Architecture

and
the Ground
 Architecture and the Ground

Understanding Architecture in Postwar

Japan Through the Ground Plane
by

Mariana Medrano

Advisor Julian Rose

Second Reader Stan Allen

A senior thesis submitted to the School of Architecture of Princeton University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Architecture.

This thesis represents my own work in accordance with University regulations.

— Mariana Medrano

April 28, 2017

 Acknowledgements

This thesis is dedicated to my mother, Maria del Carmen Medrano, and my grandfather, Gabriel Medrano-
Stephens, for making my undergraduate career a possibility. I can never express the full extent of my gratitude
to the two of you.

Thank you to my (incredible!) advisor Julian Rose, whose genuine curiosity, and talent for listening and asking
truly probing questions were always encouraging and empowering.

Thank you to Alissa Lopez Serfozo, Ivan-Nicolas Cisneros, Jose Escamilla, Kate Chiu, Ning Loh, and Zak deGiulio
for being irreplaceable friends and informing my academic standpoints through unforgettable conversations and
late nights at studio.

Thank you to the people whose conversations with me ended up shaping the way in which I ultimately found my
footing and developed the ideas driving this thesis:

At the Princeton School of Architecture: Jesse Reiser, for referring me to eye-opening essays and great insights;
Lucia Allais, for pointing out what was obvious to her but I was initially oblivious to (that I should focus my
writing on Japan, since all the buildings I showed interest in always seemed to be there); Stan Allen, who
reinforced my critical view on the topic.

Andrew Watsky in the Art & Archeology Department at Princeton, whose research seminar on Japanese visual
history was the original catalyst to discovering my interest in Japanese architectural history.

Haruko Wakabayashi and Jin Sato at Princeton’s East Asian Studies Department, for leading an eye-opening visit
to Japan’s Tohoku region, the memory of which I am still learning from.

Yusuke Obuchi in the Architecture Department at the University of Tokyo, for speaking with me when all I had
was a field notebook and curiosity, and illustrating just how vast and intriguing the landscape of Japanese
architectural history is, and how much I had yet to read and learn about. Our conversation was the earliest part
in the process of making this thesis.
 Contents

Introduction 12

1. The Problematic Ground 18

Rejecting the Ground 21

Re-Grounding the City 29

Normalizing Ground Rejection 33

2. The Ground as Metaphor 36

The Return to the Ground 39

A Shift Towards Metaphor 47

Representing the Conceptual Ground 53

3. The Ground as Image 58

Underground Architecture 61

The Allegory of the Imaged Ground 69

Conclusion 74

Bibliography 82
Architecture and the Ground

Understanding Architecture in Postwar Japan

Through the Ground Plane
 Introduction

Before there is architecture, as both a physical object and a theoretical discourse,

there must be a platform for it: the ground plane. Despite this fundamental role, the
ground plane’s influence over architecture has been largely underestimated and often
overlooked. Even the way in which the ground is typically abstracted as a line or a plane in
architectural representations implies insubstantiality, where only the surface is relevant.

But in architecture, the ground is always more than a surface: it is a dual entity, both
a material, objective presence and an abstract construct. The ground plane precedes
architecture as a material fact, and is composed of independent properties that are
inherently influential to the character of architecture, even when this influence appears
obscured or unacknowledged. Simultaneously, the ground plane also exists as a
construct, composed of a profound symbolic character driven by subjective interpretations,
and dependent on larger temporal and physical contexts. In other words, one side of this
duality is always defined by the physical state of the ground and is objectively observable,
while the other is defined by interpretations and connotations, only made observable
through analyzing architecture’s formal relation to the ground.

This thesis will subject interpretations and uses of the ground to the same rigorous
scrutiny usually reserved for architecture. By typically operating as a mere backdrop to the
built environment, the ground plane has endorsed its own effacement from architectural
discourse, and this thesis will explore what is hidden underneath, unearthing the
multiplicity of continuous narratives, tensions, and oppositions that have never been fully
excavated.

Both the fundamental importance of the ground plane to architecture and its duality
are most explicitly apparent and influential in the architecture of postwar Japan, for the
ground’s dual character was externally affected to the point of tension. On one hand,
the ground’s surface became literally laden of ashes and ruins, and its materiality

12 13
1 2
3 enacted in the form of an architectural gesture that this thesis will describe as ground
4 In retrospect, the avant-gardist, ground-defying architecture that flourished in the early
5 further realized on the basis of rejecting what was then an antagonistic ground plane,
1
Wigen, Karen, Sugimoto Kumiko, and
Cary Karacas. "Imperial Expansion and
City Planning: Visions for Datong in the
1930s." Cartographic Japan: A History in
Maps. London: The University of Chicago
Press, Ltd. 2016.
Koolhaas, Rem, Hans-Ulrich Obrist,
Kayoko Ota, and James Westcott.
Project Japan: Metabolism Talks... Köln:
Taschen, 2011. 62-67.
14
1 a total overhaul of Tokyo. They reimagined the previously low-rise city that had been
The flattened ruins of 1945 Hiroshima.
US National Archives.
2 and architects of opposing viewpoints found commonality in this rejection of the ground.
Yoshikazu Uchida. Proposal for city plan
for Datong, Mongolia. 1938.
Koolhaas, et al., Project Japan:
Metabolism Talks, 67.
3 Japan and the country’s rapid industrialization; when these forces triggered environmental
Arata Isozaki. City in the Air, model.
Arata Isozaki & Associates. 1962.
4 turned a skeptical, recalculating gaze towards their predecessors’ ground-defying
Kiyonori Kikutake, Marine City, drawing.
Kikutake Architects.
5
Kisho Kurokawa, Helix City, model.
1961.
Kisho Kurokawa Architects &
Associates.
became associated with that of scorched earth and radioactivity; these were physical
conditions that directly shaped the platform upon which architecture could be built. 1
This adverse state of the ground was engendered through constant bombing in most
urban environments of Japan, while at the same time Japanese architects had been
exploring the tabula rasa conditions of colonized regions through speculative proposals
for new cities. 1 2 After August 1945, the imperialist fantasy of an open ground upon
which to erect new cities had been inflicted in nearly all major cities in Japan during the
war. Still, the open territories of postwar Japanese cities were not affectively equal to
the bare ground of colonies. This difference between the two forms of tabula rasa was
demonstrated by the proposals for the postwar reorganization of Tokyo, as architects
formally articulated the tensions between the ground’s construed boundlessness and
the antagonistic physical state of the ground in Japan. These formal expressions were
rejection, in which buildings were drastically elevated and removed from the ground
plane, ostensibly “rejecting” the ground. During this precarious period of postwar recovery
and processing of trauma, ground rejection was exercised throughout a wide range of
architectural works and proposals, from the grand scale of new city plans to the scale of
the individual home. 3-5
stages of the postwar recovery period, heralded by architects like Kiyonori Kikutake and
Kisho Kurokawa, can be described as generally possessing a resilient character. The
grand schemes designed by Japan’s most distinguished architects constantly proposed
characterized mainly by wood-frame construction into a towering network of concrete
megastructures, as if the city could be transformed into a fortress. This resilience was
The earth was rendered a rejected entity, and with this rejection also came a constructed
freedom from urban fragility and the memories of destruction.
However, the megacities proposed by the avant-garde were soon faced with domestic
backlash. These proposals were closely associated with the rise of technology in postwar
degradation, they too became associated with the negative consequences. The utopian
visions for Tokyo dissipated in the early 1970s with the additional hit of an oil crisis and
recession, and the architects who had been brought up in the offices of the avant-gardists
cities. This period was marked by a reconsideration of the ground plane, which was
demonstrated through formal, metaphorical, and rhetorical recalibrations of architecture’s
relation to the ground.
For instance, Arata Isozaki, who had constantly asserted his opposition towards the
earlier avant-garde, architecturally articulated this opposition through reconsidering his
architecture’s proportional relation to the ground plane. Having spent his years as an
15
6 7 architecture student and apprentice working under Kenzo Tange, Isozaki uses his first
independent commissions to reference Tange’s extreme vertical ratios by committing to
designing in a neutral ratio of 1:1 horizontal to vertical elements, which visually neutralizes
the two. When Tange’s drawings for Plan for Tokyo 1960 had emphasized the schism
between the built environment and the ground below through the use of proportions
and shadows, Isozaki also employs proportions and shadows to instead emphasize the
continuity and neutrality between architecture and the ground. 6-7

As Isozaki and other architects sought to reconcile the ground with the built environment
through their projects, the recalibration of the ground plane often operated as a
metaphoric opposition to the ground rejection of the earlier postwar architecture. Through
this metaphoric characterization of the ground plane, the ground’s significance garnered
theoretical depth. Its profundity was given in the form of these implicit meanings, obscured
8 9 by the ground’s surface but made apparent in the way architecture metaphorically returned
to the ground.

Thus, as the ground became progressively layered with meaning, its architectural role
shifted from that of a planar surface to a symbolic entity with a contextually-defined
significance. This made it possible to meaningfully appropriate the image of the ground,
for its image began to signify much more than what was superficially legible. Towards
the 1990s, architects began to excavate mountains to embed their buildings within them,
and then topping the architecture with a new constructed ground, such that the image
of the ground plane became the façade. 8-9 This was the epitome of the ground plane
as symbolic image, for at this point it was capable of holding such depth of meaning and
reference that the ground imbued the architecture it obscured with symbolic meaning.

Each of these developments will be considered in separate chapters, beginning with the
6 postwar complications of the ground as a problematic tabula rasa in the first chapter, and
Tange Lab, A Plan for Tokyo 1960: Plan progressing to explore how architects then reclaimed the ground in the following chapter.
view drawing of housing structures. The third and final chapter critically evaluates underground architecture in Japan through
1960.
Tange & Associates.
the framework established by the preceding chapters, contending that replacing the image
of the built environment with the image of the ground is a mode of historicizing architecture
in relation to this narrative.
7

Arata Isozaki, conceptual drawing for
Gunma Museum of Modern Art. 1971.
Arata Isozaki & Associates.
8
Kengo Kuma, Kitakami Canal Museum.
1999.
Mitsumasa Fujitsuka.
9
Thus, this thesis revisits the history of architecture in postwar Japan, a history that has
often been told, written about within a wide array of conceivable frameworks, from both
domestic and external viewpoints, and holds that it cannot be cohesively understood
without narrating the topic through the perspective of the ground plane. The ground had
been unquestioningly present in so much of the rhetoric dealing with the topic, that its
essentiality and influence dimmed into the background, as if retrospective gazes towards
this history had grown desensitized to the ground’s presence. Rather, here the ground
plane’s evolution in relation to architecture is held at the center of scrutiny, and what has
been previously left buried is unearthed.

Kengo Kuma, Kitakami Canal Museum The ground ran much deeper than what was initially presumed, and all that was found is
section drawing.
written here.
Kengo Kuma & Associates.

16 17
 1 The Problematic Ground
1 The end of the Second World War came to Japan in mid-August of 1945, after the
1 architectural scene, however, was characterized by an overall emergence of multiple
Koolhaas, Rem, Hans-Ulrich Obrist,
Kayoko Ota, and James Westcott.
Project Japan: Metabolism Talks...
[Köln: Taschen, 2011], 80-81.
2
Lin, Zhongjie. Kenzo Tange and the
Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of
Modern Japan. [New York: Routledge,
2010], xvi.
18
Throughout my youth, until I began to
study architecture, I was constantly
confronted with the destruction and
elimination of the physical objects that
surrounded me. Japanese cities went up
in flames. Forms that had been there an
instant earlier vanished in the next.
Isozaki, Arata. "Blue Sky of Surrender
Day: Space of Darkness." Arata Isozaki:
Four Decades of Architecture. New York:
Universe Publishing, 1998. 31.
1
Shigeo Hayashi, photographic panorama
of Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb.
August 1945.
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
Collection.
devastating nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reduced centuries of history
and tradition to ashes in less than a minute. Photographs depicting the flattened ruins
of Hiroshima reveal the immediate aftermath of the attack, when people were already
being warned against visiting the site for death was presumed to be the consequence of
exposure to the contaminated environment. 1 The trauma, however, was more widespread
and profound than what is readily observable in these photographs. The architectural
profession was committed with the task of reconstructing the nation’s cities, as most cities
entered the postwar period in primarily ruined states, while architects themselves were still
processing the results of witnessing mass urban trauma. They were tasked with navigating
the uncertain territory of Japan’s cultural resurgence amidst the postwar reorientation of
Japanese society, negotiating their experience of destruction during the war with visions
for the construction of the future built environment.
It was during the early postwar period that the Japanese architectural avant-garde
emerged from the conceptual opportunities presented by what Rem Koolhaas refers to
as the “traumatized tabula rasa.” 1 Japan’s avant-garde movement is often associated
with the Metabolists, the globally recognized group of architects who sublimated 20th
century Japanese architecture into the mainstream architectural dialogue. The domestic
architects with distinct agendas, producing a rich body of work that did not always
correlate with the historical monolith of the Metabolist narrative. The urgent need for
reconstruction and the availability of funds to drive architectural production instigated
work that was less theoretically driven than what classifying this architecture into a
single narrative would imply. Instead, architecture was simply urgent, for homelessness
abounded and there was a need to shelter Tokyo’s residents from the debris and ashes
leftover by the war, littering most of the city. This in part can be contextually attributed to
what is now known as the “1955 System,” which refers to a stabilization of Japan’s welfare
19

