Architecture of Defeat

Kengo Kuma, one of Japan’s leading architects, has been combining p ­ rofessional
practice and academia for most of his career. In addition to creating many
­internationally recognized buildings all over the world, he has written extensively
about the history and theory of architecture. Like his built work, his writings also
reflect his profound personal philosophy.
Architecture of Defeat is no exception. Now available in English for the first
time, the book explores events and architectural trends in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries in both Japan and beyond. It brings together a collection of
essays which Kuma wrote after disasters such as the destruction of the World Trade
Center in New York City on 9/11 and the earthquake and tsunami that obliterated
much of the built landscape on Japan’s northern shore in a matter of minutes in
2011. Asking if we have been building in a manner that is too self-­confident or arro-
gant, he examines architecture’s intrinsic—and often problematic—relationship
to the powerful forces of contemporary politics, economics, consumerism, and
technology, as well as its vital ties to society.
Despite the title, Architecture of Defeat is an optimistic and hopeful book.
Rather than anticipating the demise of architecture, Kuma envisages a different
mode of conceiving architecture: guided and shaped by more modesty and with
greater respect for the forces of our natural world.
Beautifully designed and illustrated, this is a fascinating insight into the
­thinking of one of the world’s most influential architects.

Kengo Kuma is one of the world’s leading architects. He established his architec-
ture firm Kengo Kuma and Associates in 1990 and is a Professor at the Graduate
School of Architecture at the University of Tokyo, Japan.
Architecture of Defeat

KENGO KUMA
Translated by Hiroshi Watanabe
MAKERU KENCHIKU
By Kengo Kuma
© 2002 Kengo Kuma

Originally published in 2002 by Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo.

This English edition published 2019

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

By arrangement with Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo.

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

The right of Kengo Kuma to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

­trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-138-39083-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-39084-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-42317-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Univers
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
Contents

Introduction 1

Part One
Disconnection, criticism, form 5

1. From disconnection to connection 7

2. Field and object 18
3. What was criticality? 37
4. The dreariness of form versus freedom 48

Part Two
Transparency, democracy, materialism 61

5. De Stijl: A melancholic transparency 63

6. Rudolf Schindler: A vision of democracy 75
7. Yoshichika Uchida: Postwar democracy 89
8. Togo Murano: System and materialism 97
9. Place, building, image: San’ai Dream Center 112
10. Give us houses, let us see TV: Venice Biennale 1995 118
11. Girls and yogis: Venice Biennale 2000 128

Part Three
Brands, virtuality, enclosure 131

12. Public, brands, private 133

13. Houses and the sex trade 141
14. Concrete time 144
15. Virtuality and parasite 146

v
Contents

16. The end of beauty 151

17. Enclosure 155

Afterword 160

List of illustrations 162

Index166

vi
Introduction

This book is a compilation of articles I have written since 1995.

Much has happened in that time. The Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 17 January
1995, the terrorist attack by Aum Shinrikyo sect members of 20 March 1995, and
9.11 were all events of considerable consequence for society, but they were also
events of architectural significance—events that symbolize the crisis threatening
the very thing called architecture.
The earthquake exposed the vulnerability and fragility of architecture, but
what was exposed most nakedly was not the physical or structural weakness of
buildings but a critical weakness of the private ownership of buildings. People
living in rental housing suffered little damage from the point of view of property.
People who were homeless before the earthquake suffered even less. Those
who sustained the greatest damage were people who had purchased their own
homes with housing loans; that is, industrious white-collar workers who had
adhered most closely to policies promoting homeownership that the Japanese
government, like other governments throughout the world, had adopted in the
twentieth century. Having lost their houses which had not only consumed their
life savings but for which they had taken out loans that were still being repaid,
they were forced by circumstances to go doubly into debt.
Homeownership was supposed to guarantee stability of life and be a sign of
good fortune. However, it did the exact opposite. Possession of buildings caused
misfortune and instability. And as I repeatedly explain in this book, policies of
homeownership and modernism are closely related. To a surprising degree, mod-
ernism exploited homeownership policies to extend its influence. The earthquake
shook the very foundation of those policies as well as modernism itself.
The religious buildings created by members of the Aum cult also upset the
conventional view of architecture. Religions have traditionally made maximum
use of the potential of architecture. Architectural stratagems such as symbolic
exteriors that seem to reach the heavens and solemn interiors filled with light
from above have been utilized in efforts to uplift the religious feelings of believers.
Both established world religions and newly emerging religions have been highly
dependent on the device called architecture.
However, Aum was different. It expected nothing of architecture. The build-
ings it constructed and called “satian” were crude barracks and unlike any work
of religious architecture of the past. However, the cult did use drugs and had

