Architecture Words 2: Anti-Object (Kengo Kuma)

Architecture Words 2

KENGO KUMA Anti-object: The Dissolution and Disintegration of Architecture

ANTIOBJECT TRANSLATED BY HIROSHI WATANABE

Preface

My purpose in writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred and coercive. I am opposed to the presence and atmosphere of certain works of architecture that I have chosen to call objects. Whether or not a building is an object is determined by its character rather than its architectural style.

To be precise, an object is a form of material existence distinct from its immediate environment.

I do not deny that all buildings, as points of singularity created by humankind in the environment, are to some extent objects. However, buildings that are deliberately made distinct from their environment are very different from those that attempt to mitigate this isolation, and the difference is perceptible to everyone who experiences them.

I set out to criticise buildings that are isolated from their environment and eventually came to realise that all architectural styles are open to criticism.

Kengo Kuma

Architectural Association London

ANTI-OBJECT

Making a Connection: The HyŪga Residence by Bruno Taut It all began one hot summer’s day, with an unexpected encounter on a cliff overlooking the Pacific.

I had gone by train to Atami, a well-known resort in Shizuoka Prefecture, where I had been commissioned to design a small guest-house on top of a hill. Following my map, I took a narrow path up from the station and after ten minutes I arrived at the site. I walked around, checking views of the sea and of the mountain that rose inland.

Then, as a courtesy, I called on the neighbouring house to inform the owner of the impending construction work.

This house was modest and compact, with a look typical of prewar domestic architecture. Two storeys high, and made of timber, it blended in with the carefully tended pine trees in the grounds. It did not much look like the work of an internationally famous architect, yet it turned out to be the Hyūga Residence, designed in part by Bruno Taut, who lived in Japan from 1933 to 1936.

The Hyūga commission was for an addition to an existing structure, an ordinary timber-frame house with white stucco walls and a blue-tiled gable roof. At the back of the house was a veritable hanging garden – a lawn supported by concrete columns and beams jutting out over a steep, seaward slope. The client had the idea of creating a basement within this structure, and asked Taut to design the interior. Though the basement could be equipped with windows to let in light, there was no opportunity to design an architectural form as such. The concrete structure was in place, and even the outer boundary of the room was already fixed. This was not the sort of commission one would normally expect a professional architect to undertake, let alone one with an international reputation.

No doubt some local carpenter could have performed the

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job quite satisfactorily. Taut not only took on the project, but expressed his satisfaction with the result in a letter he wrote to a friend in Berlin.1

To understand the reason for Taut’s pride, we must first examine the idea of architecture as an object.

Ordinarily, a building is considered an object – an independent material object distinct from its environment.

The public perceives buildings to be objects, and that is also the perception of most architects. When one speaks of a beautiful work of architecture, one generally means the work in question is a beautiful object. By an excellent architect one generally means an architect with the ability to design beautiful objects.

Taut questioned such a conception of architecture.

He abhorred objects, believing that architecture was more a matter of relationships. The Hyūga project gave him a rare opportunity to experiment with the relationship between architecture and the environment. The basement is half-buried in the ground and connected to its surroundings. It is incapable of being perceived as an independent object. One might even liken it to a parasite, living off its environment. It is an anti-object.

Taut did not begin his architectural career thinking that architecture was about relationships; he arrived at this idea only in a roundabout way. His experience in Japan, particularly his well-known visit to the Katsura Detached Palace, represented a final, decisive stage in the evolution of his thought. However, before discussing that visit, we need to consider the origins of his abhorrence of objects.

Taut was troubled from the beginning by a deep inner conflict that was a reflection of the times in which he lived.

He referred to the nature of that conflict in a talk he gave at a retrospective of his work held in Turkey in June 1938, just six months before his death: Professor Fischer 2 gave me the job of restoring a small gothic church and constructing a turbine hall for a steel factory. The two tendencies apparent in these works – conforming to an old architectural tradition and resolving

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the demands of contemporary industry – were already present in my early youth. That is to say, the school in Königsberg where I studied was encircled by the old gothic cathedral, the campus of the old university where Immanuel Kant had taught a hundred years previously, and the chapel with the grave of the great philosopher.

We boys would always read the curious gold epitaph on Kant’s grave on the anniversary of his death, ‘The starry heavens above and the moral law within me’.

