It's not raining but pouring in the Capital. The regular outbursts of rain are accompanied by endless power breakdowns, puddles of water everywhere, all clothing feeling damp and not to mention the millions of moths hovering near the lights. After this dose of complaint, let me throw light on the bright side of it all.
The experience of walking and cycling in the rain is simply exhilarating not to talk of the pleasantly cool weather after the intense summer heat. Therefore, monsoon gives a break even if it is accompanied by suffocating humidity.
An exhibition of Japanese architecture was inaugurated at the National Art Gallery. This exhibition introduces contemporary Japanese architecture from a recent ten-year period. The first part of that period coincided with an era of economic prosperity in Japan, and the architectural world too was full of life.
However, a bubble economy fed by abnormal growth developed and architecture followed suit with designs characterised by excess. Eventually, of course, the bubble burst. Today, the banquet is over and severe social conditions prevail.
The Japanese have engaged in a great deal of sober reflection since then, but the bubble era is not entirely to be repudiated, since it opened up many new possibilities for architecture and culture in general.
Architecture must choose new direction, for there is no turning back. Nevertheless, architects continue to make use of the experience gained in the bubble era, and the diversity of architectural expression that was achieved then is now maintained on reduced budgets. This demonstrates that architecture is a part of culture and not driven entirely by the economy.
With respect to the organisation of this exhibition, the transformations that took place in architectural design in the short ten-year period have been recorded in straightforward fashion. The works have been divided into seven categories - "metropolises," "medium-size cities," "towns and villages", "suburbs", "reclaimed land," "countryside," and "resort areas" - in order to better show how architectural expression responded to changes in social conditions in Japan.
These are not only geographical but social classifications. They provide a better understanding of the nature of Japan and its architecture today.
The vitality of Japanese architecture is most apparent in metropolis such as the capital region, of which Tokyo is a part, and Kansai region, to which Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe belong. Any description of them is apt to include words such as 'confusion' and 'energy'.
The majority of the population is concentrated in these metropolises and live as uprooted strangers. Large amounts of capital are invested in land and buildings. In districts where the flow of capital is intense, the money invested in a commercial building may be recovered in just a few years. The building may be torn down to make way for something else even though it has not yet reached the end of its lifespan.
These circumstances are reflected in the landscape. Everything is ephemeral and mirage-like. Architectural designs are highly conceptual, provocative and self-assertive, but they cannot help but be artificial. After the bursting of the bubble economy, land prices fell.
Today, vacancies abound because of an oversupply of offices and housing and reinforce the eerie quality of Japanese metropolises. However, that vacuum is itself indicative of the enormous energy metropolises possess.
The majorities of Japanese cities are medium in size and have a population of several hundred thousand persons. They included many cities that evolved from castle towns. Typically, a feudal castle town had a concentric structure. In the middle was the castle, built on a hill and surrounded by Samurai residences. This spatial organisation survived in the modern era and remains in place even today.
Public buildings such as city assembly buildings, constructed in such central locations. This produces an environment that is easy to understand and human in scale.
In a city of this kind, finances are not strained to such an extent that the municipality is dependent on subsidies, and speculative land development does not threaten to create chaotic conditions.
The local government exercises control over its own destiny. Such cities, with their stability, human scale and neighbourhood relationships, constitute for many Japanese the primary world of experience.
There are also many towns and villages in Japan with a population of several thousand persons. Such areas are blessed in their natural environment, but they have only small-scale industries at best and would have difficulty maintaining their environment without subsidies.
Many youths move to metropolises to seek better opportunities. As in metropolises, a sense of community is difficult to maintain, but for entirely different reasons. The ageing of the population exacerbates the problem. In the name of 'town or village development', such municipalities nurture local industries, plan various projects and buildings that might attract tourists, and make efforts to create a more attractive regional environment.
Measures are devised at various levels, from the local government to the prefectural government, so that municipalities might survive. Construction is not simply a means to an end but a matter of life or death for a town or village.
In the case of one community centre, the cost of construction came to a million yen per resident. Construction obviously takes on much greater significance in such a context.
