Inconvenient History

This summer I binge-read the murder mystery/detective novels of Japanese author Keigo Higashino (東野圭吾, 1958–) and was totally familiar with their world of accepted truths, red-herrings, preconceived notions, and establishing timelines, not to mention the pressure from the higher-ups to close the case and go with the most likely scenario despite inconclusive evidence. In these novels, cases are invariably solved and the truth arrived at by revisiting chains of events as new information comes to light and establishing who did what when, where and why. There’s satisfying closure. Architectural history doesn’t work like that. It’s not about learning from knowing who did what when, where and why, but about omitting and curating “available” information to produce new timelines to simplify history and tidy it up. It’s an open process with no closure because new histories are created by omitting and curating the one before in a process that takes history farther away from the truth instead of closer to it. History is no longer a window into the past but a reflection of how we want to see things at any given time.

This semester I’m teaching a course on modern Japanese architecture and am noticing an absence of information on which Japanese architects were doing what, where and why during WWII. WWI divides the history of modern Japanese architecture into architects from before and architects after and, in the post-war enthusiasm to forget the war, nobody wanted to be known as a wartime architect. Some, like Tōgo Murano (村野藤吾,1891–1984) and Mamoru Yamada (山田 守, 1894–1966) were past the age for active service and continued working throughout the war and well after but they’re not the ones feted now. It’s as if modern Japanese architecture began with the first building after the end of WWII that could be perceived as modern to the Japanese and Japanese to the rest of the world. It wasn’t long in coming, but let’s not race ahead.

At the beginning of the 20th century – circa 1925 let’s say, and from the standpoint of a Japanese aspiring young architect, the choices of where to go overseas and who to study and/or work for were limited. There was the still up-and-coming Le Corbusier, a somewhat fading Frank Lloyd Wright, a recently-converted Walter Gropius/Bauhaus and, lastly, what was left of the Beaux Artes. Japanese aspiring architects went all four ways, any one of which would’ve required parents with deep pockets.

Little is known of l’École des beaux-arts de Paris alumni Junpei Nakamura (中村 順平, 1887-1977) except he was there in 1920. We know a bit more about where Kikuji Ishimoto (石本喜久治, 1894-1963) was in 1920 because he was a member of the Japanese architectural group Bunriha (分離派, The Separatists) who thought of themselves as the Japanese Secessionists even though their short manifesto was charmingly Futurist in tone.

The year was 1922 so Ishimoto went to the Weimar and not the Dessau Bauhaus where he was taught by Gropius and (from 1922) Wassily Kandinsky and (from 1923) László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. 1923 was the year Gropius threw craftspersons under the bus and insisted machine production was the way forward that the AI bandwagon-jumping we see now reminds me of. We’ll never know if Gropius’ 180° about-face is why Ishimoto returned to Japan to form the Kataoka & Ishimoto Architectural Planning Company in 1927 and, the same year [huh!?], complete the Asahi Newspaper Office in Tokyo and, in 1932, the Shirokiya Department Store. Both are important buildings in Japan’s pre-war history of modern architecture. Unremembered.

Iwao Yamawaki (山脇 巌, 1898-1987) and his wife joined Josef Albers’ first semester preliminary course at Dessau Bauhaus in 1930 but, in 1931, his wife switched to weaving and he changed to architecture, and then to photography before returning to Japan in 1932. Yamawaki designed a few houses such as the 1934 Migishi Atelier for the artist Kotaro Migishi (三岸好太郎, 1903–1934). Sadly, Migashi didn’t get to enjoy his house and its tubular furniture for very long. I don’t know what his story was. Perhaps it was a chronic illness hence the butterflies.

The third architect passing through The Bauhaus 1930-1932 was Bunzo Yamaguchi (山口文象, 1902-1978). He’s best remembered for his own 1940 house but it’s not clear why.

That raised portion of the roof suggests the bathroom is open to the outside but the house isn’t remembered for this whereas Tadao Ando’s 1976 Azuma House was sensational for making people go from room to room via the outside. Perhaps the coldness of the bathroom recreated the sensation of walking along the street to the public bath? This open bathroom would have seemed luxurious yet familiar to Japanese in 1940 yet Ando’s ambient temperature circulation seems as exotic as ever. The raised roof isn’t visible in the composite photograph at bottom right, below. I don’t know what’s going on.