So there were two different tendencies in my youth: on the one hand romanticism, on the other two or three architectural solutions, sensational at the time, in which I used steel, reinforced concrete, an abundance of glass and a variety of intense colours. 3

Taut made it his life’s objective to translate the philosophy of Kant into architecture. This philosophy was based on an awareness of dichotomies – Kant searched for them everywhere, avoiding all facile preestablished notions of harmony. This set him apart both from Descartes, who preceded him, and from later philosophers such as Hegel.

Kant proposed a distinction between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world, between the objects of our experience and ‘things-in-themselves’, which are unknowable as they exist apart from perception. Taut saw himself as torn between romanticism and objectivism, between visionary tendencies and a faith in technology.

Kant would no doubt have characterised this as the reflection of a more fundamental dichotomy between subject and object.

The world as envisioned by classicism was a collection of objects ruled by a rigorous order, existing independently of the subject. This dichotomy came to trouble architects with the classical revival during the Renaissance. The Renaissance technique of perspective was considered to be part of the same conceptual framework as the neoclassical approach, which was to govern architecture through geometry. As a mathematically based method of drawing, perspective induces a rigorous geometrical composition.

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Yet it contains an inherent contradiction: it introduces into space an extremely subjective and singular viewpoint. At a stroke, the objectivity of the neoclassical world is destroyed.

The dichotomy between consciousness and object is exposed, expressed in the disparity between the space depicted through perspective and the space actually experienced by the subject. At the centre of the perspective, the disparity is so small it can be ignored. However, on the margins of the drawing it takes the form of an enormous distortion. If the subject begins to move and shift his viewpoint, the static spatial perception achieved through perspective is rendered practically useless. This shows how complex an operation the perception of three-dimensional space really is. The only way to eliminate the dichotomy between subject and object is through stage-set architecture, in the style of Leon Battista Alberti. As long as the subject remains in front of the flat, two-dimensional facade, he is able to disregard the dichotomy, and architecture is able to assume the guise of objectivity.

The dichotomy between subject and object has frequently troubled architects in the past, causing the pendulum to swing between styles, between object/ objectivity and subject/subjectivity. The Renaissance was a period when architecture was object-oriented, conceived as a rigorous and transparent structure based on mathematical proportions. When a subject was introduced into the space, this was revealed as an illusion. The rigorous composition and proportions existed only when seen from upon high, from a godlike viewpoint. The moment the viewpoint was lowered to ground level all geometries lost their effect. Premised on this human viewpoint, design became a matter of deciding how to distort and deform architecture effectively. Architecture gradually became more subject-oriented. The painstakingly transparent structures of the Renaissance were transformed into distorted, exaggerated objects, that is, baroque architecture.

Design came to be based, not on geometry, but on perceptual effect. Instead of the rigorous circles and spheres favoured by classicism, space was organised

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around ellipses, which had greater perceptual impact.

The baroque style was, in turn, eventually supplanted by neoclassicism, where a building was typically an independent object standing in the midst of nature. The Petit Trianon in the gardens of Versailles is a representative neoclassical work – a pure form in stark contrast to the palace proper, a grand, distorted exercise in the baroque.

Neoclassical buildings were typically designed to be viewed from a distance, thus avoiding the distortion inherent in perspective and solving the problem of the dichotomy between object and subject. (At least on the outside: the interiors were another matter.) Architects were well aware that the neoclassical solution was ineffective when the distance between object and subject could not be maintained, so they had no qualms about abandoning geometry and adopting the naturalistic and ornamental rococo style for interiors.

The neoclassical solution in some respects paralleled the philosophy of Descartes, who developed a mind/body dualism asserting that the mind – as a thinking, immaterial thing – existed independently of the material body. British empiricists such as Locke and Hume were the first to question this understanding. In his ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ (1689) John Locke wrote: All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.

The empiricist approach may be said to have had its design counterpart in the English landscape garden, which emerged as the antithesis of the French garden where plants were pruned into neat geometrical shapes and objectified – against their nature. Whereas architecture can

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be construed as an independent object – as an autonomous figure cut off from the ground – a garden is a continuum, the ground itself. Since architects had been corrupted by an object-oriented way of thinking, it was left to members of a new, untainted profession to develop an empiricist design method in the form of the landscape garden.

The English landscape garden was conceived as a series of qualitatively different experiences rather than as a single entity ruled by some overarching geometry.

