Responding to Chaos

Tradition, Technology, Society and Order in Japanese Design

David N Buck

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136748363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

A celebration of a unique culture and its experience of design, this sensitive text is a timely examination of Japanese design at the start of a new century. The country's economic boom in the 1980s produced a surge of interest in land and building, and consequently in design in all its forms. From restaurant interiors to products, from private housing to recreational spaces, design received an unprecedented degree of attention. However the bursting in the early 1990s of this so-called 'bubble' economy has prompted a re-examination of design and its role in urban society.

Order

If New York is frenetic and London coolly fashionable, Tokyo is three-dimensional stream of consciousness meets urban psychobabble, New Modernism next to Post-Modern, Latin-Greco historicism next to classical-meets-mis-quoted-bastardised-Post-Modern. If Tokyo were human it would be institutionalised for life. Instead it somehow manages to meld these diverse voices into a strangely harmonious symphony. First time visitors may marvel at the incredible urban congestion and notice the bizarre built forms, but like an oil slick in a storm, there is undoubtedly a broad, calmer order to what at first glance might seem complete chaos. The following four chapters introduce diverse yet compelling answers to the question of how to design with this chaotic phenomena. Takefumi Aida uses fluctuation to co-ordinate with the amplitude of the city and its landscape. Hiromi Fujii has taken a cognitive approach to create space that, stripped of any inherent meaning, means as much as you want it to. Yoji Sasaki creates boundless urban landscapes with nature the order of the city, not architecture or engineering. Kazuhiro Ishii’s marvellous structures rotate in harmony with the cosmos. And Tadao Ando’s concrete forms harmonise with the natural order of the site. But maybe this whole order versus chaos question isn’t really relevant? Well, it all depends on whom you ask. Some economically-driven – or dependent? – planners say that the market laissez-faire means cities are fair game for all. Or if you are a fan of that particular brand of Japanese historicism that means that everything – good and bad – is ‘uniquely’ Japanese, then even chaos, if it’s native, may be no bad thing. In a sense, any search for an appropriate order can never be anything other than a search for the Holy Grail itself. Any search for stability or structure is like the search to dress in fashion, no sooner have you got there than being in style itself becomes out. But the question of an ordering system for design is perhaps – even more than tradition – the one facet that ties a designer’s work into the stream of consciousness, past, present and future. The work of these designers reveals an incredible diversity of thought, not calm, clear thought, but a deep cerebral longing that answers a basic human need for order, for structure, for knowing how the parts relate to a whole. A whole history of civilisation, even, and what contemporary design understands the present, philosophical as well as aesthetic, condition to be. These designers’ work is a bit like Stephen Hawkin’s Theory of Everything. It is so fundamental to an understanding of where we are that it is both intellectually challenging and intensely fascinating. These projects may be, or possible may not be, the greatest ever design, but in many senses they are clearly definitive ones. Order? Probably. Disorder? Maybe. Deeply provocative design? Oh yes.

Letting Nature Speak

Tadao Ando

Architecture carries the role of raising people’s awareness towards their city

Since its ‘modern’ discovery in 1908, when Frank Lloyd Wright used it for Chicago’s Unity Temple (the Romans are thought to have used it first), concrete has been a material associated in the popular imagination with · industrial buildings, road subgrade, rough architecture at best. Tadao Ando has become one of Japan’s most influential architects by using its unclad surface to meld history, context, and geometry, into a dialogue with nature. Since he launched his career twenty-one years ago at the Row House, his hallmark concrete walls have been so widely imitated that they have become a new vernacular, recycled and reapplied in housing, public institutions and recreational facilities from Hokkaido to Okinawa. Perhaps only the SRC beam, the elevator and the curtain wall have had such a powerful influence on the architecture of twentieth-century Japan.

The Oyamazaki Villa in southern Kyoto Prefecture, completed in 1996, is like many of his projects since the mid-eighties, a cultural institution in a semi-rural setting. To visit this art museum, a gallery extension to an old villa, is to travel – through straggling suburbs, tree covered approaches, and lush rolling gardens – to the heart of Ando’s architecture. Out of respect for the 1920s villa, a rare architectural survivor from the Taisho period (1912–26), and in order to preserve the existing grounds, he declined the temptation to make a cultural ‘monument’ and instead set the building mostly below ground. The cylindrical concrete gallery is accessed from a 35-metre-long linear space, its thirty-nine steps accommodating the 6-metre change in ground level. With the gallery roof covered in white-flowering gardenia and the linear circulation space incised between existing trees, the physical bulk of the annex is so skilfully melded into the landscape it seems to pre-date the villa.