1
Introduction

members wear strangely shaped helmets that gave off electromagnetic waves.
Those tools are strikingly similar to two architectural projects (or more precisely,
anti-architectural projects) that caused a stir in the late 1960s: “TV-Helmet” (1967)
by the Viennese artist Walter Pichler, and “Non-Physical Environmental Control
Kit” (1968) by an architect who often collaborated with Pichler, Hans Hollein.
“TV-Helmet” was an enormous white helmet, which Pichler called a “portable
living room”; he saw a future in which architecture would be replaced by helmets
incorporating digital technology. Hollein took an equally provocative position with
his “kit”, asserting that it would require only a single tablet to replace architecture.
As it happened, I had referred to precisely these two projects as symbols of the
crisis in architecture at the outset of a book I published in November 1994 entitled
Shin-kenchiku nyumon (“A New Introduction to Architecture”). In January 1995,
I discovered that those two devices no longer belonged just to the realm of art;
Aum had put them to everyday use in real life.
Then, in 2001 came 9.11. The twin towers of the World Trade Center were
destroyed almost in an instant. Skyscrapers have long been regarded as symbols
of twentieth-century civilization, but they are more than that. They are expressions
of a basic human craving to create visual symbols and to raise those symbols to
great heights; i.e. humankind’s architectural desire. The skyscrapers of Manhattan
are the supreme expressions of that desire, and the tallest of them all were the
twin towers of the World Trade Center.
They proved so fragile, and their fragility was so vividly demonstrated. The
two collisions may or may not have been deliberately spaced apart so that the
destruction would be broadcast live, but the visual effect was obviously dramatic.
The weak spot of a civilization dependent on visual perception was exposed, not
in words, not by scientific calculation, but in pitiless images.
Those images are still seared into our minds. I cannot imagine anything more
traumatic for the architectural profession. The perpetrators seemed to mock the
very act of creating symbols. Our dependence on visual perception was called
into question. After that trauma, what sort of architecture should we create? Is
an architecture that does not rely on symbols or visual perception possible? It is
in that pessimistic mood that I wrote the following series of essays. That is how
a book with the extremely dispirited, inauspicious title, Architecture of Defeat,
came to be written.
Yet a day like this was bound to come sooner or later. Human beings have
been fully aware of the vulnerability of architecture from the start, that is, from
that time in the ancient past when we first attempted to create a pile of stones on
open land. Even children know that a tall pile of objects is weak and worrisome.
Despite this self-evident truth, humankind has continued to desire the pile of rocks
called architecture. Looking back, we can see that it was an escalation of visual
technology, an escalation whose end-product was architecture. ­Materials and the
human body were just barely able to keep up with this unilateral escalation. And
in the end, we reached a critical point in our ability to sustain architecture. Only
when that point had been reached and passed were people made aware of that
self-evident truth. And the conclusion unfolded with images of unexpected reso-
lution, according to a skillfully paced scenario.

2
 Introduction

Is there not a way open to us other than to pile things high in the air? This
is the story of one architect’s reconsideration of that obvious question. I wanted
to explore what is possible when there is no dependence on symbols, visual
perception and desire for private ownership. How can we free ourselves of all
the desires that have motivated humankind to construct “strong” architecture? It
was with such a thought that I entitled this book Architecture of Defeat. This book
is in fact extremely optimistic and hopeful. Surely an architecture that is neither
conspicuous nor exultant—an architecture that hugs the ground and is hopeful
and receptive to diverse external forces—is possible.

3
 From disconnection to connection

If architecture is to rise above such crude questions, we must question the

premise that architecture is a matter of disconnection. We must begin by thinking
of architecture as a matter of connections.

Note
1 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 1923.