2 3
3 infrastructural recovery, actual recovery was not so quick and complete. By analyzing
When asked about Tange’s trajectory
after the war, Arata Isozaki recalls the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park as
“Tange’s first major work to be built in
Japan after the war,” and the Yoyogi
National Gymnasium for the 1964
Tokyo Olympics, remarking that it was
“[Tange’s] second project of national
importance.” These are commonly
regarded as Tange’s most widely
recognized and influential buildings.
Koolhaas, Obrist, Ota, and Westcott, 31.
More on Tange's influence on postwar
architecture in Japan:
Seng, Kuan. "A Genealogy of Tange's
Modernist City." In Metabolism: The City
of the Future. Tokyo: Shinkenchiku-sha
Co., 2011.
4 US Army Air Forces, Tokyo burning
Koolhaas, et al., 30-33.
20
4
2
Unknown, Shizuoka city after
firebombing. June 1945.
Mainichi Newspaper Company.
3
Unknown, scorched ground at Tokyo
after firebombings. May 1945.
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
Collection.
4 that synthesize Western modernism and Japanese traditional architecture, and indeed,
during an aerial bombing. May 1945.
United States Library of Congress.
policies and the rise of governance in the nation state model, a political development that
spurred economic growth for the coming decades. 2
With the economic impetus for urban and industrial rehabilitation in place, Japanese cities
saw their population increase exponentially in the early postwar decades. Tokyo became
the first city to reach a population of over 10 million metropolitan inhabitants, whereas
this number had been at 3.5 million in 1945. While Western modernism was premised
on the vision of the tabula rasa, dependent upon the state to fund and realize this vision
through policies such as slum clearance, Japan saw the infliction of these conditions in
its own postwar ground, and, synergized by this, architects rose to the opportunities for
architectural and urban reconstruction and experimentation.
However, the traumatized tabula rasa of postwar Japan was not the same as the visionary
blank slate idealized by figures like Le Corbusier. Having witnessed and often directly
suffered the near total decimation of the city, Japanese architects of this era both explicitly
and implicitly grappled with the events of the Second World War. The firebombings of
Tokyo are often underrepresented in relation to the nuclear attacks of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, though their casualties total more than those of the latter attacks. Many of
Tokyo’s residential districts were visibly flattened and scorched in the aftermath of these,
reduced to burnt ruins and ashes by the horrific use of incendiary bombs on primarily
wooden housing structures. 2-4 Such an event can hardly be dismissed from collective
memory and implicit influence even amid the success of reconstruction. Where ruins were
wiped to make way for newer buildings, the ground was left to absorb the war’s ashes
and serve as remembrance to the events of the war, and though Tokyo surfaced from
these ashes through what is now known as Japan’s miracle recovery, the public psyche’s
recovery is not so easily quantifiable. Despite what might be inferred from Japan’s swift
postwar Japanese architecture’s relation to the ground plane,where the ground is defined
as both a literal and formal field, conceptually existent through its referential status to the
built environment, a complex landscape of reactionary processes to the memory of the
war’s destruction is revealed.
Rejecting the Ground
The architect Kenzo Tange is today recognized as an essential figure of postwar Japan,
commissioned by the Japanese government to design projects that were culturally-
defining in their prominence and aspiration, and that arguably played a crucial role in
the nation-building of the postwar government. 3 His contemporaries have classified
Tange’s contribution to architecture as having been to successfully deliver buildings
even before having designed the projects that launched his career, Tange had earned
a reputation for this unique interest in synthesis since his early days teaching in the
21
5 The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
6 competition: Monument to the East Asia
5
Though the Ise Shrine is referred to
here as “canonical,” the Ise Shrine did
not achieve such wide recognition, both
domenstically and internationally, until
the 1930s after the German architect
Bruno Taut took note of the shrine
and praised it by comparing it to the
Acropolis.
Reynolds, Jonathan M. Allegories of
Time and Space: Japanese Identity in
Photography and Architecture. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2015.
6 Tange, Kenzō, and Noboru Kawazoe.
Lin, 51.
22
Sphere was Japan's vision for an
alliance among Japan, China, Korea,
Manchuria, and Mongolia, which would
rival the imperialist collectives of the
West, particularly the USSR.
Since WWII, the ideal for a Co-Prosperity
Sphere has been largely viewed as
imperialist propaganda.
Nihon Gaikōshi [Japanese Diplomatic
History], vol. 24.
In the vast area along [the proposal's]
road as the main axis, there will be
urban facilities necessary for the
political operation of the Sphere, as well
as facilities for the enhancement of the
Japanese spiritual culture.
Tange, Kenzo. "The winning entry of the
Co-Prosperity Sphere," Kenchiku Zasshi,
December 1942.
5 and overall form, into his design for the imperialist monument. However, the design for the
Kenzo Tange, Monument for the East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, submission
drawing. 1942.
Lin, 50.
6 framework, alluding to his explicit aim to synthesize traditional Japanese architecture with
Photograph by Yoshio Watanabe, Ise
Shrine: Main Sanctuary, photograph,
1965.
ISE, Prototype of Japanese Architecture.
Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1965, 119.
University of Tokyo, a position he took in 1946. 4 Having spent the duration of the war
working under Kunio Maekawa, who had been a direct student of Le Corbusier’s and
whose work articulates this lineage, Tange’s early exposure and connection to Western
modernism is unequivocal, and his later preoccupation with integrating modernism into
his interpretations of Japan’s vernacular architecture can be reasonably attributed to this
formative period.
During the height of the Second World War, and while about to leave Kunio Maekawa’s
office, Tange submitted two winning entries for competitions held by the Japanese Imperial
government, a success that brought him to national attention. One of the competitions
was for the design of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere Monument, vaguely
described as a place to pledge allegiance to Japan. 5 After Japan’s surrender in
1945, this project faded into the history of Japan’s imperialist period, indefinitely left
unaddressed, but it offers a unique insight into Kenzo Tange’s early independent work as
an architect. Tange’s proposed design formally references the Ise Shrine, a sacred shrine
of Shintoism and a canonical example of Japanese premodern architecture, defining its
style through what Tange interpreted to be a Japan-specific architectural language. 5 6
The drawing submitted for the competition reveals how the ground is represented as a
barely expressed field, its properties and surface conditions blurred into the background.
The ground in the proposal is expressed as if it were an implied alien or abstract
territory, despite the fact that Tange situates the monument relatively near Tokyo and
contextualizing it within a larger network of highways that would connect it to the city. The
monument itself is represented in a similarly understated manner, its height and image
outdone by the archetypal form of Mt. Fuji in the background horizon.
This mode of ambiguous and understated representation, which is more reminiscent of
a conceptual vision rather than a building proposal, lies in correlation with the fact that
the Ise Shrine has historically been more of an image rather than a tangibly-understood
object, for the main complex is inaccessible to the public and the buildings are obscured
by a self-containing network of fences. During the time Tange had prepared his proposals,
few images were available of the shrine, and Tange had not yet been granted access to
enter and document the complex, an event that transpired nearly a decade later in 1953.
Despite the limited visual documentation of the Ise Shrine, Tange opts to translate many
of what can be presumed to be highly apparent architectural elements, such as materiality
monument does not represent Tange’s proposal in its entirety, as evidenced by the title:
“Plan for a Memorial Building Connecting the Greater East Asian Highway – Chief Motif:
Plan for a War Memorial to the Construction of a Greater East Asia.” The memorial was
meant to anchor Tange’s ambition to reconfigure Japanese cities within the competition’s
Western modernism, in this case through urban masterplanning and the use of linear
networks of transportation. 6 The conceptual tabula rasa upon which Tange’s proposal is
realized is purely that—conceptual—and it is only until after the nuclear attacks of 1945
that Tange submits an entry in a national competition for the design of the Hiroshima
23
7 The Hiroshima Peace Memorial
8 Tokyo’s department of architecture. Through the university’s support, he established Tange
7 two proposals were envisioned to be built upon are comparatively interesting, for they are
Some contend that this is the product of
a fascist versus a democratic political
context, but this interpretation seems
appropriate mostly in retrospect, as it
does not suffice to account for Tange’s
radical reinterpretation of Ise at the
given moment. Tange is more focused
towards the conditions of the site, and
less on the time's political shifts.
Tange, Kenzo, Seng Kuan, and Yukio
Lippit. Architecture for the World.
Harvard University Graduate School of
Design, 2012. 48-49.
8
Koolhaas, et al., 81.
24
Exhibition Hall was built across
the river from the Genbaku Dome
(fig. 7), the area known as the
nuclear bomb's ground zero.
7 Right after the war, when we were asked by the Institute for War Recovery to make the
Unknown, photograph of the Genbaku
Dome, also known as Hiroshima's ground
zero. 1945.
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
Collection.
8
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Exhibition Hall
Peace Memorial Park complex, and is able to build on the real tabula rasa of scorched,
radioactive earth. 7
The ground plane, having been a cooperative, albeit vague field in Tange’s proposal for
the monument for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, appears characterized
in a completely opposite way in Tange's postwar proposals. Thus, the ground plane
emerges as having a dual character that will define it throughout the development of
postwar Japanese architecture: it is both physical and abstract. Its physical component
becomes literally strewn with traces of the war, and in turn, its abstract character absorbs
the connotations and memories of a destroyed landscape. Susceptible to the ground’s
antagonistic character, Tange reacts by elevating his buildings off the ground in a display
of resilience.
Tange’s seminal display of ground rejection is enacted in his design for the Hiroshima
Peace Memorial Exhibition Hall. 8 After leaving Maekawa’s office and due to the success
of his mid-war proposals, Tange was offered a teaching position in the University of
Lab, an architectural research and design laboratory, which students in the university
could apply to become part of. In 1949, Tange Lab enters a competition to design the
Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, and having submitted the winning entry, Tange
becomes implicated in the design for a project heavily embedded in social aspirations for
the demonstration of postwar recovery.
For the Exhibition Hall, the most prominent structure in the memorial park, Tange revisits
the Ise Shrine as his main point of reference for Japanese traditional architecture.
However, Tange’s formal interpretation of the shrine undergoes a nearly irreconcilable
shift in the postwar period, evidenced by considering the design for the Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere against the Hiroshima Exhibition Hall’s. The exhibition hall
is built of reinforced concrete and raised from the ground by tectonically-emphasized
pilotis, granting the structure a stark degree of geometric legibility completely opposite to
Tange’s unrealized proposal for the Co-Prosperity Sphere. 7 The sites upon which the
both similar in the conceptual embodiment of the tabula rasa. However, the contrast lies in
the character of the ground plane, where the environment in Hiroshima was presumed to
possess such a level of toxicity that Tange recalls being warned against visiting:
reconstruction masterplan for various cities in Japan, I volunteered to work on Hiroshima. There was
a rumor that if you went there you might be radiated to death and that there was no grass growing any
more. But I wanted to go there anyway, even if I would die because I had a special bond with the city.
In Hiroshima we [Asada, Otani, and Mitsuru Ishikawa] stayed in a hut with a corrugated sheet metal
roof on the scorched earth. 8
25
9 [T]he black market stalls that
proliferated before train stations in
Shinjuku and Shibuya [neighborhoods
in Tokyo] lacked even floors. . . In
comparison, just having a floor made
[the homes] a work of architecture.
Ueda, 204.
10
11
9
Kiyonori Kikutake, Sky House, 1958.
Kikutake Architects.
9 use after the war, since his former home had been destroyed during the 1945 air raids.
10
Ueda, Makoto. "Architecture Embracing
Both Reality and Vision." In Japanese Kenzo Tange, A House, 1953.
Architects: 1945 - 2010. Tokyo: Photograph by Michiko Uchida.
Shinkenchiku-sha Co., 2014. 204.
11
10
Arata Isozaki, Nakayama House, 1964.
Ibid., 204. Arata Isozaki & Associates.
26
Tange’s recollection of his time visiting a destroyed, presumably deadly Hiroshima, is of
interest in his specific reference towards the ground as “scorched earth.” Through Tange’s
rhetorical description of the ground plane upon which his proposals were to be erected,
he reveals the absence of neutrality in his conception of the ground. The word “scorched”
provokes not only the visual imagery of fire, but also the sensation and process of burning,
implying an unsalvageable state of ruin, of something being irreparably burnt.
A photograph taken during the exhibition hall’s construction illustrates the relationship
between the site and the building, where the ground plane seems as prominent within
the frame as the building's towering structure. 8 The image seems to juxtapose the two
entities of the ground plane and of the architecture as forces in opposition or tension, as
the building appears to strive for an escape from the reality represented by the ground.
The Hiroshima Peace Center Exhibition Hall rejects the former city’s ashes underneath it
and creates an artificial ground plane divorced from the ground it towers above. The pilotis
that elevate the building articulate formal acts of resilience through alienation from the
earth, which had at that point absorbed the physical traces of the war through radioactivity
and the visceral traces that were provoked by the blackened earth and the presence of
ashes. The Genbaku Dome, a building whose structural skeleton withstood the nuclear
bombing, and whose ruins are now a monument for memorialization of the event, can
be observed underneath Tange’s exhibition hall, neatly framed by the middle pilotis, and
is made small and distant by the museum’s relatively stately form. While the ground
plane evokes the decimation of a past Hiroshima through the conditions of its surface,
the artificial ground plane created by the museum is future-oriented by its rejection of the
ground, and by extension of the past, to the extent that this photograph makes the building
appear like an object that has spontaneously manifested from Tange’s imagined tomorrow,
unscathed by a site full of ruins.
The antagonistic surface condition of the ground in Hiroshima was not unique to the cities
affected by the nuclear bombings. Postwar Japan observed most of its cities in a state of
prevalent ruin immediately after 1945. Of cities that were constantly targeted for air raids,
such as Toyama, nothing survived of them after the war. Architects in Japan bore witness
to the decimation of the urban fabric of an entire nation on an unprecedented scale,
even when compared to past natural disasters and widespread fires. In the face of these
conditions, architects reacted through architectural ground rejection as an expression
of resilience. 9-11 Examples of this trend abounded in the context of a war-torn Tokyo,
where a sizable percentage of the past residential districts lied in burnt shambles,
rendering a significant number of people homeless. Architectural historian Makoto Ueda
recounts a house that architect Takamasa Yoshizaka designed and built for his personal
Yoshizaka’s new house rose from the original site through an elevated floor within the
same year, distancing itself from the ashes of the former, destroyed home, and soon
after others followed suit. 9 In such a context, the act of constructing an elevated floor
can be interpreted as an enactment of psychological and architectural resilience against
the memory of disaster, since with the ruins of the former city gone in the bombs’ fire,
the ground is what absorbs the debris of destruction in the form of ashes. In a suggested
27
12
11
Because this [radial growth] pattern is
not discarded, every time a fine new
building is erected in the metropolitan
centre, the city moves one step closer
to a comatose state . . . the permanent
structure of the modern metropolis is
incompatible with the movement that is
necessary to the life of the metropolis.
The old body can no longer contain the
new life.
Tange, Kenzo. "Five Million People on the
Sea." Shukan Asahi. Tokyo: 1960.
28
12
Kenzo Tange, A Plan for Tokyo 1960,
photograph of the model. 1961.
Kawasumi Architectural Photograph
Office, Tokyo.
assertion to this resilience, Ueda writes, “just having a floor made [the home] a work of
architecture.” 10
Thus, the multiplicity of the ground plane in modernist architecture as popularized through
the idea of the plano libre, or the free plan, was complicated when exercised in the
context of postwar Japan, for the boundless space desired by modernists was realized
through trauma. Thus, as opposed to only striving for a liberation from the constraints
of the ground plane, as is implied by the "free" plan, elevated dwellings in Japan were
more focused on rejecting the antagonistic territory of the scorched earth. Architects at
the time were faced by a ground that had absorbed both the memories and the physical
traces of radioactivity, fire, and death; consequently, many of them chose to displace their
personal dwellings from the reach of these antagonistic elements. The state-sponsored
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Exhibition Hall, hovering far above ground zero, is a testament
to an architecture that can alienate itself from the decimation faced by past cities, where
the ground’s surface is strewn with traces of the war and underneath this layer lay the
affective and collective memories of destruction, and the creation of artificial planes
represented a vital alternative for the realization of architectural resilience.
Re-Grounding the City
Architectural resilience through ground rejection manifested in the scale of urban
proposals approximately a decade later. On the first day of 1961, Kenzo Tange appears
on national television in a 45-minute program to present the officially titled A Plan for
Tokyo 1960 – Toward a Structural Organization, a meticulous visionary project for the
reorganization of Tokyo developed by the members of Tange Lab. 12 The proposal came
from Tange’s preoccupation with what he qualified to be the doomed course in which
Tokyo developed into the 1960s. Tange deemed the radially-oriented growth of the city,
which he referred to as the normative pattern for urban development, to be obsolete in
fulfilling the needs of an automobile society, and his concerns seemed especially urgent,
since at the time Tokyo had rapidly expanded into the unprecedented population count
of 10 million and demonstrated no signs of abating its growth. He predicted the unless
Tokyo’s urban fabric and networks underwent complete reorganization, the city’s growth
would stagnate, leading to what he called a “comatose state.” 11 Plan for Tokyo was
a utopian proposal, not only predicted on the advancement of the city, but also on the
perceived certainty of a future urban demise.
Tange’s motivational framework suggests that Plan for Tokyo is a demonstration of
the reactionary disposition of an architect who had already directly witnessed the total
destruction of cities, and considered this destruction an event that a city’s design had
to predict and be able to persevere. The concept of urban resilience is thus intimately
present in the proposal, manifesting in a visually striking manner as Tange reconfigures
the city into a dual linear axis and projects this axis onto the Tokyo Bay. This urban axis
29
13 15 begins in the contemporary central district of Tokyo and extends towards the ocean,
spanning 30 kilometers until reaching the opposite coast of the bay, ending upon meeting
the landmass of Chiba. The axis is composed of an interconnected, vertically stratified
network of transportation routes, mostly highways. Between the two main lines of the axis,
artificial islands contain the corporate, recreational, and other programmatically-defined
districts of Tokyo. Linear highways branch off perpendicularly from the central axis,
connecting it with floating megastructural developments principally purposed for housing.
13