The Oyamazaki Villa (1996), overlooks the confluence of two rivers that flow out from the south of Kyoto City.

But is his recent work, including this project, really what it is often said to be, an extension of the Japanese traditional aesthetic where building and nature exist in a state of ambiguous fusion? It’s probably not easy to accurately compare Ando’s contemporary work with the building–nature relationship epitomised by Katsura Imperial Palace, Kyoto, because there have been such huge changes in the nature of building and landscape – in both directions. He says of this aspect of his work: ‘I don’t think that architecture should speak too much, but should remain silent, and let nature – in the form of sun and wind – speak’. With particular eloquence, Oyamazaki Villa speaks to both history and nature. But what about geometry, the other key to his work?

The Row House (1976). Sumiyoshi. Osaka, replaced a pre-war wooden row house with a concrete box that redefined the relationship between Japanese housing and nature and brought attention to Tadao Ando’s architecture.

Although in plan his buildings are frequently composed of overlaid squares, axes, and circles, he somehow manages to make them invisible in the three-dimensional spaces he creates, so as at Oyamazaki, his buildings are experienced as spatial labyrinths rather than clashing geometry. Passage, progress, time, place, experience and performance: the stepped approach and the mysterious luminosity of the gallery interior are not just evocative but multi-coded metaphors. This ability to load his buildings with visual metaphors is what transforms what could so easily be the intrinsic harshness of the concrete into spaces that people can relate to. But when his career took off in 1976, with his design for the Row House in Sumiyoshi, south Osaka, it was with a site only 1 per cent the size of the Oyamazaki Villa. A 57-square-metre plot situated in dense housing into which he inserted his concrete sliver of a building, the two-storey residence providing a bathroom, two bedrooms, a living room, a dining kitchen and a courtyard.

It was the courtyard, a 16-square-metre central rectangular space, open to the sky, that was fundamental to this design and to his early philosophy towards nature in the city. Renouncing any attempt at a more conciliatory approach, he sealed the site with concrete walls rejecting the chaos of the site’s context in favour of nature. By arranging the rooms around the central courtyard, he enclosed an outdoor space where one would usually find the indoors, an unexpected reversal which allowed nature into the house: fragments of light, sky, wind, and rain. The Row House became a place where people and nature confronted each other under a sustained sense of tension. In an age before environmental pollution, global warming and green architecture became part of the everyday vocabulary, it must have been nice to see nature not just survive, but get some tacit respect.

The lessons he learnt from this project guided his subsequent career and led to the establishment of his position as Japan’s leading voice on all subjects and scales of design. From nature in the city, to the landscape’s importance in Kobe’s earthquake recovery, to the theme-park developments that characterise Japan’s cities, even raising people’s awareness of what a city could be, it all intrigues him. To meet Ando in person is to find a man, now in mellow middle age, who belies the images associated with his lack of formal education and pugilist past, someone completely accessible, remarkably un-egotistical. He radiates incredible energy and has an indefinable ‘aura’. He was constantly punctuating the interview to add notes and sketches to a notebook, as though ideas were pouring through his mind like a cosmic stream that he didn’t want to lose. That’s not to say he lets things hang in the air unsaid. Ask him a question he doesn’t find interesting and he tells you so. Ask him a question about a current project being explored through models lining his office walls and he’s off gesticulating. He talks passionately for twenty minutes without a pause.

These days design fashions come and go, but Ando’s is one that just won’t go quietly. He has managed to keep reinventing his work so that his predominant use of a single material can still create new projects that are identifiable as his, but unique to the actual site. The seductive simplicity of his designs have, not surprisingly, made them ripe for imitation. Most ‘imitators’ have seen only the visuals, not the vision. While their work is mute, or at best hums, his composes. Perhaps he gave the best summary of his work recently when he said ‘I don’t think of “architecture” or “parks”, I think of designing places’. What he should have said is evocative, intriguing, enigmatic, powerful, spiritual, places.

You are now possibly Japan’s best known architect. Have you been surprised by your success and how do you deal with the pressure that fame has brought?

I don’t really care so much about success, nor am I really surprised by any successes as an architect, but of course sometimes, I myself am surprised by the building that actually comes into existence. In other words, I don’t start out knowing exactly how my buildings will ultimately turn out once they have been completed. Many architects say they have an idea of what what the building will look like but in my case I only know for sure about 70 per cent of the project; 30 per cent are surprises I get on the site. I think if I knew that everything that was on the drawing ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Tradition
• Technology
• Society
• Order
• Pronunciation Guide
• Photographic Credits
• Index