17
 Field and object

r­ eplaceable variable into an unchanging field called the function is a similar mode
of thought. There, the question of whether the function is linear or nonlinear,
that is, whether it is predictable or unpredictable, is not of major significance.
In that sense, nonlinear theories are tiresome. The moment a pair called func-
tion and variable is established, a schema of division called field and object has
taken over.
Then is it possible to transcend division? What is new about the computer OS
(operating system) referred to as object-oriented is that it rejects the classification
called function and variable. There, a variable is not substituted into the function;
instead, the function and variable are treated as things of equal value. That has
dramatically improved speed of operation. The term “object-oriented” is apt to
be misinterpreted but in this case means that no distinction is drawn between
field and object; instead, operator (field) and variable (object) are both regarded as
objects of equal value. In past OS, when the function became complex, multiple
layers of functions within functions (i.e. subroutines) came into being, making
operational processing time-consuming. In the case of object-oriented OS, no
lower-order item is subsumed by a higher-order item since there is no hierarchy
to begin with; the more complex the function, the more readily is the superiority
of this flat method confirmed.
What is demanded of us now is a method of thought similar to object-­
oriented OS, that is, a method of thought that does not divide things into field and
object. The boundary between field and object is ambiguous; it cannot be clearly
drawn. It is in that way that the world is becoming complex. Objects, architecture
and the city are all knitted together in a way impossible to unravel. Moreover, in
reality, even information and desire are layered over and melded to these things.
Under those circumstances attempts to impose a schema called field and object
have lost all meaning.
What is important is that, though things are melted together, the world is by
no means a chaos impossible to understand or calculate. Though quite complex,
it is still comprehensible and calculable. We have already learned through the
computer that we are fully capable of processing such complexity. The basis of
modern city planning and design was the principle of division. We anticipate the
existence of a principle that will take the place of division. We not only anticipate
that but have begun operating on that very assumption.

Notes
2 A number of institutional reforms (deregulations) triggered the boom in financial man-
agement. One was the sale in 1980 of medium-term government securities fund;
another was the liberalization of foreign currency deposits with the revision of the
Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Control Law at the end of 1980.
3 Cosmetic salons and cosmetic surgery are nothing less than attempts to forcibly de-­
territorialize human bodies—things that are farthest removed from de-territorialization.
4 The total floor area of a building that can be constructed on a land divided by the area
of the land. The agency in charge sets the value in response to the character of the
place. For example, in the case of a land whose FAR is 500 percent, if the site area is

35
Part One Disconnection, criticism, form

330 square meters, then the total floor area of a building that can be constructed on the
land is five times 330 square meters or 1650 square meters.
5 The high value of the yen at the time accelerated this phenomenon. It became widely
known that a world-famous architect could be hired for the same level of design fee as
a Japanese architect; practically all architects with international reputations responded
to this Japanese demand. Brokers known as “space producers” who served as their
mediators were also major players of the time.
6 Of course in this case too, the design departments of major construction companies
prepared most of the actual drawings.
7 From the 1980s, a more sophisticated term, mécénat, came to be used to refer to such
sponsorship.
8 Michael Graves (1934–2016), a representative postmodernist US architect, was involved
in many projects in Japan during the bubble era.
9 Philip Johnson (1906–2005), a representative US architect of the twentieth century,
was first known for introducing modern architecture from Europe but subsequently
became a central figure in the international world of architecture of the 1980s as a
mastermind of postmodernism. In 1988, he produced an exhibition entitled “Decon-
structivist Architecture” and parted ways with postmodernism.
10 Art Deco skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were
the best-known products of this boom.
11 Charles Jencks (1939–) is an architectural critic born in the US and active mainly in
England.
12 Robert Venturi (1925–2018) was a US architect and a leader of the US architectural
world in the second half of the twentieth century, through writings that provided the
theoretical basis for postmodernism and actual design work.
13 Functionalism is the idea that form is determined solely by function. US architect Louis
Sullivan’s edict, “Form follows function”, is well known.
14 A statement by Adolf Loos, an Austrian architect and representative figure of the
modern architectural movement (see note 40), this encapsulates the essence of mod-
ernist architecture.
15 Many architectural historians today reject this theory. As far as building technology is
concerned, modern twentieth-century architecture is demonstratively continuous with
pre-modern nineteenth-century architecture.
16 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), a representative twentieth-century architect,
was born in Germany. He is known for simple, transparent buildings using an abun-
dance of steel and glass.
17 Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Das Passagen-Werk; trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin as The Arcades Project, 1999.
18 Friedrich Engels, 1873, “The Housing Question”.
19 The world’s first zoning regulation was instituted in New York City in 1916. There were
three pillars to the regulation: a system of land use, restrictions on building height and
open land ratio. These three pillars became the core of urban and building administra-
tion and provided a model for subsequent local governments around the world.
20 In Japan, further distinctions are made such as residential districts, category 1 exclu-
sive residential districts, and category 2 exclusive residential districts.
21 Robert Venturi, Denise-Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 1972.
22 Freestanding columns supporting a building.