It’s difficult to see any correlation between the respective works of any of these instructors and instructees. If anything, I’d say Imawaki was more influenced by Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier.

Kunio Maekawa (1905-1986, 前川國男) was first to arrive in 1928 on the back of a recommendation from his uncle who at the time was a diplomat with the League of Nations in Paris.

It’s always good business to do favors for people who might send you clients one day.

Maekawa stayed for two years, returning to Japan in 1930 to work for Antonin Raymond 1930-1935, essentially swapping positions with Junzo Sakakura (1901-1969, 坂倉準三) who left Raymond’s office in 1931 to work in Le Corbusier’s atelier until 1936 when he was running the office and responsible for decisions when LC wasn’t around. If Maekawa had seen Villa Savoye being designed, then Sakakura must have helped sort out the mess from its design changing during construction. [c.f. Architecture Myths #20: The Villa Savoye]

In 1929 Le Corbusier travelled by steamer to Argentina and made several trips to the Soviet Union 1928-32. Visual communications would have been by letter as there were no fax machines. The first “phototelegraph” service was established in Germany in 1930. Part of the global success of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater has been attributed to transatlantic photo-transmission becoming possible the year Fallingwater was completed.

Maekawa left Raymond’s office to start his own in 1935, the same year Kenzo Tange (丹下健三, 1913-2005) began studying at the University of Tokyo under Shozo Uchida (內田祥哉, 1885-1972) and Hideto Kishida (岸田日出刀, 1899-1966). We don’t hear about these people. On the left below is Uchida’s 1925 Yasuda Auditorium of Tokyo University, and on the right below are details of Kishida’s General Survey of Modern Architecture (現代建築大觀, Gendai kenchiku taikan) published in Tokyo in 1929. Tange most likely learned of Corbusier through Kishida but nobody’s felt the need to tell us.

After 1935 it wouldn’t have been easy for Tange to travel to Paris and work for Le Corbusier even if he’d had the funds, so he probably settled for Corbusier-by-proxy and went to work for Maekawa 1938-1942 precisely when his office was engaged in Various Military Projects 1938-1941 in Manchuria. Tange may well have been taken on to help with the workload. During his time at Maekawa’s, Tange travelled to Manchuria and participated in an architectural competition for a bank there.

Nobody’s confirming or denying whether Maekawa/Tange won the competition so they may well have. This isn’t a case of ‘if they had, then we’d know about it.’ Similarly, nobody’s confirming or denying whether the winning design was built, so it’s possible that somewhere in the Chinese provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, or Heilongjiang is a Mayakawa-Tange bank building that could be Italian Fascist in style like the 1935 Dalian Railway Station, or perhaps Art Deco like the 1936 JQAK Radio Station (that was essentially a military project) or, most probably, Commercial Neoclassical in style like the 1938 Central Bank of Manchou in Changchun , and much like any other major bank building around the world was at the time. Allowing for the flexibility of architectural history to date a building by either the date of its conception or the date of its completion, this last one is within the range of possibility of being the Makakawa-Tange bank but we know it was designed by the Hershey Design Institute in Nishimura, Japan.

Tange (1) left Maekawa’s office in 1942, (2) returned to Tokyo University, and (3) won a 1942 competition for the design of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere Memorial Hall but we have no reason to assume these three events happened in that order. It’s equally reasonable to assume Tange was working on the competition alone and still at Maekawa’s office when he won, and then decided to leave once it looked like being built. I’d like to know the exact dates when Tange left Maekawa’s office and when the project was cancelled. Perhaps Tange saw the writing on the wall as the Pacific War began in 1941 and 1942 was the year it began to go badly for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The old advice to never quit your present job before you have a better one lined up remains true today. Tange may have burned his bridges with Maekawa. Time to go back to university.

The ‘Memorial Hall’ in Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere Memorial Hall is a mistranslation of 記念館 which can mean ‘Memorial Hall” and, if it had been built, would have become one but, in 1942, it was intended to commemorate the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere not memorialize it.

