Abstract
The concurrent publication in 2016 of three catalogs on Asian architecture and urbanism to accompany major exhibitions in the United States marks a mini peak of interest in the subject, one that arrived in quick succession after a similar spurt five years earlier when simultaneous publications on the architect Tange Kenzō (1913-2005) and the Japanese Metabolist movement stimulated renewed scholarly attention to postwar architecture in Asia. 1 The current cluster of books extends the narrative from 1960s to present time, in addition to expanding coverage of cities and projects beyond Japan. Like their cognate exhibitions, these catalogs assume the daunting challenge of representing the spatial and sensorial dynamism of buildings and built environments through restrictive visual and textual means. With limited facility in conjuring the phenomenology of architecture and urbanism, the printed catalog’s unique strength veers toward narrative potential, by constructing cognitive ties among locations, projects, and designers in defiance of real spatial-temporal disjuncture.
Altogether the featured projects in the books accentuate an overwhelmingly metropolitan, compressed, and anonymous landscape of repetitious, abstract forms and colors. The distinctive character of modern and contemporary Asia, as suggested by these publications, is through so-called mega-projects, mega-structures, mega-cities, and their endemic clutter. People, commodities, architecture, and landscape constitute the primary elements that collide uncomfortably against, rather than seep organically into, one another. Heavily cropped photography and terse textual captions heighten the sense of formal abstraction and spatial anomie.
The books deal with discrete buildings and existing built conditions in three distinct frameworks: Kiyonori Kikutake: Between Land and Sea focuses on one architect’s half-century career oeuvre; A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, SANAA, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, Junya Ishigami presents three generations of architects and their projects from the last fifteen years; and Megacities Asia features eleven artists whose newest large-scale installations respond to the urban sprawl that has infiltrated multiple countries across the continent. The target audience groups are analogously distinct: academics for the first, design practitioners for the second, and interested general public for the last. The books, each in its own unique way, contribute to debates surrounding creation, destruction, preservation, and intervention in rapidly expanding cities and the cultures and societies that have emerged from them. A common thread to the curatorial presentation is the evocation of places and spaces suggestive of, but not quite like, the North American here, even within the metropolitan contexts of New York and Boston that hosted the original exhibitions. The extraordinary physical density and attendant architectonic flux there are palpably more urgent.
Japan occupies center stage in Kiyonori Kikutake. Ken Tadashi Oshima curated the exhibition “Tectonic Visions between Land and Sea: Works of Kiyonori Kikutake” in 2012 at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and he also serves as editor of the publication version, maintaining a similar attentiveness to locating historical context and connections for the eponymous architect. Kikutake’s untimely death in 2011 in effect reframes the exhibition and catalog as an oeuvre complete and memorial tribute equally. The finality of Kikutake’s record of works allows Oshima and collaborators to firmly position the architect in a long lineage of Japanese architecture, extending back to the ancient period. An original member of the avant-garde collective of architects who launched their vision under the aegis of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference, Kikutake is best remembered for lively sketches and futuristic models of communities spreading across the sea. His works on land—the majority of his realized designs—similarly retain the aura of the fantastic and monolithic. To single out Kikutake from his Metabolist colleagues Kurokawa Kishō (1934-2007) and Maki Fumihiko (1928-) and their joint mentor Tange Kenzō has the positive effect of tracing a continuous design philosophy that is distinct to this architect throughout his five-decade-long career, rather than allowing the 1960 joint Metabolist manifesto and presentations to engulf Kikutake’s design identity.