Any inconsistencies in those experiences were of no consequence. A masonry pavilion in a medieval European style might occupy one spot, a Chinese pagoda another.

From above, these mutually incompatible fragments were seen to be connected by a continuous path. An observer (that is, the subject) followed this path around the garden and at any one moment was able to experience only the fragment that was before his eyes. This was the condition imposed on each individual, so these fragments, no matter how diverse and incongruous, never seemed inconsistent.

The landscape garden made manifest the position of empiricism.

Kant took this position into account but was critical of the empiricist method. He proposed that we cannot accurately know the objective order of the world merely by accumulating sensory perceptions. He believed that the subject, even in touring, say, a landscape garden, does not simply compartmentalise qualitatively different experiences but in some way perceives and defines the sum total of those experiences – a whole that makes possible their diversity. Unsatisfied by superficial experiences, the human spirit naturally seeks an underlying order. The inscription on Kant’s tomb is a statement of belief in a single, universal form of knowledge (‘the starry heavens above’) which is internalised and shared by each individual in the form of a ‘moral law’.

The landscape garden, which at first glance seems to be a mixture of heterogeneous worlds, had at its centre the owner’s residence, built in a neoclassical style. The residence exercised control over the whole, its conservative,

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Flowing Out: ‘Water/Glass’, Atami, Shizuoka, 1992–95 The site I was given was next to the Hyūga Residence and had a similar topography, being set on a cliff by the sea and accessed from a road on a higher level. I liked the descending approach. Walking down to a building is very different from walking up to one. A building on a higher level is seen against the sky; you have to look up at it and acknowledge its presence as an object. A building on a lower level, on the other hand, is difficult to see. In extreme cases, you may be right on top of it before you know.

Walking down to the Hyūga Residence, you come across a garden with a pleasant lawn that juts out towards the sea. Beneath this lawn is a narrow, dimly lit space containing an addition designed by Bruno Taut. There is no outward hint of the existence of the space – the architecture is made to disappear, far more effectively than any conventional basement. Moreover, there is no lower vantage point from which you can look up at the building, so precipitously does the land rise from the sea. Nor does the access road on the upper level reveal its presence; from there all you see are the trees growing on the cliff. The Hyūga Residence is hidden from view from both higher and lower levels. It is doubly absent.

The conditions were the same in the project I call ‘Water/Glass’. The building is visually shielded in nearly all directions. The only place from which its exterior is visible is the garden of the Hyūga Residence – a gesture made out of solidarity with, and as an act of homage to, Taut.

To make a building without a display exterior, as such, the architect must relinquish the use of forms and abandon the idea of making an object. This does not mean

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closing the architecture off from the outside world. In ‘Water/Glass’ the architecture is made to disappear, even as the building opens itself to the outside world. In this there is no contradiction.

Architecture can never be closed off completely. That is the premise of my work. One may enclose space with walls and bury it underground, but architecture is always situated in – and connected to – the world. More precisely, architecture is a device mediating between the subject (i.e. mankind) and the world. The goal of this project was to reconfirm that fact. Establishing the relationship between the subject and the world happens to be the goal of the intellectual occupation we call philosophy. That being so, the goal of this project can be said to be an engagement in philosophy through architecture.

There are two forms of connection between subject and world: the frame and the floor. A typical example of a device for visually framing the world is a window punched into a wall. For the device to function effectively, there must be a certain distance between the subject and the world. The frame selects some particular element of the disordered environment while screening out all other elements. Through this process of elimination, it generates an object – an object summoned from the outside world.

Thus the frame form is another name for objectification.

The world regulated by or perceived through the medium of the frame form is a world of objects.

Before the advent of modern architecture in the twentieth century, western buildings were masonry structures, constructed of courses of brick or stone.

Window openings in massive masonry walls had to be relatively small. From the Renaissance, western paintings (apart from murals) were also premised on frames and isolation from the surrounding environment. Photography, which regulates vision by means of the In the traditional Japanese viewfinder, emerged in the nineteenth house, perception of space century as an extension of that frame is controlled by the floor.

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form and subsequently became a dominant medium of expression. Indeed, in its various guises, the frame form has been the basis of western perception and expression.

It is a means of producing objects and will forever continue to be so.

