History the Writer Ango Sakaguchi Provides a Helpful Lens for Re-Reading the Radical, Subversive and Destructive Obsessions of the Architect Arata Isozaki
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arq (2021), 25.1, 31–42. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.1017/S1359135521000154 history The writer Ango Sakaguchi provides a helpful lens for re-reading the radical, subversive and destructive obsessions of the architect Arata Isozaki. Demolition traditions: Isozaki and Sakaguchi Simon Richards Rem Koolhaas: The irony here is that we’re trying to stemmed from writings that disparaged – quite look at Metabolism and almost 80 per cent of the outrageously and scatalogically – the traditionalist discussion is about Japanese tradition. values demanded by the Japanese censorship regime Fumihiko Maki: Oh, really?1 during wartime. In that stance he was something of an outlier in the literary landscape of his time, If ever an architect bit the hand that fed, it was the much like Isozaki who sought strenuously to young Arata Isozaki, a mercurial and distance himself from architectural peers who held uncompromising architectural talent who would go to the government line on traditional Japanese on to secure establishment respectability with the values and economic progress. And yet both men Pritzker Prize of 2019. But he made his renown with were perhaps much closer to the ideals, cultural designs and exhibitions exploring themes of death practices, and people that they disparaged than they and destruction, not least his ‘Fractures’ pavilion for seem initially to appear. the 1996 Venice Biennale, which sought to stage the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake from a year earlier, Anti-architect while also being a leading proponent of a playful, Isozaki was asked to join the Metabolist movement almost saccharine postmodernism, with projects for its launch at the World Design Conference in including the Team Disney HQ of 1991. Immersed in Tokyo in 1960. Kenzo Tange was founder of the the leading currents of Japanese architecture from the movement as well as Isozaki’s employer at the Tange 1960s onwards, his tendency to snipe at the motives of Lab of Tokyo University, and given the respect his collaborators was legendary. Commentators have traditionally accorded to bosses and organisations in tried to account for these professional shifts and Japan it might seem unthinkable that Isozaki would antagonisms, his dour and contrarian thematic refuse. But, refuse he did.2 obsessions, as well as his critiques of architectural Isozaki was sceptical of the Metabolists’ techno- traditionalism and technological progressivism. Why utopian solutions to urban problems as well as their did he conduct his professional life and art this way? grounding of those solutions – in a seemingly The conclusion seems to be that he was a nihilistic contrary way – on the architectural traditions of maverick pushing at the outer limits of architectural Japan. In short, the Metabolists sought to find culture and even taste. precedents within traditional architecture that This article reopens this question by tracing key would allow them to keep something of its essence themes through Isozaki’s more extreme theoretical even while modernising it to answer the need for writings and design activities as they developed in economic growth and infrastructural expansion, response to Japanese culture in the 1960s and 1970s. both of which – respect for tradition and economic It is in four sections: the first introduces the expansion – chimed with government policy at the provocative tensions in Isozaki’s work and how this time. The Metabolists also liked to present this has been accounted for; the second explores the cultural formulation as distinctively Japanese. interweaving of theories of tradition with theories Isozaki, however, was having none of it. Shortly of destruction by Isozaki and his contemporaries; before setting up his own practice in 1963 he marked the third focuses on Isozaki’s contribution to Expo his rupture from Tange and the Metabolists with a ‘70 in Osaka, comparing it with his paradoxical short story. Published in the September 1962 edition advocacy of Todai-Ji as an ideal kind of non-Japanese of Japan Architect, ‘City Demolition Industry, Inc.’ was Japanese architecture. The article draws these a fantastical autobiographical sketch typical of threads together in a conclusion that offers a Japanese tastes in the short story genre.3 The story parallel reading of the writer Ango Sakaguchi, who presented the young architect’s encounter with a was a major influence on the postwar artistic circles respected, cultivated, technologically driven and that Isozaki moved in. Sakaguchi’s popularity progressive businessman, but one who also happens history arq . vol 25 . no 1 . 2021 31 32 arq . vol 25 . no 1 . 