The book is organized into three main sections. The first section consists of a foreword by Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, followed by seven essays; roughly half are historical interpretation and analysis by scholars of modern Japanese architecture while the other half are personal interpretation and recollections by architect disciples of Kikutake. The second section presents excerpts of writings by Kikutake. The third section catalogs the architect’s major projects, mainly through drawings, models, and photographed views of actualized buildings, with the support of concise textual explanations for each project. The three sections reinforce one another’s major assessments and arguments, most notably in bringing to the forefront two unexpected design stimuli for Kikutake: his familial origin in feudal-era Kyūshū (a southern island of Japan) where the Kikutake clan was a major landowner, and his architectonic penchant for premodern Japanese shrines and temples. The conscious revisionism in this catalog, the attempt to re-read the “techno” and “mega” aspects of Kikutake’s concrete monoliths, giant towers, and sprawling cities as natural evolution of similarly monumental expressions in wooden form witnessed at the Grand Shrine of Izumo, Itsukushima Shrine (Hiroshima), and Kiyomizu Temple (Kyoto), is proposed with surprising consistency in all the essays. The designer’s own words reproduced in section 2 serve as compelling supporting evidence.
The implicit but not subtle message of the book, best encapsulated in Oshima’s introductory essay, is Kikutake’s keen appreciation of specific historic Japanese forms as he pursued the outwardly radical-looking schemes: Kikutake found particular resonance in the platforms and corridors of Itsukushima Shrine hovering above Hiroshima Bay, originating from the twelfth century; the great terrace of the Kiyomizu Temple in the eastern hills above Kyoto from 1633; or the sublime suspended structure of the Kasamori Temple from 1028 that rests on wooden stilts above a rock outcropping in Chiba Prefecture. (p. 13)
A main takeaway of the book is that the enthralling elevation, suspension, flotation, and cantilevering synonymous with Metabolist construction did not come out of nowhere; they came from premodern Japan. If you question this interpretation, then look to Kikutake’s essay “New Form and Old Tradition” of 1964, which draws to a close with: As representative examples of Japan’s traditional architecture, one might mention the Ise Shrines and Katsura Imperial Villa . . . I agree that they are superb examples of Japanese traditional architecture. But I also think that there is another genealogical line, characterized by daringness, simplicity, and vastness of scope. This line is represented by Izumo, Itsukushima, and Kiyomizu. (p. 115)
The architect concludes with the assertion that he and his peers should learn from the “old tradition,” cognizant of not just form alone but the “technological actualities” and “tradition as a whole.” Of equal interest here is Kikutake’s calculated philosophical break from the group elder, Tange, whose admiration of the architecture at Katsura and Ise was made manifest in two respective publications in 1960 and 1962. 2 Tange is set up as the antithesis to the younger designer’s preference for the comparatively less refined but more audacious spatial configuration visible at Izumo and Kasamori. In his essay contribution “What Was Metabolism? Reflections on the Life of Kikutake Kiyonori,” Itō Toyoo (a.k.a. Ito Toyo, Toyo Ito), in his capacity as Kikutake’s former employee, confirms this antithetical characterization, casting an admiring eye at the Sky House and other major Kikutake projects for their evocation of traditional floors, columns, bracketry, verandahs, and gates.
Throughout the book, Kikutake’s built and unbuilt projects take on equal significance. Section 3 starts chronologically with the Sky House in Tokyo, the architect’s own residence first completed in 1958 that underwent continued expansion and conversion in the next three decades, and ends with a Floating Luxury Hotel in Saudi Arabia proposed in 1977, a veritable pleasure city set free onto the sea. Whether the context is urban, rural, or aquatic, Kikutake-designed structures hover. Black and white photographs of the realized Sky House, Hotel Tōkōen, Miyakonojō Civic Center, and the 1970 Expo Tower, all shot from a far distance, accentuate their incongruent height and scale with respect to the surrounding landscape. The architect’s sketches of unrealized floating cities similarly dissociate the network of platforms and cylindrical towers from the faraway backdrop of mountain ranges, avian flocks, and blazing sun. As Kikutake asserts, these marine communities can appear and disappear at will. While the ocean allows man “to feel emancipated from the bondage of the land,” it is no substitute for land. Marine cities are conceived as impermanent overtures that do not need to fit in, for they will be sunk under the ocean when they become obsolete (pp. 93-95).
Kiyonori Kikutake showcases projects sited on land and sea across the Japanese main islands and farther, to Hawaii and the Middle East, yet the catalog covers a limited time span, fixating attention on the 1960s and 1970s. Later large-scale projects such as the Edo Tokyo Museum (1992), Kita Kyūshū Media Dome (1998), and Kyūshū National Museum (2004) are not discussed in the essays nor presented in the projects section, except for passing mention by Oshima in the introduction. The omission of Kikutake’s works from the most recent two decades lodges him firmly in a postwar past that is now history. Kikutake’s words as much as his works are upheld as the most reliable basis for interpreting this architect’s unique articulation of Metabolist tenets.
A Japanese Constellation, in contrast, offers much less text and context. The catalog accompanies the exhibition titled “A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond” held in 2016 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition and catalog feature six currently active Japanese architects who do not self-identify as a collective. They are drawn together by the curatorial vision of Pedro Gadanho that posits a multi-generational design lineage originating from Toyo Ito (1941-): Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, and Akihisa Hirata each at one time worked in the offices of Ito; Junya Ishigami worked for Sejima before establishing his own firm; Nishizawa founded SANAA with Sejima, although both continue to separately run their namesake firms; and Sou Fujimoto has claimed Ito as mentor. Not incidentally, Ito himself, as mentioned earlier in this review, commenced his career working for Kiyonori Kikutake. Such interlinkage should not come as a surprise, given the limited number of elite architecture programs in Japan (predominantly, University of Tokyo) and the inevitable relationships that are formed within these privileged circles; the same can well be said for the United States and its leading programs. The constellation analogy that Gadanho uses to describe this group of Japan-based architects, as if each member shines equally, shows the curator’s attempt to depart from the entrenched monographic, starchitecture culture that buoys high design today, yet at the same time, his proposition of genealogy presupposes generational hierarchy. Ito and then Sejima of SANAA are clearly the big stars of the cluster; the others line up by age and experience after them, as indicated by their order on the book title and in the table of contents.
Nearly all of the book’s 256 pages are devoted to photographs and drawings of selected works of the six architects and one firm (SANAA). Glenn Lowry, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, provides a foreword that places this exhibition in the lineage of Japan-related displays at this institution, citing as origin point the groundbreaking 1932 show “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” that included one example from Japan amid a sea of European designs. Gadanho provides a prelude essay that imagines Japanese luminaries like Ito and Sejima as deviations from the egotistical starchitect stereotype: “when Japan’s star architects favor cross-fertilization and cross-generational mutual support that move beyond mere competition and self-aggrandizement, they are observing Japanese tradition that maintains as essential mutual respect between master and disciple” (p. 15). The book tells rather than shows the kinship among the featured architects, for it organizes their projects strictly by designer rather than by form, function, type, or principle to facilitate cross comparisons. Three essays by historian-critics are inserted between the segregated sections, a format that further impedes a natural flow of affiliated ideas and forms across pages.
Compared with Kiyonori Kikutake, A Japanese Constellation gives readers minimal interpretative guidance. More picture book than manifesto in the tradition of Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s The International Style, 3 this latest Museum of Modern Art catalog includes minimal textual intervention. Serving as the opening of each designer’s section is a paragraph-long quotation printed in large-size font, source and context undisclosed; the pithiness makes them inadequate preambles for the preternaturally pale, superficially austere, and volumetrically diagrammatic structures that appear on the following pages. Take, for example, Nishizawa’s claim that “architecture creates a landscape and an atmosphere for people, for life” (p. 139) or Fujimoto’s vision that “architecture will usher in opportunities, freedom, and connections among people” (p. 165). These hazy pronouncements do not convey either designer’s unflinching experimentalism in melding functions and molding space. The essays by architectural historian Terunobu Fujimori, curator-critic Taro Igarashi, and urbanist Julian Worrall do the job of historicizing and contextualizing the featured architects and their projects, and, collectively, they provide an interpretative framework that traces the development of modern Japanese architecture from the nineteenth century to today.
The beginning of Fujimori’s essay “Magical Spatial Inversion” should be appreciated for proposing a genealogy for today’s architecture that goes farther back than Tange Kenzō. Speaking as a historian, Fujimori concisely explicates the successive waves of major foreign schools and figures that hit Japanese shores: European eclecticism, the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Implicit in Fujimori’s assessment of modern Japanese architects—who can be loosely categorized three ways, as those who studied abroad with European luminaries, those who did not but followed overseas trends closely, and those who learned at the feet of Japanese masters—is an acknowledgment of the benefit of distance from the epicenter of modernism; distance presented Japanese designers the freedom to elaborate on a preferred expression or innovate an amalgamated one. Ito, according to this formulation, was able to forge a new path by not adhering faithfully to any one school (neither the Japanese rendition of the Bauhaus nor of Le Corbusier) after his training at the University of Tokyo and then under Tange disciple Kikutake.
Igarashi and Worrall continue the narrative from this point forward, urging the reader to see Ito and his disciples featured in the book as an avant-garde collective with a penchant for minimalism of material and form yet keen sensitivity to instating new spatial order and experiences. Worrall proposes four key terms—nature, publicness, lightness, and abstraction—as conceptual touchstones for evaluating the works realized so far. What he concludes about them elucidates some of the inscrutability of the diagrammatic drawings and the abstruse spaces realized from them: These architects combine an [sic] habitual disciplinary rigor and depth with openness and curiosity to the world. This is an attitude to contemporary modernity—with its artificiality and consumerism, its technology and media, its speed and flux and lack of depth—that is neither defensive nor celebratory, alienated nor ardent. Rather the position is one of detached curiosity . . . Such an architecture is autonomous from the world yet engaged with it; reflects the world yet is critical of it. (p. 249)
The projects featured in the catalog vacillate widely between the large-scale institutions and small-scale residences in each architect’s portfolio. Of those sited in Japan, the physical and psychological disparity between the limitlessness of museum, library, plaza, and promenade spaces and the extreme compression of home spaces appears to encapsulate the experiential norm for the twenty-first-century city dweller. To lessen the oppression of constricted residential lots, the designers liberally fragment and dematerialize the box by punching out walls, sliding floor plates, cutting open roofs, and blurring living and garden zones. A straight reading of these bleached, porous houses that expose dwellers to large doses of the natural elements, garden vegetation, and the inevitable street noise and grime as expressions of, in the words of Worrall, “detached curiosity,” renders them free of the urgency and disillusion that fueled Kikutake and his Metabolist cohort in the immediate postwar period. Nishizawa’s Garden and House and Fujimoto’s House NA, for example, relate to their sites in a noncommittal fashion, neither conforming to the surrounding nor recoiling from it. The photos and drawings, equally sparse in coloration and line work, extol the experimental spirit, as if architecture could be cleanly detached from history and social reality. The latter impression holds sway in the book but not in the original exhibition, which devoted space to the award-winning Home-for-All relief project mobilized by Ito, Fujimoto, Hirata, and Kumiko Inui in response to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. The decision to omit this timely, humanitarian initiative in the book is an unfortunate one, as the book presents no project that similarly engages a social mission to offset the adulation of pure design that permeates the whole volume.
Megacities Asia, the most compact of the three catalogs under review, is also the most insistent with tackling the problems—social, ecological, and psychological—of urban built conditions. Contemporary artists through their large-scale sculptural works expose the undesirable, displaced, and neglected that overwhelm congested cities, giving overt visual-spatial expression to places, objects, and conditions habitually overlooked by high architecture. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized in 2016 at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, the book defines megacities simply (too simplistically) as cities that hold populations of ten million or more (p. 9). The eleven featured artists originate from five such cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Delhi, and Mumbai, a small and somewhat random sampling of the sixteen extant Asian megacities; the conspicuous absence of Japanese cities will be touched on later.
The short forward by the museum director, Matthew Teitelbaum, establishes the premise of the exhibition as artistic critique of unrestrained rapid urban growth, a universal problem palpable within and beyond Asia. Co-curators Al Miner and Laura Weinstein follow with an introduction that investigates a working definition of Asian megacities as sites of accumulation, characterized by the frenzied pace and chaotic pattern of accretion. Responding to the multi-layered densities ranging from skyscrapers to plastic bags that clutter skyline to street corner, the artists act as salvagers of fragments—buildings, vehicles, utensils, clothing, industrial and household waste—and reconstitute them as statements of caution, memory, or protest. The main body of the book catalogs each artist and his or her artworks through a short interpretative essay by one of the co-curators and stunning photographs of the art on site and of close-up details.
As a publication, Megacities Asia offers a straightforward proposition and a visually striking assemblage of sculptural and architectural installations. A strength behind the book’s exploration of current urban conditions is the equal weight that it gives to towering international figures like Ai Wei Wei (1957-), the most senior in the group by age and fame, and emerging artists like Aaditi Joshi (1980-), active only in the last five years with exhibits almost exclusively within Mumbai. The variety of voices sharpens the book’s communication of lived realities inside contemporary megacities. However, the catalog diminishes the powerful effect of the exhibit perceptibly by not including all fifteen works installed in the museum and instead inserting additional pieces by the same artists placed in other institutions and cities. Focused description by text and photography of the works created specifically for the MFA galleries would have lent further intellectual unity to the vastly disparate materials and scales engaged by this disconnected set of practicing artists.
Regardless of wide variations in color, material, texture, or scale, the artworks have in common a methodological reliance on repetition to visually arouse the viewer. Whether literally the same object stacked ad infinitum (Ai Wei Wei’s bikes, Subodh Gupta’s steel kitchen utensils, or Choi Jeong Hwa’s plastic bowls) or the same type of material fused into new structures (Asim Waqif’s bamboo, Song Dong’s siheyuan [Chinese courtyard house] fragments, or Hema Upadhyay’s aluminum sheeting and other scraps), the scavenged items exude unexpected esthetic power. That unexpected beauty also unintentionally blurs the line between deplorable waste (plastic bags and take-out containers that clog the environment) and desirable salvage (sustainable building materials and practices) when the resulting artworks appear similarly alluring.
While Japan occupies center stage in Kiyonori Kikutake and A Japanese Constellation, its total omission in Megacities Asia is startling and in defiance of conventional expectation. As referenced in passing in an endnote of the last book, Japan stands as the exception to the publication’s overarching assertion that megacities are recent phenomena that abruptly sprouted across Asia within the past decades (p. 112). Yet, as the nation with the longest history of urban development and industrialization in Asia, not to mention the first to formalize the education and professionalization of architecture and urban planning, Japan cannot be ignored in a narrative about Asian cities defined by enormous concentrations of people, capital, construction activity, and commodities. The absence of Japan in a discussion of Asia points to a new trajectory of investigative vision, one that eschews the established, Japan-centric regional order set in place since the late nineteenth century, for an updated twenty-first-century order premised on the enormous buying and production power of the world’s two most populous nations China and India. As Megacities Asia makes the decision to highlight cities in the throes of modernization, industrialization, and adapting to the global economy, it chooses to regard just the present and near future but not the past. Cities with longer histories of modernization like Tokyo and Osaka play no part in this vision.
The three books represent changing models of cataloging architecture and urbanism. Kiyonori Kikutake is biographical, monographic, and historically situated; A Japanese Constellation is style and ideology driven; and Megacities Asia is experimental and open-ended, an assessment of an unfolding phenomenon. Together, the publications offer different levels of engagement with Asia, architecture, design, and urbanism for a broad range of audiences, and they should be highly applauded for starting to the fill the gap in publications on these subjects. Because they bring attention fairly exclusively to the hyper-urban facets of Asia, it is the hope of this reviewer that these publications also ignite the rise of complementary studies on other aspects of Asian modernism, not necessarily rooted in cities, for a balanced view of the past, present, and future of the region.