36
Part One Disconnection, criticism, form

somewhat simplistically, from a closed, centripetal society that still had a strong
desire for architecture to an open, centrifugal and de-territorial society that no
longer desires architecture. The system functioned effectively only when both
coexisted. Architecture to begin with is most actively produced under conditions
in which two such societies coexist. Both public buildings and houses for the
middle class were products of such mixed conditions. In both cases, buildings
were demanded by a closed society, in an anachronistic or rear-guard action.
That was the fate of buildings produced in such mixed societies. Architects of
such a period were of necessity critical of these anachronistic buildings. Spe-
cifically, they were critical of clients that commissioned such work. As a result,
criticality became the most important theme of twentieth-century architecture.
In such an era, criticality too was necessarily duplicitous in character. It looked
forward and attempted to subvert the prevailing order on the one hand, and
looked backward and attempted to provide a measure of self-protection for
­architects on the other.
Today, we are at last being freed from criticality. Forced to keep pace with the
so-called age of architecture, architects could not help but be critical and negative
because of their own inner contradictions. Wariness toward a closed society that
demanded architecture and supported architects was translated into criticality
and expressed in buildings. However, we are now entering an era in which there
is no demand from any quarter for architecture. Architects lost their sponsors
when closed, backward societies ceased to exist. Though they might still wish to
satisfy architectural desire, the desire itself has vanished.
There is no need to mourn the loss. In fact, there could be no happier
outcome. That is because architects for the first time have regained architecture.
We no longer need to perform a precarious high-wire act, suspended between
territoriality and de-territoriality, using criticality as a balancing pole. What is the
architecture that is still required in an open society? We can begin by consider-
ing that question as honestly as possible. If eventually we arrive at some sort
of answer, then we can make a case for that perceived need for architecture.
Only when people have been convinced will architects begin to be given work
once more. What is demanded is straightforwardness in a world in which work is
scarce, in place of nihilism in a world of plenty.
Architects have somehow become a tiny, dissident minority. There is no alter-
native but to explain the need for architecture once more from that disadvanta-
geous position. Being critical meant assuming a suspicious posture and preparing
to defend ourselves from society. Society in general and architects in particular
no longer have the luxury to look askance at the world. We need to look directly,
without suspicion, in a positive and realistic way.

Notes
23 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, 1994.
24 Walter Adolf Gropius (1883–1969), a representative modernist architect, was born in
Germany. He became director of the Bauhaus in 1919, joined the faculty of Harvard
University in 1937 and became a leader of architectural education in the United States.

46
 What was criticality?

25 Iemoto is the founder or current head of a school of Japanese art such as dance, flower
arrangement or tea. In the school’s hierarchy, the Iemoto is the final authority on ortho-
doxy.
26 Shingeki is a form of theater with contemporary themes and psychological realism
introduced in the late Meiji period.

47
Part One Disconnection, criticism, form

Notes
27 Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was an architect and architectural theorist of the
middle Italian Renaissance. His actual works are characterized by massive walls.
28 Colin Rowe (1920–1999).
29 Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, 1947.
30 Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) was an architect of the late Italian Renaissance. Known
for a decorous classical style based on the study of Roman ruins, he exerted enormous
influence on later generations.
31 Richard Meier (1934–) is a US architect of the second half of the twentieth century,
known for white buildings with beautiful geometrical forms.
32 Peter Eisenman (1932–) is a US architect of the second half of the twentieth century.
Known also as a theorist, he provided the theoretical underpinning for Deconstructivist
architecture.
33 Bernard Tschumi (1944–) is a Swiss-born architect active in France and the United
States. Best known for Parc de la Villette (1987) in Paris, he is also a theorist and long
served as dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at
Columbia University. He is also a leader in the use of computers in American architec-
tural education.
34 The two engaged in several discussions from 1985 to 1990 on the so-called “Chora L.
Works” but the talks eventually broke down.
35 Five residential architects who occupied a central position in the US architectural world
in the 1970s are Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and
Richard Meier.
36 Rem Koolhaas (1944–) is a Dutch architect known for a contemporary, radical e ­ xpression.

60
Part Two Transparency, democracy, materialism

easy to understand. It shuns commodities that are complex and deep. Simple,
easy-to-understand commodities, detached from the environment and armed
with new technology, that had been designed by Corbusier and Mies won out.
The name De Stijl, meaning “style”, is an almost sadly honest confession of
the limits of its methods. Its members believed that the evolution of art would
take the form of a change of style. Now that a hundred years or more have passed,
all we need do is look around us to see that it was indeed a change of style. In
that sense De Stijl was not mistaken. However, in the midst of an upheaval, that
is, in a time of conflict, people do not see something as objective as style. They
do not have the time to leisurely analyze a change of style. They can only strug-
gle to survive a battle waged with technology and images of commodities. The
members of De Stijl, who emerged belatedly in a time of peace, did not realize
that decisive fact.
Modernization is nothing less than a process of integrating dissimilar spaces.
The objective of De Stijl—the “losers”—was to integrate dissimilar spaces and
to generate a transparent space on a meta-level. However, it was defeated by the
impetuous logic of war. The crude logic of war—a logic that rejects complicated,
tedious methods and elects to forcibly join dissimilar spaces—was victorious.
Then, what sort of an age are we in today? Wars of the sort waged in the
past no longer exist. Mass society, in the sense of a monolith, is disappearing,
and detailed information travels with amazing speed over the network. There is no
need to forcibly commodify architecture, nor do packages determine everything.
Are we able to direct our attention at last to the gaps between objects (or com-
modities) as De Stijl envisioned?
Unfortunately, the space we live in is not that transparent. What has replaced
war is not peace but security management. Space is dominated, not by transpar-
ency, but security. The world may seem to be joined together by a network but
in fact is divided into countless enclosures by security systems. The gaps that
have spilled over from enclosures are not free spaces for movement. The gaps
and holes in the enclosures are only places of violence. Only inside our snug
enclosures are we barely able to achieve De Stijl transparency and play with De
Stijl gaps. No one can guarantee that even those places will remain free of vio-
lence. Peace in a network society is this kind of peace. Transparency in a network
society is this kind of transparency. Transparency is still only a vision.

Notes
37 Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) was a classicist architect of nineteenth-century Germany.
Known also as a theoretician, he is considered one of the forerunners of modernism.
38 Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (1888–1964) was a Dutch architect and proponent of De Stijl. He
was also known for designing furniture such as the Red and Blue Chair.

74
Part Two Transparency, democracy, materialism

i­nstitutionalized environment and been transformed. It is no longer what Alan Kay

originally envisioned but instead something monitored and controlled by multiple
layers of an invisible security system. We have not yet fully understood its fright-
ening character.

Notes
39 Otto Wagner (1841–1918) was an Austrian architect who practiced mainly in Vienna
from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century and exerted enormous
influence on the modern movement.
40 Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was an Austrian architect and one of the major theoreticians of
the modern movement. He experimented with surfaces and structures, was interested
in three-dimensional spatial continuity, and advocated an abstract architectural expres-
sion devoid of ornament.
41 This is an overall term for concrete products prefabricated in factories as opposed to
concrete cast in forms on the site.
42 Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, Pomegranate Communications, Inc., pp. 234–235.
43 Cesar Pelli (1926–) is a prominent Argentine-born US architect known for his distinct
sensibility and pursuit of thin but humanly scaled surface designs.
44 This was a dominant style of architectural design in the 1990s, featuring diagonal lines
and taking as its theme discordance and chaos. Underpinned by the French theory of
deconstruction, it was critical of a conventional, right-angled geometrical order. In Japan
it quickly lost support after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995.

88
Part Two Transparency, democracy, materialism

Notes
45 Yoshichika Uchida (1925–) is an architect and educator who has made a major contri-
bution to the postwar advancement of industrialized buildings. In particular, he has
exerted an enormous influence on Japanese prefabricated buildings, which are without
parallel in the rest of the world.
46 Yoshinobu Ashihara (1918–2003) was a well-known modernist architect of postwar
Japan. He studied under Marcel Breuer at Harvard University and advocated an open
modernist architecture in which inside and outside spaces were integrated.
47 Kiyoshi Seike (1918–2005) was a well-known modernist architect of postwar Japan. His
small, highly transparent wooden houses of the 1950s attracted world-wide attention.
48 Kiyoshi Ikebe (1920–1979) was a well-known modernist architect and educator of
postwar Japan. His series of small houses of the 1950s had industrialization and
modules as its theme.

96
Part Two Transparency, democracy, materialism

All forms of modern expression and science were born of the tension arising
from the encounter of multiple value systems in the modern era. Both Keynesian
economics and monetarism emerged in the twentieth century to resolve this
crisis. However, these twentieth-century theories of economics were institutional
attempts to resolve the crisis of commodity. That is, these economic theories
were theories for those at the top of the system, those who see the system
as a thing to be manipulated—that is, theories of economics for “government”.
Only Marx tried to grasp the essence of the crisis from the standpoint of the com-
modity. That is why to Murano Das Kapital was a bible and why he empathized
with Marx.
And of course Marx was targeting something that transcended economics
and commodities. Both Marx and Murano asserted that all things private and
sensuous shared the crisis of commodity. In the process of de-territorialization
that is modernization, a mortal leap is demanded of all these things.
Keynesian economics and monetarism seemingly resolved the crisis of
commodity, just as a systematic and ideological aesthetic represented by Mies
seemingly resolved the crisis of things private and sensuous. That was the illusion
peculiar to the twentieth century. Mies proposed a uniform space, an infinitely
tolerant place that permits everything that is private and sensuous. However,
were commodities and those things that are private truly saved? Nearly a century
has passed since then and we have been made to realize all too clearly that no
such thing as an all-tolerant uniform space exists. Macroeconomics has been
devastated, and a mood of resignation prevails in economics.
Ultimately, the ideal advocated by modernism was that architecture is public
in character and transcends commodity. Murano understood that architecture
was nothing more than a commodity and incapable of rising to a higher, meta-
level. He saw, moreover, that a commodity is forever required to take a mortal
leap. It was in accordance with that perception that he designed lighter, shinier
commodities than anyone else and was critical of every established architectural
method. His commodities never lost their intensity.
Murano knew full well that commodities cannot be saved by ideals. In that
sense, he was a thoroughgoing materialist and Marxist. That is why I stated
that he outlived modernism. We have been brought back again to the same stand-
point as Marx, that is, to the same materialist standpoint as Murano.

Notes
49 Togo Murano (1891–1984). After graduating in 1918 from the Department of Archi-
tecture, Waseda University, he entered the office of Setsu Watanabe and produced
excellent designs. He opened his own office in 1929. For more than half a century he
continued to produce unconventional works.
50 A method of laying stone or brick so that vertical joints in successive courses are stag-
gered. “Straight joint” is a method that produces continuous vertical joints.
51 A form of window often used by the Mannerist architect Andrea Palladio. A large arched
opening in the center, supported on columns, is flanked by narrower rectangular open-
ings. Also called Palladian motif or Serliana.

110
 Togo Murano: System and materialism

52 Strictly speaking this is a horizontal projection at the top of the entablature (the beam-
shaped horizontal band above the columns) in classical architecture. Now widely used
to mean any ornamental horizontal band introduced to articulate the wall.
53 A design style that became fashionable throughout the world after the 1925 Interna-
tional Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Art (usually referred to as the Art
Deco Exposition) in Paris. It influenced graphics, industrial design and architecture and
is often compared to Art Nouveau of the late nineteenth century.
54 “Nissei o kataru” (Discussing the Nissei); dialog between Togo Murano and Ryuichi
Hamaguchi; Shinkenchiku; January 1964.
55 Creating openings between structural columns was a hard-and-fast rule of classicist
architecture and a way of emphasizing the role of columns in supporting the building.
56 Detaching the exterior wall from the structure, making it possible to create openings
wherever one liked was referred to by Le Corbusier as the “free facade” and was cited
as one of the five principles of modern architecture.
57 This is a building for the tea ceremony, or the free and naturalistic design method of
teahouse architecture as opposed to the formal and urban shoin style of architecture.
58 The founder or head of a school of traditional Japanese art, the Iemoto maintains ortho-
doxy among disciples through authority and powers such as that of accreditation.
59 Isoya Yoshida (1895–1974) was an architect known for a distinctive Japanese-style
architecture. He worked to modernize sukiya architecture and is called the originator
of modern sukiya, having devised such features as the roughly framed shoji, the okabe
style of wall construction and the mesukashi ceiling.