2021 history to be an assassin. The assassin – a stand-in for Tange – exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New propositions the young architect with a job: to assist York, of what Frederic Jameson terms ‘Isozaki’s Body’ him in the business of murdering the city itself. as a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from 10 Four decades later the concluding part of the story bits of other architects. The medieval Buddhist emerged. In Isozaki’s ‘Rumor City’ (2001) the assassin aesthetic of mujo or impermanence, as celebrated by and architect meet again in old age to attack the the monks Chomei and Saigyo in the twelfth and opportunism, venality, and pointlessness of each thirteenth centuries with their temporary and other’s careers as well as their own.4 Unlike the ramshackle dwellings, were also seen as formative ironically sober laying out of a murderous business for Isozaki. These living spaces celebrated existential plan in the first story, here the style veers into what impermanence, the natural cycle of seasons and even reads like a stream-of-consciousness transcription of natural disasters, but rather than appreciating the a mental breakdown. As the viewpoints of architect- recurrence of birth and decay positively Isozaki creator and assassin-destroyer collide, their pushed it towards the straightforwardly nihilistic identities flow and eventually merge to the horror – celebration of manmade destruction, for an it seems – of both of them. architecture of what Jin Baek calls ‘meaningless Isozaki’s designs, writings, and exhibitions often ashes and debris’, a reflection of ‘Japan under 11 focus on dark themes and contrarian about-turns disintegration to its root’. such as these. A good example is the deliriously Isozaki remarked that, ‘I have always maintained spiteful composition of his Team Disney the position of an anti-architect’, and that ‘anti- Headquarters in Orlando (1991). It begins with an construction [and] the mark of trauma … [are] the entry porch shaped like Mickey Mouse’s ears, which core of what Japan-ness is to me’, so it is joins a structure reminiscent of Aldo Rossi’s ossuary understandable that commentaries about him at San Cataldo Cemetery (Modena, 1971) with its emphasise the negatives that he delights in directing 12 internal prison-like walk-ups, and this backs onto our attention to. But this does not locate him quite another structure quoting the industrial cooling accurately within the cultural currents of his times. tower that houses the parliament chamber of Le Corbusier’s Palace of Assembly (Chandigarh, 1963). City demolition industries Once seen, the cheerful colours can never quite offset Rem Koolhaas directed the 2014 Venice Biennale this grim conflation of children’s entertainment along thematic lines dear to him. ‘Absorbing with industry, politics, imprisonment, and Modernity: 1914–2014’ required the national cemeteries.5 This may raise an ironic smile from an pavilions, as Amy Frearson explains, ‘to show, each in ‘architectural connoisseur’ like Peter Cook who their own way, the process of the erasure of national delighted in architecture’s playful uptake of characteristics in favour of the almost universal ‘multiple coding’ in the 1970s and 1980s, and for adoption of a single modern language in a single 13 whom Isozaki qualified as the ‘architect’s architect’.6 repertoire of typologies’. Most of them complied, But Isozaki had sharp words for the connoisseur too: including the Japan Pavilion. Designed by architect ‘During that time, I fooled around with a nasty Keigo Kobayashi and commissioned by Kayoko Ota, a bastard called PoMo.’7 former employee of Koolhaas, the pavilion was Commentaries on Isozaki have sought to account crammed with architectural blueprints, for these provocations in similarly extreme ways, resorting to monsters and hauntings. Isozaki is haunted by traumas in Japan’s past, such as what Jun Tanaka describes as the ‘murdered phantom children’ of abortions conducted under family planning advice related to housing-size restrictions in the mid-1950s.8 Isozaki’s collaboration with Tange in Expo ‘70, with its celebration of capitalist-driven technological utopianism, caused him to become in Emmanuel Petit’s words, ‘[h]aunted by guilt for collaborating with a paradigm he reproves.’9 His love of disturbing architectural combinations was reflected in Hans Hollein’s collage, in a1976 1 Keigo Kobayashi and Kayoka Ota, Japanese Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2014. Notice the clustering of historical decorative rubble around the floor opening of Takamasa Yoshizaka’s 1956 pavilion design. 1 Simon Richards Demolition traditions history arq . vol 25 . no 1 . 2021 33 photographs, models, and books from the previous and Yayoi (the refined post-and-beam construction century, all stacked on, stapled, or taped to trestle techniques developed from 300 bc–300 ad). This was tables, filing cabinets, packing crates, pallets, and oil used to infer a prehistoric Jomon origin for the drums. The space gave the impression of a curatorial sculptural Brutalism of Metabolist architecture, team busting open their freight in earnest and giving while they also drew heritage from the structural up the installation halfway.