When discussing the decision to displace Tokyo onto the ocean, Tange explained his
14 desire to reconnect the citizens of Tokyo to the ocean. Tokyo had historically been a
city deeply related to the ocean, he writes, and his wish was to rekindle this day-to-day
interaction with the water. By solely operating in the megastructural scale, however, this
intention seems lost in the plan’s overall design, as the city is drastically vertically removed
from the water and the highways appear to act as fortresses against the open waters. 14
Indeed, the housing megastructures are introspective architecture, directed towards their
interior courtyards, their wide bases obscuring the water below. 15 The alienation of the
built environment from the water is emphasized throughout the proposal’s representational
drawings, as the shadows separating the ocean from the built environment are the darkest
and most readily visible element. Thus, the specificity of the water as ground plane and
site is lost in Tange’s objective for a resilient city, and it instead becomes an abstracted
tabula rasa, whose only character is to function as a blank slate.

The structurally and conceptually challenging decision to displace Tokyo onto the ocean
can be interrogated under this question of specificity. 12 Tange had presented the project
12 in earnest to his audience during his televised presentation, as the members of Tange
Lab had developed the project through a rigorous process of economic and demographic
When writing about A Plan for Tokyo
1960, among other proposals that research. However, the proposal to build a city upon an ambiguous seabed drew criticism
projected the city onto the Tokyo Bay, rather than support. Tokyo’s regrounding upon the water was an escapist act, as the city
Rem Koolhaas cites "the entrenched
system of urban land ownership" as abandoned the chaotic ground plane in favor of the ocean. Instead of conceiving of a
the main reason behind the trend, for suitable tabula rasa upon which to build a vision for a utopian Tokyo on the ground, Tange
the ocean represented more of an open
ground plane than the actual landmass
implicitly deems the war-torn and recovering landscape of the ground plane unfit.
13
of Japan did.
Because of Tange’s rhetoric dealing with organic growth processes, which he used to
A Plan for Tokyo 1960: Plan view
Though not the focus of this thesis, this
drawing of housing structures. inform the linear axial growth process he implements in Plan for Tokyo, the project is today
does not oppose the contention that
Tange & Associates.
ground rejection was also driven by an generally associated with the Metabolist movement, which is famous for having developed
aspiration for urban resilience against
similar analogies between architectural and organic processes. Still, a significant number
the perceived toxicity of the ground.
14 of the architects who had worked in Tange Lab and collaborated on the proposal also
In fact, Koolhaas's position reinforces
the idea that the formal act of ground identified as Metabolists, and they endorsed the general ideology behind the movement,
A Plan for Tokyo 1960: Elevational detail
rejection is motivated by interpretations
of the corporate district. Drawing by often integrating it within their own methods. In retrospect, despite never having been an
attached to the ground plane by
Arata Isozaki.
architects. official member of the group, Kenzo Tange can never be fully extricated from Metabolism,
Tange & Associates.
for his practice had fostered many of the younger architects who later directed the avant-
Koolhaas et al., 267, 284-286.
15 garde movement. 13

13 A Plan for Tokyo 1960: Perspective detail

of the model.
Ibid., 285. Tange & Associates.

30 31
"Metabolism" is the name of the group,
in which each member proposes future
designs of our coming world. . . We
regard human society as a vital process
- a continuous development from atom
to nebula.
Kawazoe, Noboru, et al.
Metabolism/1960 - The Proposals
for New Urbanism. Tōkyō: Bijutsu
Shuppansha, 1960.
16
14
[T]he architects of the Metabolism
Nexus each had their own concerns,
which were reflected in their designs:
Kikutake and Kurokawa proposed
projects featuring enormous urban units;
Otaka and Maki proposed the concept of
gunzokei ("Group Form"). . .
The involvement of Asada Takashi and
Kawazoe Noboru in this conference
confirms that Tange was the progenitor
of the Metabolist movement: Asada had
served as Tange's right-hand man and
Kawazoe, the group's theoretical leader,
had established Tange as Japan's
leading post-war architect. . . while
editor of Shinkenchiku.
Hajime, Yatsuka. "The Structure of this
Exhibition: The Metabolism Nexus' Role
in Overcoming Modernity." Metabolism:
The City of the Future. Tokyo:
Shinkenchiku-sha Co., 2011. 12-13.
32
It is incorrect to say that the most sure
means to live is to cling to the land.
Kikutake, Kiyonori, et al.
Metabolism/1960 - The Proposals
for New Urbanism. Tōkyō: Bijutsu
Shuppansha, 1960.
The original Metabolist Group was
comprised of the following seven
members: Kisho Kurokawa, Kiyonori
Kikutake, Fumihiko Maki, Masato
Otaka, Noboru Kawazoe, Ekuan Kenji,
and Awazu Kiyoshi. Their writings and
drawings were jointly compiled into
Metabolism/1960 as part of the general
manifesto.
For more information on their individual
roles and backgrounds, see Hajime,
10-15.
16
Kawazoe, Noboru, et al.,
Metabolism/1960 - The Proposals for
New Urbanism, publication's cover.
Normalizing Ground Rejection
Metabolism first emerged as a cohesive movement during the 1960 World Design
Conference held in Tokyo, as the group of architects who identified with the movement
distributed a publication titled Metabolism/1960 – The Proposal for New Urbanism, a
collection of data and documents from the group’s meetings. 16 Metabolism/1960 lay
the foundational rationale for an avant-garde movement that would unfold into a complex
and multifaceted history, rather than ever compressing into a singular theory or practice.
14 Nevertheless, the use of the word Metabolism to describe the ideologies driving the
movement offers a common reading of the group’s theories, namely the analogy between
a biological process and an architectural or urban process. In a metabolic process, simple
units are aggregated to formulate a complex whole, and the process component of this lies
in the implication of instability, or that the units will be cyclically subtracted and aggregated
without adhering to the aim for balance or rigidity. Understanding the integration of this
concept into an architectural methodology illustrates the source of such concepts as the
“megastructure,” a term originally coined by the Metabolist Fumihiko Maki, or “capsule
architecture,” a style manifested in Kisho Kurokawa’s work. While “megastructure”
alludes to the final, grand configuration of individual units, “capsule architecture” implies a
preoccupation with the characteristics of the unit itself, rather than with the final aggregate
form of units. The differences and overlaps of these concepts illustrate the distinct ways in
which individual Metabolists interpreted and developed the movement.
When asked what originally brought the Metabolist group together, the architect and
original Metabolist Kiyonori Kikutake claims that it was an effort to address “the important
question of what unique qualities and ideas Japan could bring to the world.” 15 This
aligns with the group distributing its manifesto in a global conference, foreshadowing the
Metabolists’ later ability to exercise a prolific media presence in Japan and abroad. It also
provides insight into the implicit concern for presenting to the world a culturally emergent
Japan that could meaningfully differentiate itself from the Western cultural dialogue.
Indeed, Metabolism’s utopian vision for an architecture that embodied a dynamic and
organic process deemed it a unique avant-garde movement, concerned with pursuing a
utopian urban future for the emergent postwar Japanese city, rather than solely articulating
contemporary technologies through individual buildings.
Thus, the 1960s were marked by visionary proposals to reorganize Tokyo, and these
often additionally relocated the new city to alternatives of the existing ground plane,
rejecting the ground in a way that formally relates these proposals to the earlier versions
of ground rejection in the scale of the home and of the public building (i.e. the Sky
House, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Exhibition Hall). For instance, an urban proposal
that displayed this mode of regrounding was Kiyonori Kikutake’s Marine City, an urban
33
"Tokyo is hopeless," Isozaki declares.
"I am no longer going to consider
architecture that is below 30 meters in
height. . . I am leaving everything below
30 meters to others. If they think they
can unravel the mess in the city, let
them try."
Koolhaas, et al., 40.
17 18
proposal that he constantly revisited throughout the 1960s, envisioned a city composed
of radial infrastructural planes floating like independent islands on the Pacific Ocean,
interconnected by a network of bridges. In Marine City, dwelling spaces are conceived
of as prefabricated capsular modules, partially embedded into towering cores. The cores
operate as vertical projections of the man-made ground plane, extending the urban fabric
into a vertical order rather than a horizontal one. For Kikutake, the interpretation of the
water as a tabula rasa is extended towards the sky through the cores that organize the
19 housing units vertically, demonstrating that both the water and the sky could also serve as
alternative fields to the problematic ground plane.