In ‘Water/Glass’ I chose to adopt the other form of connection, the floor form, which regulates only the floor on which the subject stands. This is the traditional form of Japanese architecture, a product of post-and-beam construction in the same way that the frame form is a product of western masonry architecture. The Japanese have tried to minimise walls that separate inside from outside. (The relatively enclosed tea-house is an exception, but even there the walls are far from solid and inside and outside are connected in diverse ways.) Installed between the posts and beams are panels that can be slid open or closed. There are of course no punched windows. The perception of space is controlled, not by the frame of a window, but by the floor. The subject, being of flesh and blood, always stands on a floor of some kind: he does not look at the world from on high, or float in mid-air like a phantom. Neither phantom nor god, the subject is a physical being. The floor form only regulates this quite natural state of affairs – and repeatedly reminds the subject of his absolute, unalterable human condition. All physical beings return to the floor form because they have to stand on a floor. Therefore, almost all possible relationships between the world and the subject are merely variations on the floor form. The floor form is open and inclusive. The frame form, on the other hand, requires the subservience of both subject and object. No other relationship between the world and the subject is possible as long as the frame is the medium. If, for example, the subject were to approach the world and attempt to connect with it in a tactile way, the frame would obstruct both that movement and the relationships that might arise from it. In such circumstances, the world ‘Water/Glass’, section appears only as a collection of visual

through top floor (see p 124)

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objects separated from the subject. The frame robs the world of its diverse, multilayered and interactive character, reducing it to paltry objects. The frame and floor forms do not represent merely architectural or methodological opposites; they represent two opposing ways of perceiving the world.

‘Water/Glass’ is an exploration of the potential of the floor form. The experiment takes place on the top floor, which is formed of a single, shallow pool of water on a bed of dark green granite. The dark colour of the stone makes it difficult to gauge the depth of the pool, which is just 15 centimetres. Instead one sees only the trembling, radiant surface of the water, which seems to float weightlessly on top of the cliff. About 100 metres below is another surface of The pool is water – the sea. The two parallel planes essentially a veranda made are used to explore various ways of of water (see p 123) connecting the subject with architecture and the world, where the pool represents architecture and the sea represents the world.

The boundary conditions of this installation shift from moment to moment, responding to the changing moods of nature. At particular times, you perceive the upper and lower planes of water as a single continuous surface and you have the sensation of floating on the sea.

In that moment, the subject is directly connected to the world by the medium of water. Inclement weather can reinforce this impression. On rainy days, the boundaries between world and architecture melt: sea, sky and pool are transformed into a mass of blue-grey particles that envelop the subject. Even the distinctions between solid, liquid and gas disappear. In such moments, the building expands infinitely and becomes identical with the world. At the same time, everything in the world is compressed into and embedded within the building.

This strange phenomenon, in which the building and the world become identical, is of short duration: the illusion of oneness can be destroyed in an instant. A slight shift in

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the fall of sunlight, or in the shadows generated as the wind stirs the surface of the sea, causes the architecture and the world to disengage once more.

It is the strange nature of water that makes this experiment possible. Able to alternate easily between its solid, liquid and gaseous states, water makes our attempts to categorise the world look foolish. Water is also an infinitely sensitive receptor, responding to the slightest changes in the environment. Whereas objects are always in an active mode, water is always acted upon. Even its configuration is determined by its receptacle. Water is consistently passive. That is why the floor of water of ‘Water/Glass’ functions as a receptor.

At Katsura Detached Palace, which Taut so admired, there is a bamboo veranda that also functions as a sensitive receptor. The veranda is said to have been created for viewing the moon. The lustrous bamboo reflects the colours of the world in a fascinating way; the grooves between bamboos inform us of slight changes in the angle of light by translating them into more perceptible changes of shadow.

In the past, verandas had to be made of bamboo, but today we have the technology to make them of water, a receptor many times more sensitive and passive than bamboo.

To induce such diverse relationships between receptor and environment, it is not enough simply to enclose a surface of water within a building. The water surface itself must not become an independent object, but must serve (or more accurately, efface itself in serving) as a medium between the subject and the world. In this project, three steps were taken to ensure that it would do so.

One was to control the physical relationship between the subject and the surface of water. The architectural plan and circulation had to be carefully devised to ensure that the pool was always interposed between the subject and the outside world. At the same time, views of the pool from the world at large had to be completely eliminated, to prevent the pool of water from being reduced to an independent object – an object as banal as a goldfish bowl.

Once it becomes an object, a thing like water cannot be

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turned back into a medium connecting the subject and the world; such is the power of objects and the fragility of media.