Tange’s winning proposal has been described as a “fusion of Shinto shrine architecture and the plaza on CapitolineHill in Rome”. This was Tange’s second known competition and, with not just shrine imagery but with an on-axis Mt. Fuji, it was his first publicized competition win.

Tange’s third known competition and his second known win was the 1949 competition for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park that won international favor despite its precedent. It’s to Tange’s astuteness and being able to ‘read-the-room’ that its main building was seen as Corbusian than belonging to Shinto, Ise and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Tange was thus first choice to design the 1951-53 Hiroshima City Children’s Library that was probably the first double-curvature reinforced concrete structure in Japan. Shinto shrines must have still been on his mind however, as Tange had been invited to Ise Shrine’s 1953-54 rebuild – it’s 59th. It’s a Big Thing. Construction of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park wasn’t to be completed until 1955.

In the meantime, Tange designed his own house and Western observers saw in it the Corbusian-ness they loved to see reflected back at them in a Japanese building and Japanese saw in it the Shinto shrine-ness they loved to see reflected back at them in a Western-style building. The Peace Memorial Park building and Tange’s own house even had similarly syncopated structural bays.

Completed two years earlier than the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Tange’s house (a.k.a Seijo Villa) is commonly understood as a precursor to HiroshimaPeace Park but is actually a consequence. Whether unintentionally or not, the appearance of this house created a false impression of Tange’s architectural progression.

Remember how confused everyone was when Frank Gehry’s earlier-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in 2003 six years after the later-designed Guggenheim Museum Bilbao? Frank Gehry is probably the only living architect whose buildings we still expect to exhibit a continuity of style, partly because Frank Gehry has a habit of saying his most recent building is his best ever. For many. Disney arriving out of sequence was proof that wasn’t true.

With history now tidy, we see no more houses from Tange. A detached house was the smallest thing an architect could do in the 20th century and masterplanning the largest. Tange’s first city-wide masterplan followed the Corbusian tradition of ‘visionary’ but speculative masterplans for Paris and Moscow when he produced his 1960 one for Tokyo. His Metabolist crew followed suit with Kyonori Kikutake’s Ocean City and Kisho Kurokawa’sHelix City in 1961, and Arata Isozaki’s City in the Air in 1962. This post is more about branding strategy than the viability of these visionary ideas.

Shinohara began his architectural studies in 1950 so he was no wartime architect but he did serve in Korea one month before the Japanese surrender (on 14 August 1945) and was discharged two months after. A two-month delay discharging soldiers with nothing to do seems strange so it makes me think Shinohara may have sustained an injury and been hospitalized.

In 1954 Kazuo Shinohara (篠原一男, 1926-2006) completed his first house that was much the same size as Tange’s but, with its metal columns, more Miesian than Corbusian although you’d have never got him to mention either name. Between 1954 and 1963, Shinohara had been designing detached houses while all these visions for cities were happening so it’s little wonder he declared “Houses are Art” in 1963. Declaring the detached house an art form is what we now call “taking a position” and, along with the Futurist’s “Everything must be new” is one of the more influential 20th century architectural statements. It found favor amongst architects worldwide for validating sculptural objects as beyond criticism because they were art. The unfortunate consequence was that if houses are art then architects are artists and thus needed to sustain a narrative of artistic progression. I’ve written about Shinohara’s Asakura House before. In 1964, construction of House in White was taking too long and House in Hanayama was rushed from design-to-completion in eight months, appearing as an apparent precursor to House in White. The curating of history that Tange achieved with his Own House in 1953 was repeated by Shinohara with his House in Hanayama in 1965.

Young and naïve me was disappointed to learn architectural history wasn’t the unadulterated record I’d thought it was but I accept it now as what happens to the truth even if I don’t accept it as truth. If we have no awareness of these inconvenient histories today then it’s probably not because architects are better at covering their tracks, but because so little is committed to print anyway and besides, our memories are so short. In such a situation, you’d think there’d be a need for history as a reliable record of what happened but no. We no longer care about who did what when, where and why because it’s all in the past so why bother? We’re all Futurists now.

• • •

Architecture Myths #20: The Villa Savoye
Career Case Study #11: Kunio Maekawa 前川國男
The Asakura House