The process by which suburbs have been formed in Japan is not very different from that in Europe. The 'Garden City' ideas of Ebenezer Howard were quickly translated into Japanese, and developments such as Den'enchofu were begun. Cities were places with bad environments, and people moved to the suburbs to escape their harmful influence.
The creation of bedroom towns in the outskirts of cities and the growth of cities as these suburbs absorbed additional population are phenomena that have occurred throughout the world.
The extremely powerful desire of the Japanese to live in their own detached houses has produced distinctive landscapes. Even now the suburbs remain laboratories for exploring new forms of community and new relationships with the environment that take into account the impact of buildings on the scenery. However, the suburbs may not continue to display such vitality in the future. The Japanese are having fewer children, and statistics forecast a decline in the population of Japan in the 21st century.
Since the feudal period, those in power in Japan have undertaken reclamation. Sea transportation was a major part of the infrastructure in feudal Japan, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi in Osaka and Tokugawa leyasu in Edo carried out reclamation projects to construct harbour facilities and areas for commoners that were essential to cities.
They thus laid the foundation for their authority. Special international significance was also attached to reclaimed areas, as witnessed by the foreign settlement on the man-made island of Dejimain Nagasaki. Such arrangements have survived into the modern and contemporary periods. Harbour facilities and factories such as steel manufacturing plants and oil refineries essential to modern industry have been located on reclaimed land.
The construction of key facilities such as office buildings, exhibition halls and airports on reclaimed land in the 1980s was in a sense also in keeping with a long, centuries-old tradition. Japanese cities in fact depend on reclaimed land.
However, that brings with it problems. Reclamation work consumes an enormous amount of energy, damages the natural environment and in many cases is tied to vested interests. Japan is an island nation that does not share a border with any other country, and reclaimed land represents for it a frontier, a place fantastic in character that is cut off from the existing landscape.
The city and the countryside were once considered antithetical concepts. The idea behind the Garden City was that the city is an evil place where the air is polluted and morality is in crisis and the countryside is a good place blessed with nature.
However, today when everything has become urbanised, the countryside perhaps ought to be understood, not as a specific place, but a certain cast of mind, one that is oriented toward the landscape and scenery. The bubble era of the 1980s was characterised by the consumption of signs, in the sense that architects indulged themselves in allusions to architectural styles of the past.
The 1990s have seen a heightened awareness of the environment and greater interest in the relationship between scenery or the landscape and architecture. The world is no longer considered merely an architectural construct.
Architecture is seen as only one part of the entire environment, a part that must moreover be reconciled to the whole.
In that sense, it is interesting that many cultural, religious and industrial facilities are among the works that demonstrate a careful consideration of the relationship between architecture and the environment or scenery. A consciousness of scenery now signifies a distinctive state of mind.
The idea of resorts was introduced into Japan by Europeans during the era of modernisation, though traditional antecedents exist. In the 17th century, the abdicated emperor Go-Mizunoo constructed Shugakuin Detached Palace and Prince Toshihito of the Hachijono Miya family and his son Prince Toshitada Built Katsura Detached Palace for the purpose of artistic diversions such as flower-viewing , moon-viewing, poetry and music.
At the end of the 19th century, Aritomo Yamagat built Murin'an in Kyoto and integrated the architecture and the garden. Spas such as Beppu, Hakone and Atami have existed from olden times. In the Kanto region, resort areas were first developed when foreigners built retreats in highlands such as Karuizawa to escape the hot Japanese summer. Today retreats are becoming even more mass-oriented.
They are becoming an industry tied to leisure activities such as golfing, yachting and skiing. As a result, when large real estate companies spend enormous amounts of capital to develop new resort areas, the result is apt to the destruction of the environment and the creation of expensive, short-term retreats such as resort hotels. Companies are looking for an efficient way to recover their investment.
The enactment of the so-called "Resort Law" in 1987 promoted this trend. The last ten years have seen the large-scale development of resort areas and some second thoughts about the wisdom of such projects.
The comprehensive exhibition hopes to communicate not only the surface aspects of architectural design but the fact that architecture is the product of climate, society, and, especially, the times.
The summer vacations have put a break to the number of cultural events happening in the Capital. However, every day is new and every coming week carries its own agenda. So long until next week folk.
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