The architect Arata Isozaki, who did not identify with the Metabolist movement but was
at the time working in Tange Lab, independently developed a resonating urban project
in 1962, titled Shibuya Project: City in the Air. Isozaki’s explicit intention was to relocate
urbanity towards the open sky, using a megastructural model that makes use of cores that
operate as monolithic structural supports that remove the city from the ground. Like in
Marine City, the cores of the megastructures act as vertical artificial ground planes, and
the horizontal dwellings spaces that projects outwards from the cores are substitutes for
20 21 22
the rejected urban fabric below. The ground plane is disconnected from Isozaki’s proposed
city as the megastructures are connected to each other and enable circulation throughout
the whole network, which renders the cores the only referential ground plane towards the
habitable spaces.

17
Kiyonori Kikutake, Marine City,
model.
Kikutake Architects.
18
Masato Otaka. Neo Tokyo Plan,
proposal draft drawing. 1958.
Bureau of City Planning Tokyo
Metropolitan Government.
19
Arata Isozaki. City in the Air,
model. 1962.
Arata Isozaki & Associates.
20
Kisho Kurokawa, Helix City,
15 model. 1961.
Kisho Kurokawa Architects &
Koolhaas, et al., 12. Associates.
21
Kisho Kurokawa, City Farm,
model. An elevated concrete
grid removes the city from the
open ground below.
Kisho Kurokawa Architects &
Associates.
22
Kenzo Tange, Renewal of Tsukiji
District, model.
Tange & Associates.
Though the rejection of the ground in both the scale of the city and that of the individual
building was a prevalent gesture throughout Japan’s postwar resurgence, the new
urban developments of the 1960s obscured the postwar ashes, and the ground was no
longer visually toxic or unsalvageable. Rather, the connotations of toxicity were implied
through the drive to colonize alternative ground planes, by either projecting architecture
horizontally over the Tokyo Bay, or by establishing a vertical artificial plane to extend
urbanity into the air. The megastructural core became the new ground, and this was
largely normalized in the Japanese avant-garde during this period. 17-22 Architects
poured out proposals for cities that explored alternative planes for construction in a
popular effort to abandon the problematics of the ground, as the ground represented the
antithesis to the utopian desires of urban resilience expressed by these proposals. Ground
rejection as a formal gesture became synonymous with the optimistic futurism explored by
the avant-gardists.
When the avant-garde movement in Japan fizzled during the 1970s, or as Rem Koolhaas
put it, burned “in the bonfire of neoliberalism,” ground rejection as an expression of
futurism, or as resilience against destruction, also declined. 15 This did not, however,
mark the end of the creation of artificial planes in Japan, as the period after the 1970s
complicated the narrative of the ground and produced new ways in which the younger
generation of Japanese architects would reinterpret and reclaim the ground plane.

34 35
 2 The Ground as Metaphor
1 Ten years after the World Design Conference and the initial publication of the Metabolist
1
TIME Magazine. March 2, 1970.
2 1
Koolhaas, Rem, Hans-Ulrich Obrist,
Kayoko Ota, and James Westcott.
Project Japan: Metabolism Talks... Köln:
Taschen, 2011. 528.
36
Photograph of Nakagin Capsule Tower
framed by the Ginza district in Tokyo
during the 1970s.
Kurokawa, Kisho. Metabolism. 1977.
manifesto, the Osaka Expo of 1970 provided a global stage to display the achievements
of Metabolism since its conception. It was the first time a world fair was hosted in Asia,
redirecting the world’s attention from a Western-centric perspective and emphasizing
Japan’s miraculous recovery, as the country’s economy had rapidly grown into the second
largest after the United States. The Osaka Expo marked a shift in world affairs, as TIME
magazine reported at the time, “No country has a stronger franchise on the future than
Japan.” 1 The message advertised by the Osaka Expo was clear: Japan had emerged
from the rubble of the war to lead both the East and West into the second half of the
twentieth century.
Uzo Nishiyama and Kenzo Tange were commissioned as the masterplanners of the
Expo. Nishiyama drafted the conceptual arrangement of the event’s grounds, while
Tange was responsible for the plan’s development and final realization. As the instigator
of Metabolism, Tange provided the space and means for the Metabolists to explore their
ideas in the pavilion scale, a departure from the urban scale that the Metabolists were
known for at the time, and this exposed the diversity of interpretations and methods
within the movement. For instance, Kisho Kurokawa used the opportunity to explore
his “capsule-in-space-frame” concept through his Beautillion, a pavilion that served
as a kind of manifesto for the later Nakagin Capsule Tower, which boasted the ability
to be assembled in less than a week, described by Kurokawa as a “classic example
of Metabolism.” 2 1-2 Mass-production and quick assemblage, ideas extracted from
Japan’s successful industrialization and relevant to the rising age of information and
technology, were largely present in the Metabolist pavilions in the Expo, contradictory
to the movement’s initial analogy to natural organisms and its opposition to Western
Modernism’s emphasis on architecture as machine. Throughout the Expo ‘70, Metabolism
advocated for a technology-driven architecture, which disassociated the movement from
its original intent to create an architecture that was characterized mainly as a visionary
37
2 responsive mechanism to external processes and forces, rather than being characterized
3 4
3 nature and of the ground. Three main architects who launched their careers in the 1970s
Isozaki, Arata. "Reduction to the Blank:
Method, Manner." Arata Isozaki: Four
Decades of Architecture. New York:
Universe Publishing, 1998. 72-73.
4 Osaka Expo '70 by Kisho Kurokawa.
Ito, Toyo, and Thomas Daniell. "The
Fugitive." Tarzans in the Media Forest.
London: Architectural Association
Publications, 2011. 7-8.
4 youngest of the Metabolists represented in the event, timed the publication of The Work
Koolhaas, et al., 45.
5 Cover by Kiyoshi Awazu. The Work of
Ibid., 590-602.
38
by the use of contemporary technology.
Arata Isozaki, who at the time was employed under Tange’s office, had been tasked with
both organizing the equipment for the Festival Plaza, the Expo’s central arena, and with
creating a pavilion in accordance with the expo’s theme, despite his growing dissent
towards Tange’s and the Metabolists’ ideas. Officially, the Osaka Expo operated under the
theme “Progress and Harmony for Humankind,” but Isozaki’s project for the expo seemed
to be a more telling representation of the Expo’s implicit agenda, one that was more
focused on the display of technological achievement. Isozaki designed a performing robot
for the expo, and on the same day that the robot was meant to "dance" to the Japanese
national anthem, he collapsed from fatigue, and perhaps also from a sense of personal
dissonance, and had to be hospitalized. 3 It was then that, amid his exhaustion and
delirium, Isozaki resolved to leave Tange’s office to establish his own firm, and “to make
darkness and ruin the basis of [his] theories of space and time.” 3
It was not only for Arata Isozaki that the Osaka Expo represented a tipping point. An oil
crisis halted the Japanese economy soon after the exposition’s massive global success,
along with a growing critique of industrialization due to its negative environmental and
public health consequences. 4 Technocratic architecture seemed misplaced in such a
context, and Metabolism was, for the first time since its conception, seemingly excluded
from the Japanese public’s vision for the future. Indeed, in the years following the Osaka
Expo, Tange did not receive commissions from the Japanese government. 5 Architects
affected by Japan’s stagnated economy began to export their work, increasingly to the
Middle East. The idea of the tabula rasa that had first been represented by the Japanese
postwar ground migrated from the island-nation to the desert of the Middle East, and
then extended to de-colonized nations in Africa and nation-building proposals in Eastern
Europe. 6 The ground plane in Japan shifted from being both a boundless space and
an antagonistic entity, to demand recalibration in the wake of Japan’s reconsideration of
articulate this recalibration of the ground plane in their defining projects, namely Kisho
Kurokawa with the Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972), Arata Isozaki with the Gunma Museum
of Modern Art (1974), and Toyo Ito with the White U House (1976).
2
Takara Beautillion designed for the
Archigram Archives. The Return to the Ground
3
Deme and Deku robots designed for the Kisho Kurokawa, who during the time of the Osaka Expo ’70 was 36 years old and the
Osaka Expo '70 by Arata Isozaki.
Archigram Archives.
of Kisho Kurokawa to coincide with his participation in the exposition. 4 Rem Koolhaas
4 describes the book as “a merger of theory (capsule, space frame, metamorphosis) and
graphic audacity,” a testament to Kurokawa’s media-savvy personality and his status
Kisho Kurokawa. 1970. as both a rising architect and a public figure in Japan and abroad. Kurokawa became a
Mori Art Museum.
39
5 6 kind of spokesperson for Metabolism in his ambition to widen its scope of influence, and
such was apparent through his efforts to publicize and market his ideas. Words specific
to Metabolist rhetoric adorn the book’s cover in a provocative layout and color scheme,
effectively branding Kurokawa’s image as an architect and making it palatable for mass
public consumption. Having been commissioned to build the ostentatiously futuristic
Nakagin Capsule Tower, opened in 1974, Kurokawa’s individual reputation rose as
Metabolist visionary proposals generally declined in Japan due to the country’s stagnating
economy. Perhaps through a combination of these factors, the Nakagin Capsule Tower
stands today as the international icon for the Japanese postwar avant-garde, unrivaled in
the attention it has and continues to receive on an international scale. 6 5

The tower is an aggregation of prefabricated, structurally identical capsules, vertically

7
stacked and arranged around two core-like structures that emerge from the ground. 6
The capsules are the living units, while the cores are meant to fulfill circulatory, mechanic,
and general structural needs. 7 Kurokawa conceived of architecture as a fabricated
object that could be liberally manufactured and discarded in tandem with the ebb of
demand and the building’s own decay and disuse; thus, the Nakagin Capsule Tower was
designed not as a finished project, but rather as a building meant to undergo a process
of both aggregation of new capsules and subtraction of the old ones. This is structurally
achieved by attaching the capsules to the cores through the sole use of four bolts, and
in Kurokawa’s vision for the building, this theoretical ease of addition and removal would
have encouraged evolution, or metabolism, throughout the tower’s lifespan. Indeed, this
would have represented an architecture that was liberated from the specificity of the site,
since the tower was designed as a simultaneously grounded building, embedded within
the realities of its surroundings, and as an unbound vision, abstract from the urban reality
of 1972 Tokyo.

The capsule stands for the emancipation of a building in relation to the ground, and
heralds the era of moving architecture. 7

The intention to remove a visionary architecture from the ground resonates with earlier
Metabolist proposals particularly in that there is an explicit desire to reject the ground
5 plane. Kurokawa even elevated the capsules from the ground plane (here, the urban

Kisho Kurokawa, Nakagin Capsule

fabric) through an architectural pedestal, where the lobby is located. Unequivocally
Tower. modernist in a way that references the international style, this base is hardly compromising
6 Accessed on ArchDaily.com.
towards the capsule manifesto the rest of the building represents. The use of pilotis to
Hajime, Yatsuka. Metabolism: The City
6 elevate the building is also subverted by the cores, which serve as the main structural and
of the Future. Tokyo: Shinkenchiku-sha
foundational base of the building and are thus embedded in the ground and then extruded
Co., 2011. 146.
Ibid, elevation and section drawings.
upwards, as if the ground plane itself was undergoing an extrusion, since the cores are

7 7 excluded from the dwelling units and provoke a certain ambiguity in the way that they rise
above the rest of the tower in a pointed, abstract geometric manner. The building rejects
Kurokawa, Kisho. "Article 2." Each One Mechanical details and plan drawing.
the ground plane only on a surface level represented by the modernist base and pilotis, in
a Hero: The Philosophy of Symbiosis. Kisho Kurokawa Architects &
Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1997. Associates. agreement with Kurokawa’s own rhetoric, yet the central cores represent the tensions and

40 41
8 9 limitations in this ground rejection.