For the same reason, views of the pool from above a certain height had to be eliminated. A bird’s-eye view would have turned the pool of water into just one of countless objects existing on the ground. The level that allows a bird’s-eye view might be called the ‘metalevel’.

This is simply another name for the viewpoint from which all things in existence are perceived as objects. The moment the subject stands at the metalevel, subject and object are sundered: objects close themselves off and the world turns its back on the subject. In ‘Water/Glass’, the idea was to keep the interior floor level as close as possible to the level of the water, so as to keep the subject on the same level as the surface of the pool. This naturally created major problems of waterproofing – one of the challenges in detailing this building.

Another measure concerned the detailing of edges.

The subject attempts to read everything there is to know about a material – such as hardness, density, tensile strength and temperature – from the boundaries of that material. A projection of a few millimetres on the boundary can expose everything about the material; so can the faintest curvature. The treatment of edges The surface of water seems can be of decisive importance for to float weightlessly on top architecture, particularly in Japan, of the cliff (see p 124) where styles are differentiated by the detailing of edges rather than by ornamentation, as they are in the West. Sukiya architecture, for example, is divided into shin, gyō and sō styles by the way edges are treated.1 Are the corners of columns at right angles or have they been chamfered or rounded? If they have been chamfered, then by how many millimetres? One can read the true character of a material and the character of the building as a whole by the way edges are treated, which is often quite subtle. Some edges in a building can be of critical importance. ‘Water/

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Substituting: ELECTRONIC Memorial Space, Takasaki, Gumma, 1997–98 A certain corporation asked me to design a memorial to commemorate some 800 people who had worked for them during their 100-year history. Frankly, the project did not interest me much in the beginning. The only apparent solution was to design an object made of stone. I could not even be bothered to sketch ideas on paper.

A memorial is an extension of the tomb, one of the two extreme forms of architecture. Its purpose is to endure, to intervene between subject and time. At the other extreme, the role of a building is to intervene between subject and space, that is, to shelter. Architecture alternates between these two extremes.

Ordinarily, if we want to make something that will endure, we turn to a shape of cohesive force, believing it to be the only form that will impress itself on people’s memories. The word monument is derived from the Latin for ‘remind’. The function of a monument is also to last through time; thus it aspires to be a powerful, conspicuous object.

Does this mean that objects are the only form to last through time? I was not so sure. Modern art was concerned with time. The cubists, for example, attempted to depict multiple moments in time on one canvas. Modernist architects were also interested for a while in manipulating and designing time. (Giedion’s seminal work on modern architecture, after all, was entitled Space, Time, and Architecture.) However, their attention ultimately shifted to the problem of universal space, which they defined as a space with movable partitions that allowed for adaptation to any change in use. Modernists saw this as a means of

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dealing with multiple moments in time. It was not; it merely offered a possibility to alter space. The typical modernist method was to substitute space for time, disregarding all phenomena related to time, such as memory.

That was why I thought of making memory and time the central issues in this project. But would it be possible to intervene in time without using an object? I gradually came to feel that the project had the potential to be an extremely interesting experiment.

Two things provided me with useful hints. One was the Vietnam Veterans’ Maya Lin, Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. This Veterans’ Memorial, is extremely reserved by the standards Washington, DC, 1982 of the US capital, especially compared to the nearby Lincoln Memorial. It has an extremely low profile: nothing projects above the ground. The lawn dips down and the memorial serves as a retaining wall. The names of some 60,000 American soldiers who died in the war are all carved into the black granite that covers the wall. There are no objects here. Nevertheless, we are able to remember; we are able to capture time.

Bruno Taut provided the second pointer, with his essay, ‘Honouring the War Dead and Wounded’,1 published in 1915. At this sensitive time just after the start of the Great War, architects and designers had to decide what stance to take towards war and death. Taut’s essay was sharply critical of monuments, arguing that they effectively denied the purity of the very ideals they were intended to commemorate. The alternative he proposed was quite eccentric: the remains of those who had died in war were to be transferred to a garden. There, amidst fountains, waterfalls and glass structures, plants would be nurtured by soil enriched by the remains, and a new spiritual garden would grow. According to Taut, what was needed was not a symbol of the dead but a place to remember the dead.2

Even though I had been asked to design a memorial, my first recommendation was that nothing monumental be built. I proposed creating a garden instead, just as Taut

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had done during World War I. The site was by no means large, measuring only 18.8 metres by 10.5 metres. I didn’t want it to be visually dominated by a single object. Objects are devices for giving space a symbolic focus. Two supreme examples of this are the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, which convert the spatial extent of Paris into points in the popular imagination. Objects freeze and fix spaces that are otherwise indeterminate and ambiguous, they compress information – and that is why people continue to construct them.

