Ch. 3, pp.128–135

August 18, 2024

After I posted the previous installment, I wanted to check some dates so I went back through the translation so far. > Riken Yamamoto and Hiroshi Hara’s surveys of the world’s villages began in 1972 and, over 40 years, they surveyed over 500 villages in over 50 countries. > I’m guessing that methodologies were being refined and hypotheses made and, to some extent, conclusions drawn as the data accumulated. > This book I’m translating was published in 2015 some 43 years after that fieldwork began and approximately three years after it concluded. > I came across it in a library almost ten years later in 2024. > On (my) U.S. Amazon and Chinese Taobao, the 2015 book wasn’t available as an import and, as far as I know, it’s never been translated. > However, ideas contained in the book had been making their way into Yamamoto’s projects as early as 1978 with his Studio Steps project and the 1982 Fujii House and were fully formed by the time of the 2006 Pangyo Housing [link] project with its “shiki [= threshold] that are like huge porch[es], which can be used as a drawing room, home office, atelier [or] other function”. > The Pritzker Prize statement [link] condenses Yamamoto’s lifetime concerns in a single paragraph, the meaning of which is opaque without examples or knowledge of them.

Perhaps it’s best that all ideas find their way into projects and disseminate through other projects. This makes me wonder then, how are we ever going to find out about them and learn from them? Scouring websites isn’t the answer for information is often incomplete and what information there is, is often the same as everywhere else. (Even on Riken Yamamoto’s generous website is, the word “shiki” is mentioned without any indication it denotes a “threshold”.) Staying up-to-date in the sense of fully comprehending the implications of everything the second it crosses one’s path is obviously unsatisfactory as everything would have to be remembered in order to comprehend themes and their development across a career. I think, in the end, the best we can do is wait for old fashioned books that bring all projects together with essays and critiques. The one in the middle below did it for me. The good thing about slow information is its currency. When it eventually finds you, its worth is most likely to have been already proven.

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128-129
130-131
132-133
134-135

Marx recognized that the relationship between master and apprentice was a cooperative for the making of things and that work was a completely different process to labour. Hand crafting required an enormous amount of intelligence and the foolishness of the words “Shoemakers, protect your lasts!” became immediately apparent the moment the hourly wage earner Watt invented the steam engine, the barber Arkwright invented the factory production system, and the jeweller Fulton invented the steamship.” (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 172) The development of new technologies was not necessarily driven by workers in that field. New technologies invented outside the guilds and manufacagturing processes for the rational division of labour led to low-price shoes being produced in large volumes. Guilds were already unnecessary, as were wooden shoe lasts. Or so thought Marx who had said it was the height of foolishness to speak of the extreme intelligence of guild workers. However, the shoes made by guild workers were not simple consumer items. “Shoes of that time looked poor, as did slippers and fashionable ladies asked for shoes of mountain goat leather or Cordova leather that required far more delicate handiwork than cow leather.” (Guis, F. & Guis, J., Life in a Mediaeval City, p. 124) Shoemakers competed to fulfill these orders. Shoes that both looked good and felt good to wear were things of value. Shoemakers made shoes that were only sold in stores of a particular guild in certain cities, and that could not be substituted by others. Shoes made by a shoemakers were branded to show their place of origin. In other words, the branded shoes represented their place of origin, that city, and work that undercut that brand was not permitted. That brand was something possessed by the thing even if the thing remained unsold. “Just as work and labour are not the same things, there is a difference between use and consumption. “ (Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 225) For the guild shoemakers, their lasts were an asset for making shoes that were their own works. Shoes from those lasts were of specific places in the city. This “being of the place” means that the worth of shoes that are consumed is totally different from that of shoes with only simple function and simple exchange value. This worth is the “inherent objective worth of the thing itself”. (ibid., p. 261) It is something that can’t be exchanged for something else. Ultimately, the lasts were the “extreme intelligence” of the shoemakers in that they produced that worth. Workers of this kind are known as demiourgoi.

The Middle Ages had its idols and its branded products

The sight of places of guild production being the same places the produced items were sold, could be seen whatever the mediaeval city. The message that “this city is special” was extremely important for the city to prosper. (Figures 4, 5, 6) These cities were messaging their own brand. Since their inception, cities have been places for people coming from far and wide to congregate. These people came to obtain “branded” goods that were only available in the boutiques and bottegas of a particular town, or otherwise came to enjoy the wine or the food or special styles of cooking from only that place. Many pilgrims visited the churches in order be in the presence of idols of Mother Mary, St. Catherine, St. Francis of Assisi and others. The entirety of the mediaeval city was its attraction. The city had many generous methods for inviting people in, not unlike a theme park. They were designed to be like this.

**Figure 4:** Assisi ③ (Photo: The author) An artificial platform extends to the left and on it stands the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi. Its characteristic outline can be been from far away.

**Figure 5:** Dubrovnik (Photo: The author) A city on the Adriatic Sea. Many of the world’s most visited tourist destinations are mediaeval cities.

**Figure 6:** San Giminiano ② (Photo: The author) There were once as many as 72 towers. Even now, they are overwhelmingly pleasant to look at.

Marx completely acknowledged the attraction of cities that made the “brands that could not be consumed” and the fascination of the space of the cities themselves but had no interest in the urban space itself as he wholeheartedly denounced that urban space as bourgeois. The crumbling city was the only stage for the revolution.