The capsules are rather specific, even limited, in their program. They possess “a twin bed,
a television, a shelf, a window, a bathroom, and a foldout desk. Other needs, assumed
the architect, would be provided by the city of Tokyo.” 8 8-9 This assumption made by
the architect transcends the building’s physicality, somehow extending the architectural
realization from within the building towards the city itself. Thus the building is not only
physically and literally grounded in its site by massive cores, but the city also acts as
a conceptual ground plane and becomes a metaphorical extension of the architecture,
where the two are conceived of as overlapping entities in constant interaction. Kurokawa's
blurring of the limits between architecture and the ground plane is further demonstrated by
contrasting the Metabolist ideology as represented in the Nakagin Capsule Tower versus
the Sky House, two residential buildings, albeit of different scales, that are often credited
with representing contemporary embodiments of Metabolism. 9

10 11 At the early strides of the Metabolist movement, proposals had typically strived to dislocate
the new city from the old one. Ranging from building upon the Tokyo Bay, as proposed in
Kikutake’s Marine City and Tange’s Plan for Tokyo, to building above the obsolete city, as
in Isozaki’s City in the Air, the tendency had generally been to translate the city to a new,
oftentimes seemingly unfeasible setting: anywhere but the ground. Even in the scale of
the personal home, Metabolist proposals generally placed themselves upon a constructed
ground plane, elevated not only from the real ground but also from conceptual constraints
imposed by it. For instance, the Sky House, noteworthy for its originally disproportionately
elevated design, utilizes supports that are arguably also disproportionate for its scale,
alluding to an infrastructural capacity. 10 Its corridors, removed from the interior of the
home and projected towards the exterior, imply a potential for a horizontally-arranged
aggregate architecture, resembling a grid-like blanket of infrastructural homes to substitute
the existing urban fabric. 11 The home’s interior arrangement is granted with a degree of
flexibility, as Kikutake intended, as the bathroom and kitchen are movable units, meant to
accommodate the inhabitant. Thus, the Sky House is successful in alluding to an artificial
ground plane that operates in the urban scale, and exposing the individual inhabitant to a
Metabolist architecture, which here undertakes the definition of a module-like unit with the
8
capacity for internal and external evolution. The city is rendered irrelevant to the house’s
Interior of individual capsule.
longevity.
Kisho Kurokawa Architects &
Associates.
Superficially similar to the Sky House, Kisho Kurokawa’s housing units, the capsules

9 that constitute the Nakagin Capsule Tower, also displace themselves from the ground
plane through an elevated base. The capsules came outfitted with all the furniture
8 Ibid., drawing of interior.
that at the time the individual Tokyo resident was projected to ever make use of in the
Noritaka, Minami, Julian Rose, and
architect’s mind, and Kurokawa conceived of the capsules as being shelter-like in their
Ken Yoshida. 1972. Heidelberg: Kehrer 10
Verlag. 2011. 92. size and intimacy, protecting the individual from unwanted communications in the dawn
Kiyonori Kikutake, Sky House, 1958. of the information age. However, the units were not meant to exist independently of
Kikutake Architects.
9 the ground below, and unlike the Sky House, the building’s successful longevity relies
on an interdependence between the city and the building. The capsules’ programmatic
Hajime, Yatsuka. Metabolism: The City 11
of the Future. Tokyo: Shinkenchiku-sha limitations, such as the lack of a guest-oriented area or a kitchen, imply that certain
Co., 2011. 51-52, 146. Ibid., plan drawing.

42 43
12 individual needs should be fulfilled by the city itself. The Nakagin Capsule Tower has thus
threaded an existence between physicality and fantasy since its inauguration, providing
an objectively suitable home while still relying on an imagined future to complement a
capsular lifestyle. Kurokawa laid the question of the fulfillment for the tower’s vision upon
the urban fabric.

In 2011, the photographer Noritaka Minami conducted a thorough documentation of

the Nakagin Capsule Tower’s interior and exterior spaces, exploring how Kurokawa’s
projected vision for the tower relates today to the building’s conditions. 12-15 The
photographs offer a glimpse into how the tower’s fulfillment remains unrealized. They
reveal the worn and individualized interiors of the capsules, where Kurokawa’s vision
was overwhelmed by objects of personhood, lack of maintenance, and an evolved
technological reality. A portable internet modem can be observed being charged on one
of the desks photographed, and Kurokawa’s original intention for the capsules to act as
information shelters comes undone through the reality of contemporary communications.
13 14 15 Unlike the Sky House, the living units of the Nakagin Capsule Tower were not meant to
serve the evolving needs of the inhabitant, able to act independently of the city. Rather,
they represent an implicit reliance on the city as a complementary plane. In terms of
contrasting Kurokawa’s capsule tower to earlier Metabolist proposals, this reliance on the
ground plane is crucial in understanding the way in which the Nakagin Capsule Tower
represents a return the city as not only a suitable ground plane, but also a continuous
plane, meant to extend the reach of the architect’s vision.

Due to the unrealized relationship between Kurokawa’s tower and the city of Tokyo
today, the tower has come to face a constant threat of demolition since the architect’s
passing in 2007. The capsules, initially fabricated under the expectation that they would
be replaced every 25 years, were never dissembled from the cores and substituted. The
tower’s residents found that it would be costlier to replace every capsule than to demolish
the building and rebuild it completely, also considering the structural and mechanical
maintenance necessary to fully restore the twin cores to their full capacity. 10 Today,
the Nakagin Capsule Tower, in its state of disrepair and neglect, occupies a lot in one of
Tokyo’s most expensive neighborhoods, and the promise of the exorbitant value of a new
12 building in the tower’s current lot has sustained the drive to replace it instead of preserving
it. Despite the contemporary nature of the tower’s uncertain fate, its ultimate lack of
Noritaka, Minami. Exterior detail of
Nakagin Capsule Tower. 2011. fulfillment was still foreshadowed even in the seventies soon after its completion, when the
1972. ideas manifested in the capsule tower failed to be applied elsewhere:

13
10 Ibid, capsule interior. Kurokawa’s twin tower, built in 1972 on the Ginza in Tokyo, was the only major project born
Minami, et al., 86-89. of the visions of 1960. . . [The capsule tower] was repeated only once. All that remained of the idea
14 in 1975 consisted of the externally attached cloakrooms on Kurokawa’s Sony Tower in Osaka, which
11 Ibid.
gave the tower structure a technological aura reminiscent of the period of manifestos and radical
concepts. 11
Ito, Toyo, Manfred Speidel and Andrew
Barrie. "Origin and Destination?" Toyo 15
Ito: Blurring Architecture. Auckland,
N.Z.: Artspace, 2001. 23. Ibid.

44 45
 A Shift Towards Metaphor

Under the critical environment of Japan in the seventies, when technocratic, large scale
proposals entered public scrutiny as poor remedies for postwar devastation, and when
the recession drove the perception of Metabolist proposals from utopian visions to
inappropriate fantasies, architects who subverted this architectural technophilia began
to exert a greater influence on the development of 20th century Japanese architecture.
Toyo Ito, who worked under Kiyonori Kikutake for four years and held a significant role
in representing Kikutake’s office in the Osaka Expo ‘70, was deeply influenced by these
influences in the early stage of his career. As Ito parted ways with Kikutake’s practice,
disillusioned by the firm’s methodology despite his original admiration, he established his
own practice, URBOT, a combination of the words “Urban Robot,” suggesting a connection
to Metabolist rhetoric and simultaneously reducing his firm's name to a near-parodic
reference. 12

The essay that Toyo Ito published in 1971 to accompany the shift in his professional
career, “The Logic of Uselessness,” is a satirical narrative of URBOT’s conceptual origins
and its role in the city. In Ito’s account of URBOT, he animates his practice through action,
writing that “over a period of two years, URBOT had quietly observed the movements of
society,” and that “the urban spaces in [URBOT’s] surroundings were undergoing great
transformations.” The essay goes on to vibrantly describe a Metabolist dream as
URBOT’s “surroundings,” a city littered with “multistorey buildings made of huge steel
frames. . . their outer surfaces clad with white, scale-like, precast concrete units, while
endless dreary plazas and parks were being created, based on a blind faith that salvation
would be assured by chanting ‘community, community’ like a mantra.” 13

“The Logic of Uselessness” thus delivers a pointed critique of the 1960s grand scale
proposals of Metabolism. However, Ito does not remove URBOT from this Metabolist
aspiration, instead asserting the practice’s own presence within it. URBOT, like Ito, traces
its origins to that reality even as it attempts to escape it, reasserting its own logic in
simultaneous critique and acknowledgement towards the avant-gardists of the 1960s. Ito
enumerates the following, perhaps contradictory aspirations of URBOT in the following
passage:

12 URBOT advocates the negation of real conditions without leading to a simplistic focus
on utopia, he wants his presence to manifest as a tangible shape in the real world . . . while URBOT
Daniell, 6.
senses the unbearable sterility of the metropolitan environment exemplified by Tokyo, the fact is that
he could not escape the environment of the city and survive. 14
13

Ibid., 22.

“The Logic of Uselessness” can be considered under a multiplicity of frameworks,

14
including, but not limited to, a theoretical exploration into Ito’s personal architectural
Ibid., 26.

46 47
16 ethos, a manifesto, an urban ethnographic diagnosis, a science fiction narrative, and a
caustic account of Ito’s perception of his predecessors, as Thomas Daniell points out in a
reference to Ito’s essay. 15 URBOT itself is characterized as an introspective entity, not
only self-aware, but also self-critical, simultaneously conscious and reactionary towards its
environment. Ito details this awareness and animosity towards URBOT’s surroundings in
the 1977 essay “Signs of Light,” describing Tokyo as a city whose image is only perceived
in a dull haze, as shadows and light are subdued by overwhelming forces in the city acting
at odds. There is no true darkness in Tokyo, and even the sunlight is opaque and dull, Ito
writes, and this traps the city within a self-referential framework, disconnected from the
“cosmos,” and where no true gradient of light can be found. 16 Ito considers this gradient
to be imperative in architectural expression, and yearns for what he calls “medieval
light,” attributing an engendering of beauty in Le Corbusier’s work to this kind of light.
Conclusively Ito asserts the “futility of this persistent yearning,” suggesting that he can
never fully articulate his architectural aspirations in the context of contemporary Tokyo. 17
Ito’s disdain towards Tokyo is clear throughout his writing, and it is similarly expressed in
his architecture’s relation to the ground plane, specifically in the White U House, designed
within nearly the same time frame as his writing.

The White U House, completed in 1976, was built upon a lot next to Toyo Ito’s own home
17 in a suburban neighborhood of Tokyo for his sister to move into. Ito’s sister had just lost
her husband to illness, left to parent two young daughters, and in her grief and desire to
grapple with the loss, she bought the lot next to Ito’s house and commissioned him to
design her new family home. The house that Ito designed in response to this came to
represent the catalyst for his solo career. 18

Toyo Ito has described the White U House as a bunker-like structure, seemingly
underground, for its exterior is uninterrupted by windows or any other apertures, except for
the double doors that represent the main entrance. 19 16 However, the white color and
smoothness of the doors fails to create a significant disruption of the façade’s continuity
and fortress-like state, which is further emphasized by the way in which the home lies on
15 a small pedestal, evidenced by a small series of steps that slightly, yet clearly elevate the

Ibid., 4.
home from the sidewalk’s height. 17 The curved façade further alienates the home from
its surroundings, as its form stands in tension with the neighborhood block in which it was
16 built, where more traditional homes can be observed emerging from surroundings of the
house. If seen from above, the home is revealed to be more of a shelter-like structure
Ibid., 42-44.
than an underground bunker, as the interior of the U-shaped building holds a courtyard.
The slanted design of the roof, where the exterior edge of the U is raised and the rest of
17
the roof is downwardly sloped towards the interior edge, suggests that the courtyard is
Ibid., 54-55. 16 the building’s center, and differentiates the ground exterior to the home’s façade from the
Toyo Ito. White U House, aerial ground in the interior courtyard. 18
18 perspective.
Toyo Ito & Associates. The White U House as a fortress protecting its interior from its environment evidences
Ibid., 11.
Ito’s own writing about URBOT, as building is aware of both itself and its surroundings,
17 and in this awareness and animosity, turns into an introspective entity. This is articulated
19
Toyo Ito. White U House, front elevation. in the way the house is not only closed off to the exterior, but also, through the home’s
Ibid., 8-9. Ibid.

48 49
 leaning towards the interior courtyard, and the courtyard as the home’s sole access to a
natural exterior or garden, the way in which the home effectively creates an alternate site
within its walls. One could deem this a re-grounding of the White U House, as Ito, in an
awareness of the home’s surrounding ground plane, consciously rejects it and creates an
alternate plane in the home’s own interior. For the family living in the home, their access to
an exterior reference of site and context came only through the gradients of light and dark
in this courtyard, as the sun traced ephemeral shadows on the white walls and the black
soil of the interior courtyard while it completed its daily trajectory. Thus, the outside as
18 reference became invisible and unnecessary to the inhabitants within the home’s walls.

It is in this way that Ito also attempts to grasp at what he calls “medieval light,” light
uninterrupted and unfiltered by the contemporary city. The architect’s desire to re-ground
the home is expressed throughout the building, driving the form and the design, the
sensibilities to light and darkness, the colors of the walls: a spotless white that provides a
clear canvas for the seasons and sun to paint their temporal state onto. Like a meditative
garden, the interior courtyard is minimal and bare, composed only of dark soil, inviting a
protracted mode of contemplation that differentiates itself from the quickness of action
of the contemporary lifestyle, as the sun’s patterns on the walls and soil can only be
appreciated in the passing of hours and days.

