The town of Shuto in Yamaguchi Prefecture (population 15,000) set out to build a community meeting place. The town fathers consulted with the construction-department head at the prefectural office, and in a scenario reminiscent of Nagi's, the department head called in his college buddy, the architect Takeyama Sei, who proposed a concert hall. While this was far from the original purpose of a meeting place, and though Shuto villagers had little need for a concert hall, who were they to argue? The Shuto Cultural Hall (Pastora Hall) opened in 1994, a huge concrete block in the middle of rice paddies, with a rooftop performance space large enough to seat 1,500 people.
The next step after «planning» is «design.» Commercial architecture accounts for most of the new buildings in Japan, which is of course true around the world, and in Japan these are designed largely by in-house designers working for giant construction firms and architectural agencies. These buildings share a common grayness, uniformity, and cheap commercialism. As for independent architects, their work generally falls into the two familiar styles: manga (comic-book fantasy) or massive (overwhelming office block).
The leader of the massive camp is Tange Kenzo, whose solid, single-piece constructions aim to impress with weight and majesty. This style dominated in the 1960s, when he designed the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, and at first it featured traditional Japanese forms duplicated in concrete, such as pillar and post, or jutting roof beams. A turning point came in the 1970s, when Isozaki Arata insisted that it didn't matter if a building looked Japanese or Western. Japanese culture, he argued, had no core, so the architect was free to quote wittily from any tradition. This was the beginning of the manga style, with its emphasis on curious shapes and fantastic decorations. Architecture came to be seen as «contemporary art,» as a form of sculpture.
The architects Ito Toyo, Shinohara Kazuo, and others took the next step when they invented the term fuyu-sei, «floating,» to describe a type of building made of punched metal, colored plastic, and glass with a quality of temporariness and impermanence. This self-consciously trashy, cheap, shiny look caught on like wildfire, and it dominates mainstream architecture in Japan today, even inducing a «massive» builder like Hara to add fuyu touches to his New Kyoto Station.
During the high-growth decades of the 1960s and 1970s, two developments influenced architects in Japan. Kathryn Findlay, a British architect working in Tokyo, put it this way, «From the 1970s a number of Japanese architects felt that it was necessary to divorce architecture from society, economies, and city planning, and become a self-referential art.» So in the first development Japanese architects considered that they should not be constrained by the buildings' environment. They felt no need to harmonize their buildings with cities, no requirement to site them vis-à-vis rivers or hills, and no need to take a backward glance at history. In a sense, Isozaki was perhaps right when he declared that Japanese culture had no core.
Of course, when architects sit down in front of their desks and start drawing, who knows what extraordinary visions may flow from their pens? Dreaming up castles in the air is part of what they are supposed to do. But in most modern contexts local history and the natural environment have tempered their dreams. In the 1930s, Le Corbusier drew up a plan for Paris that would have demolished the old urban center and replaced it with wide avenues fronted by rows of tall rectangular office blocks. He called this plan Ville Radieuse, "Radiant City." But Parisians dismissed Radiant City with horror, and today it is considered a byword for the misguided schemes of egotistical architects. The history of modern architecture in America is replete with the corpses of similar bizarre ideas.
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 or a comic book! The international design community lionizes architects like Kurokawa and Isozaki. They have what architects everywhere desire but almost never have the luck to find: lots of money and total freedom.
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: