day 15_"My Dream After 50 Years"

I want to be a shell.  I want to be a shell. In the peaceful world I do nothing but opening and closing my shell. Nothing can be better than this. This is the "heaven of lazy people." Soon the time will come that everything will be done by machine. The only thing we have to do will be dreaming. It seems that I have become a shell, deep into all kinds of illusions. Suddenly I think of a wonderful plan. Yes, let's do it! I get up.

I want to be a god. 

I want to be a god. I hear the voice from the heaven. I am a prophet. Well, maybe I am a god myself. I order architects to build four-dimensional "universal architecture," so the plan must be drawn in three-dimensional geometry. Who will draw it? Masato Otaka? Kiyonori Kikutake? Or Noriaki Kurokawa? But the architects can only build three-dimensional space. I am the only one who can grasp the four-dimensional space. So I deserve to be a god.

I want to be a bacterium.

I want to be a bacterium. Mad, dogmatic, and fanatic are the negative words put on me. But being a god is too insipid. Perhaps I stick too much to the image of "myself." I must cast away my self-consciousness, and fuse myself into mankind and solely become part of it. I have to reach the state of selflessness. In the future, man will fill the whole earth, and fly into the sky. I am a cell of bacteria that is in constant propagation. After several decades, with the rapid progress of communication technology, every one will have a "brain wave receiver" in his ear, which conveys directly and exactly what other people think about him and vice versa. What I think will be known by all the people. There is no more individual consciousness, only the will of mankind as a whole. It is not different from the will of the bacteria.

_ a poem by Noboru Kawazoe, an architectural critic and former editor of Shinkenchiku (New Architecture), published in 1960 as part of the Metabolist manifesto.

I will return to Metabolism and its protagonists in the next few days, but for now, I just wanted to post this essay. Today I visited Kenzo Tange's Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which had a great impact on me (images to follow shortly). I feel like this essay is somewhat representative of the feelings Japanese architects had during the post-war era, questioning their role in society and the future of mankind in general.

day 15_Journey to Hiroshima

I have not spent much time in the resurrected city of Hiroshima, but the half an hour walk from the train station to the Peace Memorial Park revealed a city just like any other. In fact, it was really not that memorable. I am not going to go into a description of Hiroshima’s terrifying history and the truly remarkable rebirth, but there is one thing I would like to mention. During the train ride from Osaka to Hiroshima, I noticed a somewhat unique pattern of urban development which crystalized for me when the train reached Hiroshima. Ten to twelve-story massive structures were dispersed throughout a field of mostly residential houses or small businesses no more than two to three stories high. The tall structures densified within and around cities, but never formed a cohesive centralized area as one would expect. Rather, they always stood in isolation, provoking disquiet. The areas looked like cities in a perpetual state of becoming—but never quite there yet.

I can only assume that these repetitive ‘monsters’ are newer housing developments built within the last ten to twenty years. Even though some of these large structures could pass for social housing, most of them appeared to be in great condition, with exterior balconies and large windows.  From what I understand, Japan just does not have urban slums, such as those in India, Brazil, or even France. (After a quick search online I found out that the average lifespan of wooden houses in Japan is around twenty years, and concrete ones about thirty. The whole country seems to be in a constant state of renewal.)

Hiroshima:

day 13_Osaka

day 13_Osaka_Ando: Sayamaike Historical Museum

Seeing already two of Ando’s buildings before, I couldn’t pass the opportunity to visit his Sayamaike Museum, which is only half an hour or so from the center of Osaka, located next to the oldest manmade pond for irrigation in Japan – Sayamaike.

day 12_Osaka_another big train station

A good chunk of my time here in Japan has been spent in train stations, hoping in and out of the never-to-be-late trains, only to be carried away again into the city by relentless crowds.

day 11_Osaka_Ando: Church of the Light

The building is located on the outskirts of Osaka, in a peaceful residential area, removed from the hustle and bustle of crazy Osaka streets. One may not even notice it when passing by; only the signature concrete walls with grid-like pattern of circular holes give it away. Unlike the Museum of Fine Arts in Kyoto, which somewhat violently opens up to the street with its massive sheared walls, this structure is the complete opposite. The church is like a seashell, turning its plain back to the street while protecting the minimalist, yet complex exterior spaces that lie behind. The unseen complexity gradually reveals itself and is only fully realized after one circulates behind the building. I don’t think I quite understood from the photographs the complex nature of the spaces that lay within the structure.  One always sees images of the interior chapel, which is striking for sure, but the spatial intricacies of the exterior are just as powerful.  Stairs squeezed between two massive narrow walls that lead nowhere; a planar wall that seamlessly slips from the outside into the interior and then back out again; and the circular bench whose geometric curves highly contrast with the planarity and bareness of the surrounding walls. I remember reading recently what Ando once wrote:  “I have tried to create works that betray the expectations of the people who experience my spaces.” Well, he certainly betrayed mine.

day 10_Osaka_first impressions

I never stopped being fascinated by the elevated highways and rail tracks hovering above the city streets, sometimes creating very complex spatial networks right above one's head.