A monument is the compression of time and space.

Thus, monuments can be said to be the compression of history, and graves the compression of death. I wondered if there might not be a method of compression that did not depend on objects.

The simplest form of compression is proportional compression. A map reduces space by this means, premised on a bird’s-eye view. For the subject, space is reduced to a two-dimensional pattern. There is no way to gauge proportional relationships with mathematical precision since space has already been lost through compression. One of Borges’s fictions tells us of a country where the pursuit of cartographic accuracy results in the creation of a full-size map, exactly the same size as the land it represents. This can be read as a criticism of bird’s-eye-view compression – a warning that it entails the forfeiture of space.

In order to preserve spatial extension and depth, the subject must first stand inside rather than above or outside space. We are then faced with a difficult decision: where to position the subject inside the space? Using that difficult-to-determine position A monument is as the datum, what method for spatial a compression of time compression could be conceived? and space (see p 144)

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How could Gumma Prefecture be compressed into the given 18.8 metre by 10.5 metre area? The set task was to convert a map-like, bird’s-eye-view space into a subjective space within which the subject is located.

I became interested in morphing operations because they involve the deformation of space around a fixed point that does not itself undergo deformation; in parallel, a subject inside the space sees his position as a fixed point while the rest of the space appears deformed. Morphing operations were originally devised as a way of mathematically describing the deformations that result from the introduction of subjectivity.

Perspective is another means of compressing space.

The problem with it, however, is that space is frozen after it is compressed. A perspective drawing is premised on a fixed subject inside the space and a fixed line of sight, whereas a bird’s-eye-view type of compression has a movable line of sight, though the subject remains outside the space. I explored the potential of morphing operations as a way of mediating between these two methods.

Interestingly, morphing operations require at least two fixed points. If there is only one, space revolves freely around that point and cannot be fixed. The two points I chose for my compression of Gumma Prefecture were Takasaki City, the site of the memorial park, and Mount Haruna, a peak regarded as sacred ground. The fact that space cannot be compressed without two points is quite telling. It teaches us that space is not discernible from just one fixed point, but emerges only through movement from one point to another. In that sense space is phenomenal.

It arises only through the introduction of a subject with a will. For there to be a will – for example, the will to proceed from Takasaki to Mount Haruna – one must be on a metalevel that allows one to perceive the relationship between these two points. Space is generated only when the metalevel and the phenomenon of introspection both exist, and there is alternation between the two (see the previous chapter: Reversing). One must overcome both a neoclassical approach to space, which gives priority to a metalevel,

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and phenomenology, which sees phenomena as absolute.

Morphing provides hints about ways to do so.

First, I set a course from Takasaki to Mount Haruna, then I undertook a morphing operation along that course and compressed space, taking in the entire topography.

However, I felt that the landscape that was made manifest was still inadequate. The subject was certainly inserted into the space, but the result was not yet clearly different from a bird’s-eye-view proportional compression, or a map. To eliminate this type of perception I added a further operation: the folding of the set linear course. Only through such controls on a metalevel does the alternation between metalevel and introspection begin. A maze (which is what I had produced) is a device that uses folding to control the metalevel and generate space. One cannot distinguish the geographical entity called Gumma Prefecture, no matter how one looks at this maze from overhead. Nevertheless, the course, though folded, is still continuous. That is, although the whole cannot be grasped, it is possible to experience each moment and to experience a succession of moments in time. In that way, spatial extension is compressed within a temporal axis.

What I tried to do was to criticise the ordinary form of spatial compression. Ordinarily, space is compressed into a combination of object and plan pattern. However, something of crucial importance is lost in that process, namely time, which gives space richness and depth.

A criticism of such forms of compression is central to the Japanese cultural tradition. Take, for example, the illustrated horizontal scrolls (emakimono). These make it impossible to get a bird’s-eye view of the depicted space, as they are unrolled gradually from right to left, revealing only a portion at a time. As a result, space appears only along a temporal axis: space and time are inseparable.

