GMW Architects, north-west side, Manchester Square, London, 2001
south-east side, Manchester Square, late eighteenth century
Classicism in modern guise:
Michael Hopkins, Queen’s Building, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1995
10.
What, I wondered, might a successful example of modern Japanese architecture look like – one which avoided kitsch and was properly coherent with its place and time?
The national angle to this question has at times, of other countries, been answered in quasi-mystical ways, as if to suggest that borderlines somehow demarcate objective, knowable personalities which the buildings within ought to take a reading of and then passively reflect. In ‘On German Architecture’ (1772), J. W. Goethe declared that Germany was in its ‘essence’ a Christian land, and that the only appropriate style for new German buildings was therefore Gothic. On seeing a cathedral, wrote Goethe, ‘a German ought to thank God for being able to proclaim aloud, “That is German architecture, our architecture.’ ”
But, in reality, no country ever either owns a style or is locked into it through precedent. National architectural identity, like national identity overall, is created rather than dictated by the soil. History, culture, weather and geography will offer up a great range of possible themes for architects to respond to (not so broad a range as the builders of Huis Ten Bosch may have hoped, perhaps, nor as restricted a one as Goethe proposed). If we end up thinking of certain styles as the indissoluble products of specific places, it is only a tribute to the skill with which architects have coaxed us into seeing the environment through their eyes, and so made their achievements appear inevitable.
At issue, therefore, is not so much what a national style is as what it could be made to be. It is the privilege of architects to be selective about which aspects of the local spirit they want to throw into relief. While most societies experience varying degrees of violence and chaos, for example, we are unlikely to want our buildings to reflect those features of the Zeitgeist. Then again, we would feel uncomfortable if architects abandoned reality altogether to produce designs which alluded to none of our prevailing morals or goals. We no more favour delusion in our built environment than we do in individuals.
An adequately contextual building might thus be defined as one which embodies some of the most desirable values and the highest ambitions of its era and place – a building which serves as a repository for a workable ideal.
The attributes of such a building might be compared with those of a prototypically admirable human being in an identical context. Oscar Niemeyer once expressed the wish that his architectural works should share the outlook and attitudes of the most enlightened Brazilians of the era: they should appreciate the burdens and privileges of their country’s colonial past without being overwhelmed by them, should be sympathetic to modern technology, yet should retain a healthy playfulness and sensuality. And, above all, he noted, they should indicate their affinity for Brazil’s ‘white beaches, its huge mountains – and its beautiful tanned women’.
A similar portrait, this time of an ideal Sri Lankan, animates Geoffrey Bawa’s Parliament Island on the outskirts of Colombo. Here the buildings are a synthesis of local and international, historical and modern, concerns, the roofs evoking the double pitch of the monasteries and royal palaces of precolonial Kandy, while the interiors successfully combine Sinhalese, Buddhist and Western features. Not only do Bawa’s buildings provide a home for the nation’s legislative government, they also grant us a seductive image of what a modern Sri Lankan citizen might be like.
A Brazilian ideal, sympathetic to the country’s ‘white beaches, its huge mountains – and its beautiful tanned women’:
Oscar Niemeyer, Kubitschek House, Pampulha, Minas Gerais, 1943
11.
There turned out to be a number of domestic buildings, in Tokyo and elsewhere, in subtle sympathy with the inner aspirations of the great traditional works of Japanese architecture.
The virtues of the nation’s architecture – simplicity, efficiency, modesty, elegance – could be re-encountered in houses which to the casual eye seemed to have no contact with the past. Only on closer inspection did one realise that a sensibility almost identical to that of ancient houses had been embedded in contemporary materials.
‘A house like me’:
Geoffrey Bawa, Parliament Island, Colombo, 1982
On a back street in Tokyo, one such house showed a blank concrete face to the world. A front door made of steel gave onto a narrow passage which in turn opened out into a whitewashed two-storey atrium, illuminated by diffused light that shone through frosted windows in the roof. Although this was a domestic space, it had a quality of emptiness and purity more typically associated with religious buildings. In inviting a retreat from the world, the house seemed to be honouring the Zen Buddhist belief in a need to create a refuge from daily life, not in order to forgo reality but so as more closely to approach certain of its central inner truths.
There were no windows with views in this house, perhaps the better to help its inhabitants see what truly needed to be observed. The light which washed down from above had the same gentle, indirect value as the glow emanating from a shoji screen. The architect had realised, as many of his lesser colleagues had not, that this luminous effect was in no way dependent on the use of paper and wood and could be achieved just as well, and in a more enduring manner, through panes of sandblasted glass. Thanks to these, the house had an otherworldly, abstracted air: to be inside it was to feel close to a realm of shadows and mist. When it rained, the pitter-patter of water sounded overhead, but the glass revealed nothing of the clouds from which the raindrops fell. This was an architecture designed to train the mind away from phenomena and towards essences.
Tezuka Architects, Jyubako House, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, 2004
In a second house, the two wings of the property were connected by an open atrium, so that even in winter it was necessary to walk outside in order to pass between the living and sleeping areas. While it did confirm a frequent Western complaint regarding the mysteriously glacial aspect of Japanese houses, this lack of insulation was evidently far from accidental, being tied instead to a desire, Zen in origin, to remind the occupants of their connection to, and dependence on, nature, and of the unity of all living things. A walk to the kitchen in midwinter delivered a brief and tart lesson about man’s place in a larger and more powerful universe. Yet this wider natural world was evoked in the most abstract of ways, not through a view onto a lawn planted with mature specimens, but through the very temperature of the air, a thin carpeting of moss and the careful placement of three volcanic rocks.
These great modern houses I encountered were often simple in their furnishings, echoing the long-standing pull of Japanese aesthetics towards emptiness and austerity. The medieval courtier Kamo no Chomei, in his Tale of the Ten Foot Square Hut (1212), had described the liberation that awaits those who strip themselves of superfluous possessions and attend to the murmurings of their own souls. Simple wooden huts had as a result acquired a privileged place in the Japanese imagination. The great lords of the Momoyama (1573–1614) and Edo periods had every few months left their mansions and castles behind to spend time in huts, in obedience to the Zen insight that spiritual enlightenment can come only through a life without embellishment.