In the temporal aspect, the juxtaposition of the Nakagin Capsule Tower and the White U
House is a compelling image, where the first saw its existence as a quick cycle perpetually
alternating between manufacture and decay, and the latter removed itself from not only
a reliance but also a coexistence within the urban landscape and its processes. Even
in the opposition of the two architects’ visions, they both inform their design through a
metaphoric process, Kurokawa through reliance and Ito through animosity. As Thomas
Daniell writes about Ito’s early disposition as an architect, Ito was “alternately seduced
and repelled by his surroundings,” and the White U House represents this admittance of
the ground plane into an architectural formal consciousness and expression. 20 Whether
the black soil in the courtyard of the White U House holds a metaphoric quality is a
speculative question. One can think of scorched earth, reminiscent of a 1945 Tokyo, where
the city, in its devastation and pre-development state, was greeted by absolute darkness.
Alternatively, there is also a possible reference to an equally bare future that Ito aims to
foreshadow in a similar manner to Arata Isozaki’s rhetoric dealing with the inescapable
decay of architecture. Either mode of speculation yields the same idea: The White U
House enacts a re-grounding through the interior courtyard as an artificial ground plane,
while simultaneously establishing a critical specificity towards the urban fabric.

18

20 Toyo Ito. White U House, interior

courtyard.
Ibid., 8-9. Ibid.

50 51

19
With Tange, the task had been to
integrate Corbusier's modulor and
the Japanese system of kiwari and
to express that in concrete, that is,
to create a design system in which
modernity and tradition were completely
integrated. . .
I felt that the problem had to do with
21 proportion. . . At the time, I felt that my
task was to destroy the proportions that
Jencks, Charles. The Language of are products of Eastern and Western
Postmodern Architecture. 1977. history, namely kiwari and the golden
section.
22
Arata Isozaki in interview with Yoshio
Futagawa, Global Architect, 15-16.
Isozaki, 32-33.
23
Futagawa, Yoshio, and Arata Isozaki.
Global Architect: Document Extra 05.
Tokyo: A. D. A. EDITA. 1996. 15-16.
19
24
Arata Isozaki. Oita Prefectural Library.
Isozaki, 71. Arata Isozaki & Associates.
52
Representing the Conceptual Ground
Thus, in Ito’s work, the ground plane increasingly becomes metaphorical, a shift that in
many ways corresponds to a global shift towards postmodern architecture. 21 This kind
of metaphoric quality can be traced even more explicitly in Arata Isozaki’s early career,
soon after he established himself as an independent architect. Isozaki is perhaps the most
distinctive figure among the architects who emerged from Tange’s office and the influence
of the Metabolists. Having constantly rejected the Metabolist label and strictly disagreed
with what he referred to as a belief in a controlled change, asserting instead that change
is drastic and destructive, Isozaki aims to metaphorically subvert the ideas of the
Metabolists in hs architecture. 22 His early independent projects are marked by this point
of exploration for Isozaki’s budding career, specifically at the time when he completed the
Oita Prefectural Library, finished in 1966, his first official public commission for which he
moonlighted while still working in Tange’s office. 19
The library is a testament to Isozaki’s early career intention to differentiate his own
practice from that of his mentors through a distinct approach to the question of proportion
in his architecture. In an interview with Global Architect, he identified his desire to
design in a 1:1 cubic ratio as a way to acknowledge his apprenticeship with Tange and
simultaneously subvert it. 23 As Tange is credited with defining his style through vertical
articulation of hierarchies, where proportion is critical, Isozaki sought to neutralize
proportions in his architecture by abstracting them through the cubic ratio of 1:1, in which
there is no difference between verticality and horizontality. The Oita Prefectural Library,
Isozaki claims, can be read as a composition of cubic structures in section. Even in the
building’s perspective view, there are parts of the library, ambiguously functional and
ornamental at the same time, that appear to be extruded cubes, which Isozaki says make
the architecture seem unfinished. He calls this “process architecture,” and claims that
this architecture is directed towards ruins rather than utopia. This rather abstract intention
evidences the architect’s shift towards a postmodern system of architectural semiotics.
The cubic ratio, within its ability to neutralize proportions, also neutralizes the ground
plane, though this potential lies untapped in the Oita Prefectural Library’s realization. The
library generally signifies Isozaki’s potential as an architect and that of his approach, more
so than the actual manifestation of these:
Some years earlier, I had designed the Oita Prefectural Library. [. . .] This building was the
Japanese realization of a New Brutalism, and I was signifying my graduation from all the things I had
learned from Modernism up to that point. The next task was the dissolution of Modernism. 24
This dissolution comes in the wake of the 1970s shift, where Isozaki’s work becomes
metaphoric. The first of his museum commissions comes in the form of the Gunma
53
20 Museum of Modern Art, and in Isozaki’s desire to express equilateral volume and
proportions as a form of abstraction, the conceptual drawing for the museum becomes
the media through which this can be articulated. The drawing shows an aggregation
of cubic frames situated upon an equally abstracted ground plane, expressed by the
shadows casted in an isometric orientation by the cubes. 20 Conceptually, Isozaki is
creating a neutral ground plane upon which architecture can be projected in a manner
that will equalize the ground with geometry. Though the drawing employs an aggregate
form in a similar manner to Metabolist rhetoric, the primordially horizontal extension of
the forms seems to be a critique to the often vertically-stacked structures of Metabolism.
Furthermore, the use of shadows in proposals such as Plan for Tokyo 1960 emphasized
separation and rejection, whereas Isozaki appropriates the representation of the shadow
as the darkest element in a drawing as a way to communicate continuity and neutrality.
These shadows also become the ground plane in that they are the sole component that
makes this conceptual ground plane legible.
21
Through this drawing, Isozaki’s Gunma Museum of Modern Art realizes the principles
of irony and metaphor that were initially considered in the Oita Prefectural Library. The
successful abstraction of the ground plane into a metaphoric element is, in the same way,
realized in the museum. The ground is thus granted a symbolic status relevant to the
postmodern system of semiotics, where its expression holds a metaphoric quality. This
successful sublimation of the ground plane into an abstract image was foreshadowed
by Isozaki’s conceptual undertakings, as was particularly apparent in his earlier Electric
Labyrinth installation.

Commissioned by the 1968 Milan Triennale, Isozaki constructed a set of interactive

panels designed to act as a maze, activated by the visitors, and alternatively displaying
images from Japanese lore and Hiroshima. The folkloric characters shown on the panels
expressed themes of death, decay, and violence, a morbid display heightened by the
juxtaposition of photographs of the nuclear attack's victims in adjacent panels. 22
Photomontages were also a key component in his exhibition, as Isozaki famously collaged
a drawing of a Metabolist ruin onto a photograph of a post-nuclear attack Hiroshima.
Having grown up in western Japan and witnessed the overnight decimation of a Japanese
city as a child, Isozaki reveals the personal and professional impact of the images in his
mind’s eye, drawing attention to urban destruction through the lens of art and architecture,
and expressing a critique towards the avant-garde optimism of the time. The city’s and the
human body’s death were thus presented in parallel with what Isozaki presumed to be the
inevitable destiny of architecture: the ground turns into ashes, in the same way tomorrow’s
20 architecture will turn into the same ashes. 23 Architects who rejected this destiny and
hoped to save architecture through technology displayed a naivety Isozaki could not
Arata Isozaki. Gunma Museum of Modern
Art, conceptual drawing. acquiesce to. 25
Ibid.
In retrospect, the early endeavor for irony in architecture became clear in Electric
21 Labyrinth, where Isozaki presented a dystopian vision and drew an analogy between the
state of the ruined ground and architecture. If Isozaki’s earlier City in the Air proposal
25 Arata Isozaki, Gunma Museum of Modern
Art. represented a hope to salvage the city by elevating it from the ground below, then Electric
Ibid., 33. Photograph by W. S. Rodriguez.

54 55
 Labyrinth marked the death of this hope and architecture’s return to the ground in the form
of ashes. The drawing of the Gunma Museum of Modern Art is a less morbid realization
of this return to the ground plane, also a metaphoric representation of equalizing the
ground plane with architecture, articulating a formal dependency. In the museum’s actual
materialization, the most explicit expression of this neutrality and dependency is the flat
pool under the museum’s south wing, which reflects an undisturbed and continuous image
of the museum onto the water, its reflection like the shadows in Isozaki’s drawings. 21

22

23

22

Arata Isozaki. Electric Labyrinth,

installation panels. The print of a
skeletal figure, representing death,
covers one of the panels.
Co-Produção Center for Art and Media.

23

Arata Isozaki, photomontage of the ruins

of Metabolist buildings over the ruins of
Hiroshima.
Arata Isozaki & Associates.

56 57
 3 The Ground as Image
1
Daniell, Thomas. After the Crash:
Architecture in Post-Bubble Japan. New
York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press,
2009. 13.
2 richness and strength of that culture cannot be understood until one has worked [there]. . . Had I not
Frampton, Kenneth, and Kengo Kuma.
Kengo Kuma: Complete Works. London:
Thames & Hudson, 2014. 8.
Isozaki, Arata, and David B. Stewart.
Japan-ness in Architecture. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 2011.
4
Jencks, Charles. The Language of
Postmodern Architecture. 1977.
5
Inaga, Shigemi. "To be a Japanese Artist
in the So-Called Postmodern Era." Third
Text 9, no. 33 (1995): 17-24.
58
During the mid-1990's, Japan's economy underwent a sharp descent from what had
been for decades a globally enviable market growth to a stock-market crash—"the burst
of the bubble." 1 As the real estate market slowed considerably, commissions in Tokyo
became rare, and the architectural profession entered into a forced period of introspection.
Specifically for Kengo Kuma, this spelled a reconsideration of his work in relation to
Japanese culture:
"I opened my office in 1986, but the bursting of the economic bubble seven years later
began a decade of recession in Japan. During those ten years, I received no commissions in Tokyo . .
. My office managed to survive by doing small, local projects in Tohoku [Northwestern Japan]. . . The
had those ten years of experience. . . [I] would not be designing the kinds of buildings I am designing
now." 2
It was at this time that a considerable effort was made to tap into Japanese premodern
architectural styles as a way of creating distance between the contemporary narrative of
design in Japan and the Western postmodernist period. 3 Such a revisitation to images
and visual concepts of premodern styles is generally understood to have marked the onset
of postmodernism in architecture. 4 However, the conditions of Western postmodernism
do not transfer seamlessly to Japan. As the art historian Shigemi Inaga writes,
postmodernism in Japan was characterized by the exoneration of Japanese architects
from pursuing synthesis with Western modernization and dialogue (a pursuit exemplified
by Kenzo Tange), and this necessitated a revisiting of Japanese premodern architectural
traditions. 5
59
1 As architects looked back towards buildings such as the Ise Shrine and other icons of
2 3
4 dimming sky is reflected on it, and the trees that give away the limits of its stretch. 1 “It’s
6
Kengo Kuma, "From Concrete to Wood:
Why Wood Matters." (lecture, Harvard
Graduate School of Design, Cambridge,
November 10, 2016).
Access: https://youtu.be/LynYUwYZXqk
60
1 Kuma designed in 1999 for Ishinomaki, a small city in Japan’s northwestern region. Today,
Kengo Kuma, lecture.
Access: https://youtu.be/LynYUwYZXqk
2
Kengo Kuma, Kitakami Canal Museum.
1999.
Mitsumasa Fujitsuka.
3 to reach it for two weeks: he resigned himself to having lost it. Later he was surprised to
Ibid., museum interior.
4
Ibid., section drawing.
premodern architecture, it became necessary to reinterpret them in this new context.
Through analyzing the underground architecture of Kengo Kuma and Tadao Ando, it is
revealed that it was the ground plane that presented the opportunity to formally enact
this revisitation. Indeed, since underground architecture employs the ground plane as the
architectural façade, the ground becomes an image, one that acts as a historicizing agent.
Thus, this chapter argues that by using the ground plane as façade and as an agent
for representing history and tradition, the ground's dual entity is reinforced, mainly in a
symbolic dimension, for the ground as façade operates as both an image and a field (since
the ground is intrinsically tied to the site). The image component imbues architecture with
referential significance, while the field component paradoxically obscures the ground's
symbolic operation.
Underground Architecture
As Kengo Kuma introduces his work to an audience in the Harvard Graduate School of
Design, his first slide presents a photograph of water, perhaps of a lake or a river, as
evidenced by the smoothness of its calm surface, the way in which the soft blue of the
hard to find,” Kuma says of his own building while the photograph of the water landscape
lacks even a hint towards anything built. 6 The second slide is much more explicit: as
Kuma switches to the next photograph, a building, shaped like a small hill, peeks out
from the ground, its glass front facing the expanse of water that Kuma had previously
shown. 2 Perhaps the intention was to emphasize the visual proximity of the building's
appearance to that of its natural surroundings, and yet, a more lingering look would reveal
that the photographs operate much more as a juxtaposition of objects at odds rather than
harmoniously similar views. The building shown is the Kitakami Canal Museum, which
Ishinomaki is known for being the city that suffered some of the worst devastation of the
March 3, 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster.
Though the tsunami that destroyed more than half of Ishinomaki occurred a little more
than a decade after Kuma had completed the Kitakami Canal Museum, the region
is historically known for being an area prone to flooding and tsunamis, precariously
positioned adjacent to the ocean in a lowland zone. Kuma recounts how, as he heard of
the tsunami soon after it struck the region, he telephoned the museum and was unable
find out that the museum had survived, as the canal flooded on the side opposite to the
museum. The museum had been miraculously lucky: most of it is underground, embedded
in the earth and emphasizing this appearance by lifting the grassy planes onto its façade,
as it were being swallowed by the ground. Had it been flooded, even if the structure
61
5 had survived, salvaging the interior would have been an incredibly difficult task. In his
presentation, Kuma says of the event and of the museum’s form, “The tsunami stopped at
my building. Is it because my building has this shape?”