In a Japanese stroll garden, too, the appearance of space is in time: a major objective of the garden is to show that space and time are inseparable. As a building can be easily reduced to two-dimensional patterns, the architect often neglects time as a factor. That was why gardens

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were created: to continue to remind people not to forget time, and to criticise architecture. In Japan, garden design is thoroughly anti-architectural. The bird’s-eye view is eliminated and space appears only successively, in time, along the route (although modern designers may try to uncover a two-dimensional pattern – to compress space into a pattern – even in the route of a stroll garden). The route of this memorial park has been folded many times in order to foil such compression, just as a scroll, being rolled, foils attempts to reduce it to a two-dimensional pattern. The garden wants to remain a garden; it wants to remain anti-architectural.

Dependence on visual perception must also be avoided, if the end result is to be a genuine garden. Vision abhors time, it always desires a still image, which is why objects and two-dimensional patterns are always in demand. I decided to design the garden as an acoustical rather than a visual space. I explored the possibility of making sound the main source of spatial information.

This was to be a garden people visited to hear sounds – sounds which would evoke memories of the departed.

A monument is a form that preserves time through the compression of space, a form in which visual perception is the parameter. This, on the other hand, would be a garden in which the sense of hearing would be the parameter; it would preserve time, not through compression, but through an audio playback function.

A visitor to this garden first calls out the deceased person’s name; he calls out to the dead. The sound is received by a computer and cast back in the form of a special type of echo. The system was built by Ken’ichi Sakakibara, who is both a composer of contemporary music and a researcher on the human voice. The name that is called out is first converted into overlapping sine waves (tones) that change in the manner of a time series; next, tones that are not important components of the overall sound stream (that are low in power or extremely short in connection time) are shed from the original name. The phonemes that indicate the called-out name are broken

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down by this means, leaving only modulation. Only someone who already knows the name, that is, the person who called it out, can recognise it from the echo. The echo is repeated throughout the garden and undergoes gradual changes.

The computer picks up sounds such as the visitor’s footsteps, the breeze and rustling leaves, and continually transforms the echo in response to these sounds, in accordance with certain algorithms. A slight change in the visitor’s stride is immediately reflected by the sound filling the garden. No object could respond as sensitively as this acoustical garden. The subject becomes ever more alert to the sounds in this garden without objects, ever more deeply immersed in the acoustic space. In listening intently, the subject is at one with time; he walks through the acoustical space accompanied by time: time and space are inseparable.

I sought gentleness, in the realms of both sight and hearing. I avoided the dominant form of the modern era – an object rising from a levelled site. The goal in the modern era has been to divide up the world and to make all of the resulting fragments (objects) interchangeable.

Objects are transportable and interchangeable because they are concentrated masses cut off from the environment.

Unfortunately, communication effected by means of objects is extremely poor, and landscapes full of objects are ugly and chaotic. Increased density and speed in the modern world have only multiplied that ugliness and chaos.

In this garden I wanted to achieve gentle spaces through delicate communication technologies. I built in many electronic technologies and also used diverse spatial techniques that were first developed in gardens. A gentle space requires the subject to be extremely sensitive and alert to the slightest nuances of things and movements.

Among the countless echoes reverberating in this memorial space, he must be able to hear the name he called out. Only then will he reach a silence that is sufficiently powerful to counteract the speed and density of the modern era.

96

Substituting Notes 1. Bruno Taut, ‘Krieger-Ehrung’, in

Das Kunstgewerbeblatt .

2. Here I come to a circumstance

that had me wondering about the mysterious workings of fate. As I

have already written earlier in this book, Bruno Taut fled the Nazis

in Germany and lived in Japan from

1933 to 1936. During that time, his sponsor was Fusaichiro Inoue,

the owner of a company in Gumma Prefecture called Inoue Kōgyō.

The corporation that asked me

to design this memorial was none

other than Inoue Kōgyō.

97

Flowing Out: ‘Water/Glass’, Atami, Shizuoka, 1992–95

The pool is essentially a veranda made of water (see p 37)

122

123

Section and view showing the two stages and, between them, the shirasu – ground that belongs neither to this world or the otherworld (see p 65)

136

137

Unravelling: Japanese Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, 1995

138

Left: Original layout of Yoshizaka’s pavilion; Right: Revised layout (see pp 70–73)

139

New circulation path through the pavilion (see p 74)

140

Above and opposite: Waterfall by Hiroshi Senj큰 (see p 74)

141