111
 Place, building, image: San’ai Dream Center

Ducks are what architects produce when they strain to solve the problem of
imagery within the existing architectural framework. Decorated sheds are build-
ings with enormous billboards attached to them. The conservative view at the
time was that decorated sheds were not proper buildings, that is, they were not
buildings architects ought to be designing. However, Venturi declared that such
deviations were precisely what architecture was about and that their design was
a challenge worthy of legitimate architects.
His idea was based on a perception that place, building and image were
essentially separate and irreconcilable. If a building is based on supply-side
logic, image is based on demand-side logic; the split might be characterized as
one between production and consumption. It is the dispassionate view that the
“mortal leap of the commodity” that Marx described applies to the commodity
called architecture as well. Venturi began to discuss ducks and decorated sheds in
the 1960s when various gaps between production and consumption, the supply
side and the demand side became manifest, and it became evident that architects
could not possibly respond to that lack of alignment with a functionalist approach
based on a notion of pre-established harmony.
Today, however, in a world with virtually no alignment, even Venturi seems
like a conservative still caught up in a pastoral vision. Decorated sheds may have
certainly been new in the 1960s, but in hindsight, choosing decorated sheds, with
their clearly separate billboards and buildings, instead of the strange composites
called ducks may have ended up protecting the conservative nature of buildings
proper. The age when buildings joined to billboards or images were new is long
over. Venturi’s position, which was to distinguish between the interior (i.e. the
building proper) and the exterior (i.e. billboards) of buildings and to integrate them
dialectically was at the time already anachronistic.
The distinction between interior and exterior no longer has meaning. In that
sense, everything is both the interior and the exterior of the phenomenon called
architecture. Everything has been permitted since long ago. Given that complete
freedom, what is possible? The sad sight of the Dream Center gives rise to
thoughts about such a freedom.

Note
60 Marcus Vitruvius was a Roman architect of the first century bc. Known as the author of
the first architectural treatise in the world, he exerted an enormous influence on later
generations, particularly the Renaissance.

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Part Two Transparency, democracy, materialism

The works that caught my eye at the 1995 biennale were either spatial
(­architectural) or visual, that is, works of art able to respond to the cries, “give us
houses, show us TV”.
The highest prize for sculpture was given to a work of video art by Gary Hill,
the first time such art has been selected; that is, the highest prize for sculpture
went to a video. Hill installed a maze made of metal in front of a screen and
integrated the two themes space and images (house and television).
Art is being forced to change. The Venice Biennale of 1995 quietly but
definitely made that change evident. Change is occurring not simply inside art.
The baton has been passed to architecture and videos, two fields that were
thought to lie outside the realm of art. Perhaps the baton has already been
passed into our hands. We have begun to run in a world without warm and
comfortable rooms anywhere, having discarded even such distinctions as art
and architecture.

Notes
61 “The problem of universals” in philosophy is the medieval scholastic dispute between
those that believed universals actually exist and those that believed universals only
exist in the mind. The former position was taken by realism, the latter by nominalism.
The dispute in Japan can be interpreted as a variation on that earlier debate.
62 “On the Selection of Participating Artists for the San Paulo Biennale: The Limits of
(Things Japanese)”, Kunio Motoe, Sankei Shimbun, August 21, 1994.
63 Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958) was a Nihonga artist.
64 “On the Participation of Japan in the International Biennale: ‘Universality’ in the West
and the ‘Roots’ of Japanese Culture”, Shuji Takashina, Sankei Shimbun, September 4,
1994.
65 “For a Place for New Expression: Transcending Modernism and Japanese-Style Things”,
Lee Ufan, Mainichi Shimbun, November 14, 1994.
66 The contemporary interpretation of Orientalism can be traced to the book Orientalism
(1978) by Edward Said, a Palestinian scholar born in Israel.
67 After working at Le Corbusier’s atelier, Yoshizaka returned to Japan in 1952, where he
created highly original works that were halfway between the International Style and
regionalism. He eventually became the founder of a regionalist school that continues to
be represented today by Team Zoo. For another perspective on the pavilion, see “Unrav-
elling: Japanese Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, 1995”, in Kengo Kuma, Anti-Object,
London, 2008.
68 Asahi Shimbun, “Comments on Literature and Art”, October 1993.
69 The concept of political correctness is undoubtedly an extension of colonialism, but
there is a difference of nuance. In the colonialist phase, modernity was clearly in
a ­superior position with respect to anti-modernity, but in the phase of political cor-
rectness, the position modernity enjoys is being undermined. A neurotic wariness
of the increasing threat of anti-modernity is a basso ostinato in PC statements and
expressions.
70 One reason for this quiet was the cancellation of the so-called Aperto, an exhibition of
works mainly by younger artists that is ordinarily held in conjunction with the biennale.
However, the cancellation of the Aperto was itself a reflection of people’s dissatisfac-
tion with the type of PC associated with developed countries.

