Others of these modern dwellings were just as faithful to the traditional Japanese fondness for material imperfection. The heavy outside walls of one weekend house a few hours’ drive out of Tokyo were constructed from panels of rough and rusting iron, stained by moss and water. No attempt had been made to clean up these stains or to protect the material with a network of drainpipes; indeed, there seemed a deliberate joy to be had here in watching nature attack the works of man. The architects of the older tea houses had for much the same reason left their wood unvarnished, treasuring the ensuing patina and marks of age, which they saw as wise symbols of the passing of all things. In his In Praise of Shadows (1933) Junichiro Tanizaki attempted to explain why he and his countrymen found flaws so beautifuclass="underline" ‘We find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice. While we do sometimes indeed use silver for teakettles, decanters, or sake cups, we prefer not to polish it. On the contrary we begin to enjoy it only when the lustre has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky, patina.’ Buddhist writings associated an intolerance for the imperfections of wood and stone with the failure to accept the inherently frustrating nature of existence. Unlike our own disappointments and decline, however, those represented in architectural materials were of an eminently graceful kind, for wood and stone, and now concrete and wood, age slowly and with dignity. They do not shatter hysterically like glass, or tear like paper, but discolour with a melancholy, noble air. The rusted and stained walls of the weekend house made for a most artful receptacle in which to entertain thoughts of decline and mortality.
12.
Successful modern reinterpretations of traditional architectural styles move us not only at an aesthetic level. They show us how we, too, might straddle eras and countries, holding on to our own precedents and regions while drawing on the modern and the universal.
The great modern houses are happy to admit to their youth and honestly to benefit from the advances of contemporary materials, but they also know how to respond to the appealing themes of their ancestry and can thereby heal the traumas generated by an era of brutally rapid change. Without patronising the history they profess to love, they show us how we, too, might carry the valuable parts of the past and the local into a restless global future.
13.
A few months after returning from Japan, I found myself on a road trip through Holland, and realised that the Dutch were on occasion as capable of pastiche as the Japanese. Here also were many houses that gave no clue as to how a fulfilled life might be lived in the present and therefore, while a great deal more coherent with their location than their brethren near Nagasaki, were no less incoherent with their era.
But on the road west from Amsterdam, on the way to Haarlem and the coast, I came across a new quarter of the village of Vijfhuizen, which triumphantly corrected all the errors of which the Huis Ten Bosch Dutch Village had been so guilty, for its houses had not only grown up in the appropriate country, they had also beautifully adapted themselves to the century in which they were built.
From a distance, the village looked traditional. The roofs were pitched, and the houses spaced out as on a typical suburban grid. Only on nearing the site did one start to notice particularly contemporary touches: the profiles of the buildings were sharply edged, as though suggesting a touch of irony or self-consciousness about their primordial shapes. The roofs, instead of being tiled, were made of ribbed-steel plating, while the walls, rather than being made of brick, were a mixture of steel panels and identically grooved wood. In this combination of traditional form and modern materials, one sensed the unfolding of a mutually respectful conversation between past and present.
Reconciling the old and new on a Swiss mountain:
Peter Zumthor, Gugalun House, Versam, 1994
The houses knew how to accommodate themselves to the realities of the modern Netherlands while remaining quietly aware of their lineage. They looked like reinventions of the archetypal Dutch home that had succeeded in succumbing neither to nostalgia nor to amnesia.
Coherence in place and in time:
S333 Architects, New Quarter, Vijfhuizen, 2004
Self-knowledge
1.
I once spent a summer in a small hotel in the second arrondissement in Paris, a stone’s throw away from the chilly seriousness of the old Bibliothèque Nationale, where I repaired every morning in a vain attempt to research a book I hoped to write (but never did). It was a lively part of town, and when I was bored with my work, which was most of the time, I would often sit in a café adjacent to my hotel named, as if out of a tourist guide, Chez Antoine. Antoine was dead, but his brother-in-law, Bertrand, had taken over the café and ran it with unusual conviviality and charisma. Everyone, it seemed, dropped by Chez Antoine at some point in the day. Elegant women would have coffee and a cigarette at the counter in the morning. Policemen lunched there, students whiled away the afternoons on the covered terrace, and by evening there’d be a mixture of scholars, politicians, prostitutes, divorcees and tourists, flirting, arguing, having dinner, smoking and playing pinball. As a result, although I was alone in Paris, and went for days hardly speaking to anyone, I felt none of the alienation with which I was familiar in other cities – in Los Angeles, for example, where I had once lived for a few weeks in a block between freeways. That summer, like many people before and since, I imagined no greater happiness than to be able to live in Paris for ever, pursuing a routine of going to the library, ambling the streets and watching the world from a corner table at Chez Antoine.
2.
I was therefore surprised to find out, some years later, while looking through an illustrated book on urban planning, that the very area in which I had stayed, including my hotel, the café, the local laundry, the newspaper shop, even the National Library, had all fallen within a zone which one of the most intelligent and influential architects of the twentieth century had wanted systematically to dynamite and replace with a great park punctuated at intervals with eighteen sixty-storey cruciform towers stretching up to the lower slopes of Montmartre.
The future of a great city:
Le Corbusier, Plan ‘Voisin’ for Paris, 1922
The plan seemed so obviously demented that it intrigued me. I discovered photos of Le Corbusier leaning over his model, explaining it to a line of local councillors and businessmen. He had no tail or horns. He appeared intelligent and humane. Only after properly understanding how a rational person might come up with an idea to destroy half of central Paris, only after sympathising with the aspirations behind the plan and respecting its logic, did it seem fair to begin to mock, or indeed feel superior to, this remarkable conception of the future of a city.
3.
Le Corbusier had drawn up his Parisian scheme at a moment of unequalled urban crisis. Across the developing world, cities were exploding in size. In 1800 the French capital was home to 647,000 people. By 1910 three million were squeezed within its inadequate confines. Much of France’s peasant class had within a few years decided that it would collectively put down its scythes in order to head for the greater opportunities of the city – unleashing an environmental and social catastrophe in the process.