In contrast to the exterior of the museum, which explicitly emulates the natural landscape,
the interior of the building is characterized by unequivocally contemporary material
choices and tectonics. 3 Thus, the most striking feature of the museum is undoubtedly the
way in which Kuma designed it to look like it shyly peeks out of the ground, and to realize
this, the sectional drawing reveals the effort Kuma underwent to make the museum’s roof
continuous with the ground plane and then planted a seamless grassy patch on top of it.
4 The motivational framework behind Kuma's decision to employ the ground plane as a
tectonic and façade element stems from what Kuma, in his lecture, qualifies as a regard
for nature and a consideration for the sacredness of the natural landscape.

Thus, Kuma’s rhetoric insinuates a deeper aspiration than that of aesthetic realization. His
words mythicize the ground and nature, as if by emulating nature through the facade, an
6 architectural type that is otherwise ordinary is sublimed within the framework of this myth.
As much is hinted at when Kuma mused whether the tsunami had stopped at his museum
due to its shape, and this belief seems further reinforced through the architect’s writing on
the 3/11 catastrophe:

I am convinced that the earthquake and tsunami that struck the Tohoku region of Japan on
11 March 2011 provided an opportunity to redress the balance of this social and cultural decline. [. . .]
When I saw the tsunami washing away those American-style houses and cars, Noah’s flood came to
mind. God had sent the biblical flood to punish an arrogant, corrupt society. 7

A similar intention can be observed in Kengo Kuma’s Kiro-san Observatory. 5 The

observatory is a concrete structure that is open to the sky—unlike the Kitakami Canal
Museum, there is no extension of the ground as roof here. The name of the observatory,
Kiro-san, refers to the name of the small mountain upon which it is built. The mountain’s
peak was excavated to embed the observatory within its ground, such as to give the
impression of landscape continuity to the distant observer; Kenneth Frampton refers to
this as the “decapitated peak.” 8 The brutality of such a description is inherently tense
against Kuma’s own rationalization of what is achieved in the observatory: “It looks like
7
nothing happened,” Kuma says as he presents this building, “but nothing happened was
Frampton, Kenneth, and Kengo Kuma, 7. the goal of the project.” 9
5

8 Kengo Kuma, Kiro-san Observatory. Kengo Kuma has been often referred to as a quintessentially Japanese architect, and
1994. such an identifier is perhaps anchored in Kuma’s own assertions of his culturally referential
Ibid., 17. Kengo Kuma & Associates.
and site-specific approach to architecture. His work is often compared to buildings in
Japan designed centuries before Kuma’s, and these encompass prehistoric granaries,
9 6
shrines, and even palaces. Sometimes, the comparison is readily justified through material
Kuma, lecture. Ibid., entrance to observatory.

62 63

7 was engaged in a process of appropriation and reinterpretation of symbols, as evidenced
10
Daniell, Thomas. After the Crash:
Architecture in Post-Bubble Japan.
11
Frampton and Kuma, 8.
12
Ibid., 14.
13
For more information on Bruno Taut's
visit to Ise Shrine and its impact on
Japanese architectural dialogue:
Reynolds, Jonathan M. Allegories of
Time and Space: Japanese Identity in
Photography and Architecture. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2015.
64
and structural similarities, such as the use of traditional wood-slotting techniques. In other
instances, as is the case with the Kiro-san Observatory and the Kitakami Canal Museum,
even though the same cultural anchor is suggested to also extend to these buildings by
the architect himself, an objective consideration of the buildings’ construction method,
materiality, and interpretation of type is insufficient to bridge this jump in logic. What
remains is the use of the ground plane as façade.
Before designing the Kitakami Canal Museum and the Kiro-san Observatory, Kengo Kuma
in his M2 Building, completed in 1991, just as Japan's economic growth was coming
to a halt. 7 Elements referencing Western architectural canons are aggrandized and
chaotically displayed, to the extent that the architect sacrifices form for semiotics. The M2
Building was commissioned during Japan’s bubble economy period, and the burst of the
bubble in the early 90s drove Tokyo’s architectural activity into a lengthy period of subdued
existence. Such was the impact of the bubble burst in the Japanese morale that architects
like Kuma still dwell on its enduring effects, and prominent historians like Thomas Daniell
have divided recent architectural history in Japan into pre-bubble and post-bubble periods.
9 The burst of the bubble for Kuma marked a period in which he was obliged to reconsider
his role as an architect, and he attributes this decade of financial uncertainty and reflection
to his current style, one that today seems completely opposite to the style exercised in
his M2 Building. 11 Three years after designing the M2 Building, Kuma completes the
Kiro-San Observatory in 1994 and enacts what can be labeled as ground appropriation in
order to imply a continuity between the ground plane and architecture. In 1999, through
the Kitakami Canal Museum, Kuma again appropriates the ground plane and this time
integrates it as architectural façade. The Western symbols of the M2 Building's façade
were substituted by the ground plane in Kuma's architecture, where the ground represents
Kuma’s intention to contextualize his architecture within a Japanese historical and cultural
narrative, namely through referencing the Ise Shrine, specifically the ground underneath
the shrine:
The [Ise] shrines are reconstructed every twenty years, suggesting that the ground below
is far more important than the structures built on top. 12
This interpretation of the Ise Shrine, particularly of the ground, is crucial due to the
building’s longstanding status as both an architectural origin myth (as in Bruno Taut’s
praise of it as Japan’s Parthenon) and as a means of synthesizing modernism with
traditional styles, as was already evidenced in the work of Kenzo Tange. 13 The fact that
Kuma extracts the idea of the ground plane as a superior element to that of the buildings
in the shrine provides a conceptual foundation and motive for abstracting the ground plane
7 as image. Therefore, the image of the ground becomes a metaphor for such a reference,
as exemplified by the Kitakami Canal Museum, which, by appropriating the ground plane
Kengo Kuma, M2 Building.
Accessed on ArchDaily.com.
into its façade as a symbolic gesture, intends to place the museum within a Japanese
65
 architectural lineage and history, one that may even grant it the near-mythical status that
Kuma suggests to justify the museum’s survival after the 2011 tsunami.

In this light, it is compelling to recall a younger Kengo Kuma’s reaction to visiting the Row
House by Tadao Ando in Sumiyoshi, completed in 1976. The Row House, which at the
time had impressed architectural critics, was suffocating for Kuma to be in, a reaction
he later attributed to having been brought up in a traditional wood-frame home “with
plenty of ventilation,” while the Row House was made of concrete. 14 Such was the
8 early foreshadowing towards his later sensibilities and inclination for an atavist choice of
materials and tectonics. However, despite Tadao Ando’s seemingly opposite style and
Kuma’s own disdain for it, critics are equally prone to nominate Ando as the quintessential
Japanese architect as they are to Kuma. 15

Ando’s style has proven to be consistent throughout his career, as his buildings hold
immediately identifiable characteristics: precast concrete as the finish for both the exterior
and the interior of his buildings, the demonstration of a commendable ability to manipulate
light and shadows, and a penchant for clean geometries. Though the material and tectonic
character of Ando’s architecture does stand in contrast to Kuma’s, Ando uses a similar
mode of historicizing his approach to architecture, citing Shintoism’s influence on his
thinking and methodology when explaining the character of his buildings. The validity
of such a claim is not of concern, for Japan holds a rich architectural history with many
qualities and narratives that can accommodate a range of interpretations, such that both
Kuma and Ando can have opposite styles and still share the title of being “quintessentially
Japanese” comfortably. What is of interest instead is that in spite of Kuma’s and Ando’s
starkly distinct styles, they share a common approach towards the ground plane, as both
design buildings that employ the ground plane as architectural façade.

For instance, Tadao Ando’s Chichu Art Museum, opened in 2004 in the island of Naoshima
in southwestern Japan, is nearly entirely underground, embedded within a hilly terrain
near the ocean. 8 Like the intent for landscape continuity that Kuma expressed through
the Kiro-san Observatory, the Chichu Art Museum, the name of which can be roughly
14
translated to mean “within the earth,” is meant to allow for nature to prevail above the
Frampton and Kuma, 11. visual image of the built structure.

15 The decision to bury the main body of the Chichu Art Museum within a hill overlooking
Naoshima’s coastline and surrounding forest can in part be attributed to the client’s
Ibid.
own proposal for Ando to create a space for both nature and art. 16 The client was
16 Soichiro Fukutake, a Japanese magnate in the education industry and a known patron
of the arts, who initiated the restoration of the three islands and sponsored the ongoing
Müller, Lars, Akiko Miki, Hiroshi
Kagayama, and Iwan Baan. Insular
construction of multiple museums and pavilions throughout the archipelago to create and
Insight: Where Art and Architecture promote a space alternate to the contemporary city. Explicitly hostile to the concepts of
Conspire with Nature-Naoshima,
“modernization” and “urbanism,” Fukutake had commissioned Ando with the vision for an
Teshima, Inujima. Baden: L. Müller
Publishers, 2011. architecture that expressed a similar opposition to the way the contemporary Japanese
8 city had developed since World War II. 17 Tadao Ando delivered an invisible building, one
17 whose form can never be fully perceived or understood from an exterior viewpoint, whose
Tadao Ando, Chichu Art Museum. 2004.
Ibid., 175-177. Benesse Holdings, Inc. interior detail intricacies and complex spatial arrangements can only be appreciated

66 67
 through architectural drawings and the actual visiting experience, but never through
external observation. Instead, the ground acts as the museum’s façade to this exterior
onlooker, communicating some of the museum’s qualities, but mostly displaying the
9 11 landscape itself. An isolated aerial view of the museum reveals the way in which abstract
geometric hollows (belonging to the museum’s courtyards) dot the hill, divulging no hints
as to the building’s scale, type, or form.

The visitor, who upon entering the museum is transported to the ambiguous space
between the ground and the architecture, transverses the museum mostly unaware of
their spatial relationship to the ground plane. Sunlight seeps through slim apertures in the
roof and sometimes in the walls, alternating with artificial lights, further blurring the exterior
spatial context of the museum’s rooms and corridors. 9 For a building whose rhetorical
aim is to create the illusion of continuity between the natural and built environments, its
interior is drastically transporting towards what one can call a vacuum space, liberated
from site-specificity to the degree that architecture gains full agency over orienting the
person. The occasional courtyards along the visitor’s path are reminiscent of the courtyard
10 in Toyo Ito’s White U House, where the interior courtyard simultaneously operates as both
a way to connect the person to a larger context and to reground them within the building’s
own constructed landscape. The ground in most of the Chichu Art Museum’s courtyards is
made of white stones and pebbles that alternate in size and hue, formally abstracting the
artificial ground plane of these courtyards even more. 10

Despite the phenomenological success in such regrounding, as Ando transports the visitor
into a vacuum-like environment by allowing the image of the natural ground to overtake
that of his architecture, the question remains whether this is an iteration of the symbolical
use of the ground as façade. Though Ando embeds the museum into the island’s natural
landscape, the interior of the Chichu Art Museum is fully familiar to one attuned to Ando’s
style. This style did not undergo any significant changes to accommodate the conceptual
aspirations for the museum, as the same elements are present: the material preference for
precast concrete, the highly articulated tectonics, the abstract geometries, and strikingly
minimalist finish. 11 All of these techniques stay faithfully identifiable in Ando’s body of
work and the Chichu Art Museum is not an exception. This renders the use of the ground
9 plane as façade a seemingly independent act, making the ground plane in the Chichu Art
Ibid., interior. Museum’s façade fully an image, completely separated from the rest of the architecture.

