LOOK INSIDE: HYPOSPACE by ORO Editions

TEXT Christopher Curtis Mead ORO Editions

TEXT

Christopher Curtis Mead ORO Editions

Publishers of Architecture, Art, and Design Publisher: Gordon Goff www.oroeditions.com info@oroeditions.com Published by ORO Editions Copyright © Christopher Curtis Mead 2023 Text and Images © Christopher Curtis Mead 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying of microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Designer: Mike Heighway Typefaces: slipcase, custom lettering; covers, custom lettering and VisueIt by Colophon Foundry; text in both volumes, Exchange by Frere-Jones Type and HeiSei Mincho by the Japanese Standards Association. ORO Managing Editor: Kirby Anderson 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition Library of Congress data available upon request. World Rights: Available ISBN: 978-1-957183-35-0 Color Separations and Printing: ORO Editions, Inc. Printed in Singapore. International Distribution: www.oroeditions.com/distribution ORO Editions makes a continuous effort to minimize the overall carbon footprint of its publications. As part of this goal, ORO Editions, in association with Global ReLeaf, arranges to plant trees to replace those used in the manufacturing of the paper produced for its books. Global ReLeaf is an international campaign run by American Forests, one of the world’s oldest nonprofit conservation organizations. Global ReLeaf is American Forests’ education and action program that helps individuals, organizations, agencies, and corporations improve the local and global environment by planting and caring for trees.

Table of Contents

VOLUME I: TEXT INTRODUCTION: MAEOKI 前置き

PART I. SPACE AND TIME: KŪKAN TO JIKAN 空間と時間

PART II. TIME AND SPACE: JIKAN TO KŪKAN 時間と空間

01. HYPOCENTER: BAKUSHINCHI 爆心地

02. INTERNATIONAL MONUMENT: SEKAI MONYUMAN 世界モニュマン

03. RASHŌMON: 羅生門

04. TRADITION: DENTŌ 伝統

05. ARCHITECTURE: KENCHIKU 建築

06. MODERNISM: MODANIZUMU モダニズム

07. BRUNO TAUT: BURŪNO TAUTO ブルーノ・タウト

08. ISE SHRINES: ISE JINGŪ 伊勢神宮

09. KATSURA VILLA: KATSURA RIKYŪ 桂離宮

10. RE-SEEING: MITATE 見立て

111

11. KAMI HEDGE: HIMOROGI 神籬

123

12. SPACE: KŪKAN 空間

135

13. BEING-TIME: UJI 有時

145

14. HOURS: TOKI 時

157

15. CLIMATE: FŪDO 風土

163

16. TYPIFICATION: TENKEIKA 典型化

175

Chapter Sources

VOLUME II: IMAGES CHAPTER IMAGES GLOSSARIES AND INDICES

383

17. ZERO: REI 零

191

18. SAVAGE SPACE: YASEI NO KŪKAN 野生の空間

201

19. MOVEMENT SPACE: KŌDŌTEKI KŪKAN 行動的空間

213

20. ROOF: YANE 屋根

219

21. TEAROOM: CHASHITSU 茶室

235

22. DEPTH: OKU 奥

245

23. HOUSE WITHOUT OKU: OKU NO NAI IE 奥のない家

257

24. BETWEEN: MA 間

271

25. FLOATING DOMAIN: FUYŪ RYŌIKI 浮遊領域

283

26. RELATIONSHIP: KANKEISEI 関係性

293

27. WORMHOLE: WĀMUHŌRU ワームホール

301

28. CIRCLE: ENSŌ 円相

311

29. LANDSCAPE: SANSUI 山水

321

30. WATER GARDEN: MIZUNIWA 水庭

335

31. GODZILLA: GOJIRA ゴジラ

347

32. ENERGYSCAPE: ENAJĪSUKĒPU エナジースケープ

357

33. HYPOSPACE: HAIPOSUPĒISU ハイポスペーイス

371

AFTERWORD: ATOGAKI 後書き

377

INTRODUCTION: MAEOKI 前置き

The Japanese practice of placing the family name first and the personal name last is followed in this book. Premodern persons living before the Meiji Restoration are identified by their personal name; modern persons living from the Meiji Restoration to the present are identified by their family name.