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 Give us houses, let us see TV: Venice Biennale 1995

71 The “TransCulture” exhibition, an event held next to the Venice Biennale, provided a
viewpoint that differed from the conventional perspective of multiculturalism. The exhi-
bition, focusing on artists with experiences such as migration that cut across multiple
cultures, suggested the potential of a new form of multiculturalism premised on the
disappearance of universals.
72 9.11 made it even more evident.

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 Houses and the sex trade

A frustrated individual who realizes the unlikelihood of a match with a perfect

partner will attempt to construct a house without someone else’s help. Clients
try to construct a house using a unilateral design system of which prefabricated
or industrialized housing is a representative example. The United States was of
course a pioneer in prefabricated construction methods. On the other hand, archi-
tects have come to avoid contact with clients, preferring instead to write books
on their theories of houses and limiting their activity to teaching the design of
houses. This phenomenon parallels the loss of love. People were increasingly
avoiding relationships and instead seeking comfort offered by the sex trade. In
offering relief without exposing the individual to the risk of conflict with someone
else, prefabricated houses are very much like the sex trade.
It is not the point of this essay to criticize such behavior. Prefabricated houses
and the sex trade provided twentieth-century society with relief. Both relieved,
or appeared to relieve, people without involving them in relationships. However,
there was a fundamental difference between houses and the sex trade. The sex
trade is transitory, whereas homeownership is long-term. In many cases home-
owners must spend the rest of their lives burdened with loans in houses they
don’t like.
However, the situation is gradually changing. Love has evolved and is becom-
ing more like the sex trade. Being in love was once considered irreversible; it
could not be undone. Today, however, men and women no longer perceive love in
that way. Moreover, people do not seek in love interaction with others as in the
past. Feelings are becoming far thinner in concentration and light of weight. The
line between love and the sex trade has become blurred.
Houses too have become light of weight. Becoming light of weight is not
simply a matter of making a house full of windows. Just as the relationship
between men and women was once divided between love and the sex trade,
houses too were divided into houses designed by architects and prefabricated
houses. However, they are changing into something lightweight that is neither
one nor the other. One reason is that both clients and architects are losing the
hard-and-fast contours of selfhood. When both sides are ambiguous, no friction
can be generated.
The other reason is that remodeling has become so widespread; like the
sex trade, houses too demand little or no commitment now. As with someone in
the sex trade, what is demanded of the “other party” (i.e. the architect) is a nice
sense of distance, an ability to be neither too intimate nor too detached. This is
not meant to be critical or snide. Residential design is approaching remodeling
and what architects practice is approaching the sex trade. To accept this fact is a
condition of the conscientious architect today.

Note
73 Kengo Kuma, Ju-taku ron—jisshurui no Nihonjin ga sumu jisshurui no jutaku (A Theory
of Houses: Ten Types of Houses Lived in by Ten Types of Japanese) (Toso Shuppan;
1986; Chikuma Shobo; 1990).

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Part Three Brands, virtuality, enclosure

of community either. The fact that people still go to pachinko parlors is proof that
the true world has not been completely destroyed. This parasite is able to survive
in new designs precisely because the “true world” manages with difficulty to
exist. We live in an in-between transitional period. Today’s pachinko parlors in their
neutral designs are also products of a transitional period.
If that is the case, then today’s pachinko parlors resemble in various ways
art museums and banks. Diverse forms of gambling are lined up at the outer
boundary of the true world: art, investments of various kinds, pachinko. They try
to survive by suggesting their trustworthiness and connection to the true world.
These preexisting forms of gambling do not themselves offer reality of pleas-
ure nor do they possess an autonomous goal or a sense of community. Their
connection to the true world is their only opportunity to survive. Art museums,
banks and pachinko parlors all deliberately increase their degree of transparency
and emphasize their connection and continuity with the true world. That is the
intention behind the designs of all-glass art museums and “open” banks. They
are glass boxes for timid, conservative people who do not have the courage to
become involved in an autonomous separate world with its own goal but who are
also reluctant to give themselves up to the reality of pleasure. But then, the true
world does not have the appeal or the binding force it did in the past. Timid indi-
viduals seek their meager ration of excitement and their brief feeling of tranquility
inside these transparent parasites.

Note
74 Nam June Paik, Tetsuya Chikushi, Shin Mizukoshi, “If Dreams Are Substitutes for Life,
Videos are Substitutes for Dreams”, in Shin Mizukoshi, ed., Nijuseiki no media (Media
of the Twentieth Century); Jasuto System, 1996.

150