A free urban space for free workers

Marx, like Arendt, understood the difference between labour and work. Marx, the person who discovered that “Labour is endeavour for the production of surplus” did not notice that “the world’s things with durability” exist in a place outside of the processes of life.” (The Human Condition, pp. 165-166) A guild was an organization of workers and these workers made the worlds’ things. And those things continued to exist in the city for a time span longer than that of a human life. These things are the things that make the world. Marx called these people that live in cities and make things the petite bourgeosie, and incorporated them into his class struggle. Local communities (communes) had nothing to contribute to the class struggle. This type of petite bourgeois socialism could only be a negative factor in the class struggle.

In response to the harsh living conditions of the labourers flowing into the city, Marx and Engles thought a free space for them and how much it would free them. But what was such a free space to have been for these people who were not tied to the land?

Proudhon had written “In the large cities, it is the reality that more than 90% of people do not have an address they can call their own. This reality has should have a fearful scorn for the culture of this shining century. This is no exceptional assertion. The home and hearth that are the meeting point of morality and family existence are sucked into a social vortex” (quoted in Engels, The Housing Problem, p. 30) and Engels criticized this by saying “For us, this very lamentable talk shows how reactionary Proudhon-ism is. In order to create the revolutionary class of the proletariat of today, it is absolutely necessary to cut the fog-like thread that has forever bound them to the land.” (ibid, p. 30,31) “Today’s large industry will create a proletariat free as a bird after throwing away the tradition of completely property-less labourers tied to the land.” (ibid, p. 31) The change was from a petit bourgeosie chained to home and hearth to a proletariat “free as a bird”. This free space was the free space depicted by Engels. I [Yamamoto] believe that this is something still firmly set in our consciousness. Home and hearth are enduring symbols of a former housing system. Modernism is about how far people can be freed from this simplistic picture of home and hearth. Only then it will be possible to actually make a city.

Just as Arendt had written, “The original meaning of familia denoted property and that property could be land, a house, money, or slaves.” “However, this property was not thought of as belonging to the family. On the contrary, the family was seen as being by the hearth and it was the hearth that belonged to the land” … “and it was not possible for property to move”, (The Human Condition, note on p. 124) and both house and hearth were assets of the world. Property “occupies a place in a fixed part of the world.” (ibid., p. 99) This is the meaning of the oikos within the polis, “occupying one’s own place in a particular part of the world and, because of this, property is associated with a governmental body.” (ibid., p. 91) In passing, the contemporary “concept of property [as in asset] has its source in humans themselves. Or, to put it another way, in owning the bodies of people and, in turn, owning the [muscle] power of those bodies.” This is what Marx called the labour power.

I had to admit defeat with this sentence.

> こうした近代の財産は、世界的な性格を失い、人間そのものの中に場所を移し、個人がただ死ぬ時に失う肉体の中に場所を移した。
> These modern properties have lost their global character and shifted their place in the human being itself, in the body that the individual simply loses when he or she dies. [DeepL]

This next sentence of mine is smoother and word-for-word correct. At first, I still couldn’t extract any meaning from it but it became clearer from the sentences after.

The contemporary notion of property lost this universal nature as it came to denote humans and the bodies they only lose when they die. (ibid., p. 99)

Arendt wrote that the concept of property shifted from “the house and hearth binding people to a place” to “the labour power possessed by a person”. The house and hearth are in the world. The world has an appearance made up of things such as the polis and the mediaeval cities we have seen so far. It is a space that “represents a familiarity [homegeneity] to the people of that world and an unfamiliarity [heterogeneity] to the people not of that world. Within this world are houses and hearths that were property but there was a change from a world in which houses and hearths were property, to a society in which labour power was property. The persons living in that society were labourers who were wage labourers, and society was market society. In that market society, a labourer was a person whose “labour power a person’s body has” was a commodity to be exchanged for money. These were the labourers as free as birds, and the space for these labourers was society. And architects came to design buildings for those labourers as free as birds. This was functional architecture. Today’s architects have lost their consciousness of the world.

Next weeks’ installment will be the end of Chaper 3 and I’ve translated enough by now to know that Yamomoto builds upon seemingly irrelevant information and saves his conclusions for the end of sections and his best ones for the end of chapters. Handsup, I felt parts of this weeks’ translation were like that childhood game Chinese Whispers with me translating into English from Japanese that had been translated from English possibly translated from German, depending on whether Marx and Engels wrote directly in English or translated from German into it. As a native English speaker, former speaker and sometimes translator of Japanese, and current learner of how to express myself in Mandarin, I know there’s a stage where the best you can do is to constantly experiment with the new language and incorporate feedback (that could be from yourself, friends, persons more knowledgeable or even an translation app) so you can judge whether what you just said or wrote is what you meant.

Babelfish (remember that?) vs. DeepL. Fight! Fight!

”Success Translation” doesn’t inspire much confidence, though, out of context, neither make much sense. I suppose a really huge large language model that’s ~~read~~ data-scaped everything Marx and Engels ever wrote in any language could probably identify the source and output any number of translations by humans but this would just plagiarising humans and so neither artificial nor intelligent.

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So long, Jonathan. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and for your comments over the years.