When an atomic bomb named Little Boy detonated a few seconds after 8:16 AM on August 6, 1945, the city of Hiroshima ceased to exist. Three-dimensional space collapsed to a single point in time and the cultural memory of a nation was split into an irrevocable before and after. The architect Isozaki Arata calls this “the end of history” and says that it made Hiroshima “the indelible origin of the reconstruction process.”1 Because the bomb that leveled Hiroshima was atomized in an explosive burst of radiation at 1903 feet in the air, there was no epicenter, no actual ground zero where Little Boy touched down, only a hypocenter in space beneath which the city disappeared. Taking my verbal cue from this event, I have coined hypospace to describe the “space beneath time” that is the subject of my book. I ask how an architecture for modern Japan was built from the ashes of Hiroshima. While its fate as the first city in the history of the world to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon is well known, the relevance of Hiroshima to modern Japanese architecture is rarely acknowledged outside the country, except as the proximate cause for Tange Kenzō’s design and construction of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (1949–1955). Yet Hiroshima continues to haunt the Japanese and this legacy informs their architecture. If, as Isozaki claims, the history of Japan began again from zero on August 6, 1945, this is not because the nation abandoned its past for a promise of future progress. In a tragic paradox, the practical demonstration that proved the spacetime physics of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity found common ground in Hiroshima with the traditional Japanese understanding that space and time are interdependent phenomena. In the West, we have classically separated three-dimensional yet static space from one-dimensional yet dynamic time. In the East, space and time have been seen for millennia as coexistent: space forms in the multidimensional field of time and time happens in the limitless void of space. Modern physics has proven the Eastern insight that our empirical world does not exist in some abstract space outside time but is instead continuously birthed into being in time. The things that make up our experience are temporal and transient events that arise from the circumstances of a moment, not objective representations of preexisting and invariant ideas. The Western belief that history is the inevitable progression of time from past to present to future yields to the Eastern and specifically Buddhist insight that time is an endless periodic arising of moments that each exist for an instant only to vanish in the next. As the monk Dōgen told his students in the thirteenth century, time scatters across time in a field of possibilities that move “from today to tomorrow, from today to yesterday, from yesterday to today, from today to today, from tomorrow to tomorrow.” A phenomenon of space-in-time, open-ended rather than preordained, the history of hypospace has infinite origins and always begins now. Rather than regiment time into a linear narrative that advances chronologically from a singular origin to its inevitable conclusion, history circles back on itself in layers that are cumulative, discursive, and organic instead of reductive, predictive, and abstract. I start each chapter of my book in the middle of things, naming a particular event, work, person, or idea whose implications are then explored. My conclusions are multiple and provisional, just as my interpretation of Japanese architecture is thematic not encyclopedic, partial not comprehensive. I tack back and forth across the history of Japan to chart the various and contingent ways in which a modern Japanese architecture of spacetime has taken shape in the practical (built) and theoretical (written) work of Itō Chūta, Horiguchi Sutemi, Kishida Hidetō, Yoshida Tetsurō, Maekawa Kunio, Murano Tōgo, Tange Kenzō, Taniguchi Yoshirō, Shirai Sei’ichi, Shinohara Kazuo, Kikutake Kiyonori, Kurokawa Kishō, Isozaki Arata, Maki Fumihiko, Taniguchi Yoshio, Hara Hiroshi, Kuma Kengo, Andō Tadao, Itō Toyoo, SAANA,

Atelier Bow-Wow, MIKAN, and Sambuichi Hiroshi among other architects. Western architects like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe resisted the challenge posed to their classical world view by the relativity of spacetime. They were reassured by Sigfried Giedion’s promise in Space, Time and Architecture (1941) that the fluctuating phenomena of space and time could safely be absorbed into the rhetoric of modernism without threatening the timeless autonomy of Cartesian space. Japanese architects initially adopted but soon came to question the airless logic of Western rationalism, especially after history fractured at Hiroshima. Working at the intersection of modern physics and traditional thought, they have brought their cultural heritage to bear on the modern world and broken free from the closed chamber of rational objectivity. They have set space adrift across the sea of time and made an architecture that is truly historical in the sense understood by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō: their architecture engages the temporality of existence that Heidegger called “being-in-the-world” and Watsuji called “climate.”

