palaces – and the Issey Miyake Foundation (2007), where the architect of the light and the water reformulates the monumental dimension of his previous projects in a more intimate architecture. However, the Nipponese tradition was gradually replaced by new formulas. From the sixties, the Metabolism caused distress to those ideas, by introducing the aesthetics of the machine and the ideology of the megastructure. Instead, a sort of ideological void arose since the seventies, after the Expo of Osaka, in spite of the presence of Arata Isozaki, intellectual, critic and architect, and Kazuo Shinohara, who aspire to construct a meaningful relationship between the building and the urban fabric. But they remained isolated and even their best follower, Toyo Ito, will reject the relationship between built form and urban space, by creating self-standing poetical universes. And his combination between the nostalgia for a lost past and the option for slogans and icons of the present day will be winning.

Today the Western culture looks at the Japanese city as a temporary structure, without significant figures. On closer inspection, this temporary nature has its roots in the necessity to achieve such portable quarters, in order to dismantle them easily, by reason of the geological instability and the frequent fires. Yoshinobu Ashihara – who elucidated the nature of the urban order, hidden behind the chaos of the Japanese city – explains that in Japan the architectural tradition is based on the floating floor, which has raised from the ground. This consideration underlines the general sense of instability, which is inborn in the Japanese way of manufacturing, so different from the Western tradition of the wall, symbolic of the eternal nature of architecture. 

If from one hand, we can appreciate the lesson of Toyo Ito, whose buildings interpret the society of consumption, the culture of the ephemeral and the urban precariousness, from the other hand we have the lesson of Kazuyo Sejima. If the first one conceives buildings as similar to temporary installations, characterized by a fragility that makes them monuments to the present day (a kind of evanescent monument), the second one conceives buildings as diagrams, always more frequently sculptural buildings, able  to trigger relations between the space and the body. These buildings are far from the will of deny the form, which characterizes the unfinished sculpture of Toyo Ito. Placed in the middle of the chaos of the city or in the vastness of the landscape as a sort of out of time white shrines, the buildings of Kazuyo Sejima introduce in architecture the aesthetics of the ma (the Japanese word, meaning the in- between space), as it is celebrated by the director Yasujirō Ozu.  

The urban image of Japan pass through little and extremely aware structures as well as through building intended as a microcosm, i.e. as an autonomous machine, which incorporates all the components of a whole city. Consider, for instance, the skyscraper designed by Takenaka Office and Cesar Pelli in Osaka (2014). It covers an area of 300.000 square meters per floor and is the highest building in Japan (300 meters). Abeno Harukas has become a landmark for the city, it is a mixed-use building made up of towers, which are connected each others; for this reason, Fumihiko Maki compares this colossus to a battleship1. Moreover, the volumetric arrangement makes it similar to a monolithic figure, as well as an enormous rock. The image of the mountain, mentioned in the first paragraph, has transfigured in the form of these last buildings – a sort of huge crystalline structures – in order to signify that Japan is suspended between the transience of buildings, which last 26 years and the will to touch more durable summits.

You can admire the beauty of Tokyo by passing through the causeway Roppongi Dori, up to where it touches the ground and innervates the burning body of the city. The beauty of this city is nurtured by strong contrasts. Evidently, the figure of an aerial walkway, which splits the skyscrapers’ profile, raises a sense of danger, but when the street disappears, only that split remains, as a fissure between tall buildings. It lets us to see one of the possible horizons of the city. 

Bibliografia

Ashihara Y., L’ordine nascosto, Gangemi, Roma 1995.

Isozaki A., Ma: Japanese Time-Space: an exhibition held at the musee des Arts Decoratifs, in “Japan Architect”n.292, 1979.

Ito T., Collage and superficiality in Architecture, in Frampton K. (a cura di), A New Wave of Japanese Architecture, Catalogue 10, IAUS, New York 1978.

Jinnai H., Tokyo then and now: keys to Japanese urban design, in “Japan Echo”, 14, 1987, pp. 20-29.

Koolhaas R., Obrist H. U., Project Japan, Metabolism Talks..., Taschen, Colonia, 2011.

Maki F., City, image and materiality, in Salat S. (a cura di), Fumihiko Maki: An Aesthetic of Fragmentation, Rizzoli, New York 1988.

Maki F., On visiting Abeno Harukas, in “Shinkenchiku”, special issue: Big Compact. Abeno Harukas. Supertall Compact City, September 2014.

Nitschke G., ‘Ma’: the japanese sense of ‘place’ in old and new architecture and planning, in “Architectural Design”, marzo 1966, pp. 117-130.

Shelton B., Learning from the Japanese City. Looking East in Urban Design, Routledge, London, second edition, 2012.

Tafuri M., L’architettura moderna in Giappone, Cappelli 1964.