10

Ibid., courtyard. The Allegory of the Imaged Ground

11

Tadao Ando, Row House. 1976.
Ando's material and aesthetic
sensibilities demonstrated in the Row
House resonate with his more recent
Chichu Art Museum.
Accessed on ArchDaily.com.
Thus, it becomes necessary to interrogate the meaning and significance of the ground
as image. Can the ground even be justifiably classified as such, in the sense that an
image is defined by a visual reference to a pre-established concept, narrative, or object?
Kuma’s and Ando’s work demonstrates that the ground’s surface, which is intrinsically
always referential towards the site, also holds a deeper layer of reference, such that the

68 69

12 How did these perfect forms originate?
Any architect seeing Ise would be moved
to try to discover this secret. . . Ise, as
the first architectural achievement of
Japanese people. . .
Tange, Kenzo, and Noboru Kawazoe. Ise,
Prototype of Japanese Architecture.
Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1965. 14.
18
12
Inaga, 17.
The Ise Shrine complex undergoing
deconstruction and construction
19 simultaneously upon the two adjacent
lots.
Isozaki and Stewart, 3. Getty Research Institute.
70
ground plane as image refers not only to the self-referential, ahistorical surface of the
earth, but more so to what is suggested to figuratively lie underneath in the form of a
historical construct or narrative. Kengo Kuma explicitly outlines this form of historicizing by
sublimating the ground upon which the Ise Shrine is built, alluding to the ground’s cultural
legitimacy over the actual shrines by referencing the ground’s permanence. 12 Like
Kuma’s Kitakami Canal Museum and Kiro-san Observatory, the Ise Shrine itself operates
through site-specific reference on the most extreme scale, as it is rebuilt every twenty
years upon two adjacent, alternating lots, in exact replication of a building that can be
construed to be more of an architectural origin myth than an actual building:
What is the most typical Japanese postmodern architecture? I propose in the guise of
introduction one famous architectural work just completed this year after more than 20 years of
long and painful preparation. I am speaking of the Ise Shrine, main sanctuary of the politically and
ideologically overcharged monument of the ‘national’ worship called Shintoism.
This monument without monumentality is postmodern in the sense that it consists entirely
of quotations and copies of its own precedent archetype which, according to mythology, has been
razed to the ground and rebuilt once every 20 years since the immemorial past. . . .[It] has therefore no
proof of authenticity if not in its retroactive—and chronopolitical—denial of historicity itself. 18
What is largely implied here is that, unlike in a Western understanding of architectural
historicizing semiotics, where one might think of a cornice or a portico in reference
Western monuments, modes of historicizing during this period in Japan possess a dual,
paradoxical character: an opposition towards monumentality and permanence, and the
consequential Japan-ness that is fostered under the guise of an ahistorical style. In a
resonant manner, employing a constructed ground plane as image in the architectural
façade results in the achievement of two things in causational order. The first occurs as
consequence of the ground being superficially ahistorical, where an attempt to historicize
architecture is obscured by the ground plane’s site-specific surface. The second is the
successful creation of an anti-monumental architecture to an extreme degree, where
the built environment’s image is replaced by the artificial ground’s—artificial because
fundamentally, the true natural environment was excavated and then recreated, which
is unequivocally an architectural process. Thus, through imaging of ground plane as
façade in the underground and mostly below-grade works of Kuma and Ando, the ground
becomes an architecturally layered entity, possessing an ahistorical surface and in turn
anchoring the architecture it obscures to a cultural and historical ethos.
The motive for such a process can be traced to a larger interrogation of “Japan-ness”
within the postwar cultural landscape of Japan. Arata Isozaki defines “Japan-ness” as
a problematic brought by the exterior gaze, one that has not “emerged causa sui,” and
indeed, the domestic search for Japan-ness was originally necessitated through external
pressure and occupation. 19 The search for what could be categorized as uniquely
71
 Japanese developed near the end of Japan’s isolation as an insular region in the 17th
century, instigated by the arrival of American warships, and reached a frantic height
brought by the nationalist urgency of the Asia Pacific War and the Second World War, and
failed to fully dissipate for decades. 20 Ironically, as both Arata Isozaki and architectural
historian Jonathan Reynolds have written, architecture was engulfed in this search
through the foreign perspective of Bruno Taut as he regarded the Ise Shrine in comparison
to the Acropolis, whereas the Ise Shrine had been until then mostly overseen in Japanese
architectural dialogue. 21 What followed was Kenzo Tange delving into a theorization
of the Ise Shrine, framing the shrine as the embodiment of Japanese essentialist
architecture. The elements that Kenzo Tange regarded as essential in the Ise Shrine
and referenced in his own architecture—such as the ratios of verticality to horizontality,
the design of the raised floor—Kengo Kuma rejected by regarding the ground as more
important. The juxtaposition of these interpretations and the way in which their opposition
crystallizes through formal ground-related gestures—one through ground rejection and the
other through ground appropriation—illustrates not only the architectural consciousness
and highly specific intent towards the ground, but also the ground's implicit eminence in
the design process.

While this analysis was first premised on the ground having absorbed the physical and
affective traces of the war, and architects enacting ground rejection as a reactionary and
defensive system towards destruction, the ground plane operated as a field condition
characterized by both literal and connotative elements that simultaneously manifested on
its surface. That is, the ground plane could be understood by a direct reading of formal
gestures, namely ground rejection, without necessitating further excavation. However,
as the postwar period progressed, the ground became a complex layered entity through
metaphoric interpretations, until finally becoming fully abstracted as a paradoxical image
both referencing and obscuring historical depth in Kuma’s and Ando’s work. The fact
that the ground plane obscures historicism through literally vanishing monumental and
imageable architecture can be understood as an opposition to Tange’s monumental
interpretation of Japanese architecture, as demonstrated through his interpretation of the
Ise Shrine and its translation to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Exhibition Hall. The ground
plane's relation to architecture was essentially inverted, since while earlier architecture in
postwar Japan obscured the ground, now architecture was moved under the earth, so that
the ground obscured architecture instead.

20

Reynolds, XIII-XIV.

21

Isozaki and Stewart, 12-13.

72 73
 Conclusion

Throughout this analysis, the ground plane has been conceived of as simultaneously a
material and conceptual entity. The first notion, the ground as an objective material entity,
refers to the independent existence of the ground as a spatial field. This field can refer
to the earth, a body of water, or the urban fabric, as the ground’s specific character is
defined by its referential existence to architecture. The second notion, the ground plane
as an abstract character or concept, is informed by a multiplicity of factors, ranging from
attitudes towards the site and to interpretations of history, which inevitably depend and
evolve on a chronological and contextual order.

The idea of the conceptual ground encompasses the ideological, cultural, and rhetorical
connotations of the ground plane, which are in turn significantly shaped by events external
to architecture. For instance, Kuma’s allusion to the ground plane in the Ise Shrine
being more important than the built shrines themselves, as he compares the ground’s
permanence to the buildings’ transience, is evident of this mode of metaphorical thinking,
shaped by the architect’s ideological interpretation of cultural institutions. However, the
ground plane as a construct is not always as evident in the architect’s own rhetoric, as
demonstrated by projects like Kenzo Tange’s Plan for Tokyo. Tange’s proposal held the
research and aspirations of revolutionizing the city through a reconfiguring of inner-city
transportation and program relationships; yet, its most striking formal features and
representations attest to a preoccupation with ground rejection, where Tange’s Tokyo
becomes a city as fortress towards natural and cultural disaster by rejecting and recreating
the ground. Thus, what is suggested through formal expressions can be productively
informed by contextual and factual evidence, such as the possibility of the ground plane
holding antagonistic connotations after the Tokyo firebombings and the city’s historical
struggle against earthquakes and tsunamis. Hence, this thesis has made use of such
evidence and used it to consider the architects’ work within the context in which the work
is produced and situated.

74 75
 This analysis shows that the ground plane is never a singular, uncomplicated backdrop to
architecture. Such is the multilayered identity of the ground that it has been explained as
both objective and subjective, material and intangible, antagonistic and redeeming. The
ground’s multivalent character holds a stake as hefty as the architecture it frames within its
field in the holistic interpretation of the built environment in both an immediate and larger
temporal context. Like architecture, ground-specific gestures become modes of expression
for both the architect and the independent circumstantial factors of the site, and in a way,
the architect’s interpretation and intention towards the ground is one of the first factors that
1 inform the overall design process. More than a surface, the ground plane’s character runs
literally and figuratively deep, laden with connotation, dense with meaning and history, and
further twisted and turned with reinterpretations and appropriations.

It has been established that during the early postwar period, the ground plane absorbed
the traces of the war through the presence of radioactivity and ashes, and their affect. To
remove architecture from the literal ground plane became a demonstration of cultural and
architectural resilience. The 1970s were characterized by a growing disillusionment with
the idea of utopia and of the invincible city, eliciting work from emerging architects that
operated as critique to the earlier avant-gardists, evidenced in the way the ground plane
was edged towards becoming an architectural construct itself through metaphorical uses
and representations. This period represented a turning point, as the ground plane shifted
from being a literal construct to having a metaphorical dimension, thus complicating the
relationship between the built environment and the ground. As the symbolic depth of the
ground plane reached new levels, new possibilities for the architect’s interpretation and
implementation of ground-related design decisions became available. When architectural
structures are displaced under the ground plane and the ground itself becomes the
façade, as exemplified by Ando’s and Kuma’s work, this represents the climax of the
ground as image and metaphor.

Underlying this mode of analysis has been the assumption of a dichotomous relationship
between the ground plane and architecture. To dissect this relationship’s qualities, both
literal and figurative, the ground and the built have been assumed to be architecturally
independent entities. However, this dichotomy has been complicated through
contemporary instances of synthesis between the ground plane and architecture.

1 Museum and the ground plane. Rather, the role of the ground plane in the museum’s
Ryue Nishizawa, Teshima Art Museum.
2010.
Benesse Holdings, Inc.
The synthesis referred to here is demonstrated by the Teshima Art Museum, designed
by Ryue Nishizawa in 2010. 1 At an initial glance, the building appears to represent an
amorphous object, like a water droplet in the uneven but cohesive swells of its concave
form. This shell has clear extremities where it emerges from the grassy terrain, as the
museum is made of a smoothly finished white concrete. To the unassuming visitor, the
museum appears independent from the landscape, stretching the expanse of its shell
upon the ground and appearing nearly sculptural, erected and displayed on a hill. Unlike
Tadao Ando’s Chichu Art Museum, there is no obvious play between the Teshima Art
design is most explicit through the construction process.
In order to cast the concrete shell, earth from the site was shaped into a mold. Concrete

76 77
2 was poured over the earth, and once dried, the artificial hill was excavated and the form of
the ground’s absence became the museum’s interior. 2 Though the ground is absent from
the museum’s phenomenology, its presence is not only indispensable, but also articulated
through the form. The synthesis occurs on an invisible, though essential dimension, where
the ground plane is absorbed into architectural design on a more profound level than what
lies on the surface, which is visual and readily observable. This material engagement
with the ground is distinct from both the use of the ground as facade surveyed in the third
chapter, as well as from contemporary landform architecture, which often relates building
to ground on the level of metaphor. In contrast, the fact that the ground plane’s role in the
Teshima Art Museum cannot be read or reduced to an image provides an alternate route in
which the ground does not operate metaphorically. Rather, it operates fully architecturally,
providing new methods and possibilities for spatial expression.

Still, even as the Teshima Art Museum represents a move away from the dichotomy
between ground and architecture, this thesis has illustrated how a dichotomy does not
3 necessarily imply a total polarity or lack of interplay. In the same way that architecture can
be analyzed through a multiplicity of lenses that range from architecture’s abstract form
to historical analysis, the ground plane displays equally compelling and layered levels of
depth and abstraction. Analyzing postwar Japanese architecture through the ground plane
has revealed this lack of polarity between the built environment and the ground, since the
ground plane has been as prone as the built environment to absorbing and embodying
the forces of history and contemporary modes of thinking. This long trend of close
association between thinking about architecture and understandings of the ground was
recently demonstrated in response to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck the
northeastern region of Japan by Toyo Ito. In an interview with Julian Rose, Ito expresses
the following about architecture’s relation to nature in the wake of the disaster:

[T]he very idea of a division between the natural and man­made is false, and events like this
one are caused in part by our attempts to separate the two. Our way of life is still based in twentieth
­century ideas, specifically a modernist philosophy that assumes we can use science and technology
to conquer nature. So we try to isolate ourselves from nature; our cities are completely segregated
from the environment. For instance, in 2011, many parts of the Japanese coast were protected by
huge retaining walls that were built to withstand a tsunami. The nuclear plant itself was supposedly
designed to resist even a massive earthquake. Yet the walls were easily broken and the plant was
irreparably damaged. The catastrophe showed that you cannot isolate a building or a city from the
environment. That kind of modernist thinking has reached its limit. 1

Ibid., museum under construction. Ito alludes to the idea of synthesis between ground and architecture, proposing
1 architecture that moves away from the ground rejection heralded by the earlier architects
3
who reacted against the destruction of the Second World War. While the avant-garde
Rose, Julian. "The Building After."
Artforum International, September 1, Ibid., museum surroundings and path of the 1960s envisioned utopian cities segregated from the ground, Ito references a
2013. leading to the entrance.

78 79
4 seemingly opposite idea, of architecture that somehow rejects this separation and even
shows deference towards the ground plane. Retrospectively, Kuma and Ando both
approached this idea of synthesis and deference through imaging their architecture with
the ground. The Teshima Art Museum fits into this idea in, if not a metaphorical manner,
a literal one, as the ground’s form was turned into the architectural form, making one
inextricable from the other.

Thus, projects such as the Teshima Art Museum remove this narrative from the symbolic
stage and provide an opportunity for synthesizing the ground and the built, intentionally
sublimating what is often only represented as a line on a page into a complex architectural
element that renders the construct of the ground plane as a planar surface not only
insufficient, but also obsolete.

To look up from the interior of the Teshima Art Museum, towards the open skylights,
and observe the towering forms of the trees, the lazy saunter of the clouds, one doesn’t
differentiate whether it is like looking out from within a building or a rabbit hole. One can
only know that they are simultaneously sheltered by the concrete shell and the earth’s
form—by both the building and the ground—while beholding the world outside.

Ibid., museum interior.

80 81
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