Treating architecture as an artifact of spacetime puts its history into context. Too often, histories of architecture treat the discipline as autonomous and self-sufficient, defined by internal rules that operate independently of any external factors. When the architecture in question belongs to a culture we know intimately, we intuitively fill in the gaps. But when the subject is another culture, its architecture risks being reduced to clichés of transparency and universality, as if buildings were uniformly self-evident and could speak for themselves without any need to know why they came about or how they are seen and interpreted. We cannot begin to understand Japanese buildings without considering some of the cultural, social, political, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, urban, and environmental conditions of their existence. To make the case that the meaning of buildings is cultural and applied, not natural and inherent, I join the idea of the “empty monument” set forth by the French semiotician Roland Barthes to Tange Kenzō’s typological definition of architecture as indefinite ideas of form and space that continuously evolve in response to changing social circumstances. As Barthes said of the Eiffel Tower, the empty monument is a “pure—virtually empty—sign” that can shelter every meaning that comes along and so attracts meaning like lighting. As Tange realized when the Peace Memorial was dedicated on August 6, 1955, this work no longer belonged to him and, so, he had to “confront what is there and hear what the silent voices of society and human beings have to say.” Instead of objects with a fixed and singular meaning, buildings are subject to interminable readings. The Western anxiety over the arbitrary connection of form to content—between a sound, image, or object and what it might represent—is foreign to the Japanese, who accept that signs like all things are empty, vacant signifiers whose meaning is transient and fluid. Many books written by Westerners—or translated from the Japanese—limit Japanese references to phonetic transcriptions of select words or phrases into the Latin alphabet of rōmaji. This convention obscures how the Japanese language is assembled from Chinese characters called kanji, from Japanese words written in the phonetic syllabary of hiragana, and from foreign words written in the phonetic syllabary of katakana. The cultural polysemy of Japanese is lost in translation, and we are left with deceptively transparent equations between mutually exclusive words. We ignore how a text—like a building—can be read differently in the West and in Japan. I draw attention to this difference by including and explaining Japanese terms and texts along with their English translations and transliterations.

The correlate to this problem of translation is the relationship of text to image. Images belong in any discussion of architecture and form a vital part of my book; some come from historic sources, though the majority are on-site photographs taken during my research. Rather than imbed the images in each chapter, citing them as illustrations of a specific building, detail, or architectural concept, I present them as parallel visual narratives. These complement the text but are freed from the linear, horizontal, left-to-right rules of writing that control how we arrange words in the West. Like Japanese, images can scatter across a spatial field and be read in multiple directions at once. Words and images do not share the same symbolic logic and are no more subject to transparent translation than Japanese is to English. I have located my book between worlds, between East and West. This liminal place acknowledges both Japan’s complex relationship to the West since the sixteenth century and my own position as an outsider to Japan. Looking from the outside in, I am a gaikokujin—a foreigner who is literally a “person outside the country”—and cannot claim the privileged experience of a native insider. I do not presume to teach the Japanese anything about themselves. Instead, I seek to offer Western specialists and general readers alike a way of thinking about Japanese architecture that expands their cultural horizons. Pushing past the clichés of Japanese exoticism, I defamiliarize our notions of Japan by taking seriously the paradoxical observation of Watsuji Tetsurō that the uniqueness of his country depends on its openness to outside influence: “Japanese culture is not something that stands as the opposite of foreign culture but that is actually born out of foreign culture.” A translation inside a translation, Japan’s long history of importing foreign ideas is less about assimilation than transformation, less a process of indigenization than one of cultural invention. 5

IMAGES

Christopher Curtis Mead ORO Editions

Table of Contents VOLUME II: IMAGES All images are by the author unless otherwise noted. Every effort has been made to secure permissions for copyrighted images, for works belonging to institutions, and for sites where photography is restricted.

PART I. SPACE AND TIME: KŪKAN TO JIKAN 空間と時間

PART II. TIME AND SPACE: JIKAN TO KŪKAN 時間と空間

01. HYPOCENTER: BAKUSHINCHI 爆心地

02. INTERNATIONAL MONUMENT: SEKAI MONYUMAN 世界モニュマン

03. RASHŌMON: 羅生門

04. TRADITION: DENTŌ 伝統

05. ARCHITECTURE: KENCHIKU 建築

06. MODERNISM: MODANIZUMU モダニズム

07. BRUNO TAUT: BURŪNO TAUTO ブルーノ・タウト

08. ISE SHRINES: ISE JINGŪ 伊勢神宮

09. KATSURA VILLA: KATSURA RIKYŪ 桂離宮

10. RE-SEEING: MITATE 見立て

111

11. KAMI HEDGE: HIMOROGI 神籬

121

12. SPACE: KŪKAN 空間

135

13. BEING-TIME: UJI 有時

141

14. HOURS: TOKI 時

143

15. CLIMATE: FŪDO 風土

151

16. TYPIFICATION: TENKEIKA 典型化

155

17. ZERO: REI 零

173

18. SAVAGE SPACE: YASEI NO KŪKAN 野生の空間

185

19. MOVEMENT SPACE: KŌDŌTEKI KŪKAN 行動的空間

193

20. ROOF: YANE 屋根

203

21. TEAROOM: CHASHITSU 茶室

215

22. DEPTH: OKU 奥

229

23. HOUSE WITHOUT OKU: OKU NO NAI IE 奥のない家

243

24. BETWEEN: MA 間

253

25. FLOATING DOMAIN: FUYŪ RYŌIKI 浮遊領域

263

26. RELATIONSHIP: KANKEISEI 関係性

269

27. WORMHOLE: WĀMUHŌRU ワームホール

277

28. CIRCLE: ENSŌ 円相

287

29. LANDSCAPE: SANSUI 山水

297

30. WATER GARDEN: MIZUNIWA 水庭

313

31. GODZILLA: GOJIRA ゴジラ

327

32. ENERGYSCAPE: ENAJĪSUKĒPU エナジースケープ

331

33. HYPOSPACE: HAIPOSUPĒISU ハイポスペーイス

347

Glossary and Index of Japanese Institutions, Offices, and Organizations

359

Glossary and Index of Japanese Names

361

Glossary and Index of Japanese Places

363

Glossary and Index of Japanese Printed Works, Art Works, and Films

365

Glossary of Japanese Terms

367

Glossaries and Indices Western Index

351

Glossary and Index of Japanese Buildings, Projects, Exhibitions, and Manufactured Works

353

Glossary and Index of Japanese Building Systems and Styles

358

Glossary and Index of Japanese Ceremonies, Events, and Historical Periods

359

Glossary and Index of Japanese Cultural Identifiers, Legal Documents, and Policies

359

14. HOURS: TOKI 時

Daitokuji, Kyōto, founded 1315–1319, rebuilt 15th–17th centuries.

Outer walls and entrance to Kōtōin, subtemple of Daitokuji, Kyōto, 1601–1628.

144

Gate to the guest hall (kyakuden) of Kōtōin. Path from the front gate of Kōtōin.

Inside the front gate (omotemon) of Kōtōin.

145

Sitting rooms (zashiki) of guest hall of Kōtōin. South Garden (Nantei) from the guest hall of Kōtōin.

146

Garden (roji) of the Shōkōken Teahouse (Chashitsu Shōkōken), Kōtōin.

Ihokuken Shoin (Shoin Ihokuken), moved from Sen no Rikyū’s residence to Kōtōin.

147

Hosokawa Tadaoki, Shōkōken Teahouse, Kōtōin.

Cemetery with graves of Hosokawa Tadaoki and Gracia, Kōtōin.

Outside wall of Murin Villa (Murinan), Kyōto, 1894–1898.

Garden view of Murin Villa.

148

Storehouse (kura) with conference room on upper floor, Murin Villa. Ogawa Jihei, stroll garden (kaiyushiki teien) from the manor house, Murin Villa.

Manor house (omoya), Murin Villa.

Teahouse (chashitsu), Murin Villa.

149

Sitting rooms (zashiki) of the manor house, Murin Villa.

26. RELATIONSHIP: KANKEISEI 関係性

270

Townhouse (machiya), Kawagoe, Meiji Era.

Kuma Kengo, Suntory Museum of Art (Santorī Bijutsukan), Tōkyō Midtown (Tōkyō Middotaun), Tōkyō, 2004–2007.

271

Mitsui Family Shimogamo Villa (Mitsuike Shimogamo Bettei), Kyōto, Meiji Era, moved to its present site in 1925.

272

Clockwise from top right: Kuma Kengo, street façade, entrance veranda (engawa), roof over entrance, and garden façade of the Nezu Museum (Nezu Bijutsukan), Tōkyō, 2006–2009.

273

Sensōji, with Nakamisedōri, Asakusa, Tōkyō, founded 645, rebuilt 17th century and 1958–1974.

Back alley of Nakamisedōri, looking toward the Asakusa Culture and Tourism Center.

Kuma Kengo, Asakusa Culture and Tourism Center (Asakusa Bunka Kankō Sentā), Tōkyō, 2009–2012.

Clockwise from top left: Information lobby, second floor internet and sightseeing information area, fifth floor multipurpose space, and seventh floor terrace of the Asakusa Culture and Tourism Center.