Ch. 5, pp.208–210

In the past week and while I’ve been translating this book in order to have a better understanding of last year’s Pritzker Prize laureate, there’s been an announcement of the next one. Two successive architects who we can learn a lot from is almost too much. I struggle to keep up with this new rate of one worthy architect per year. I’ve no idea how people keep up with architecture daily. One way I suppose is to reduce an architect’s philosophy of building to a few sentences as in a Pritzker Jury statement, and then to over-reduce that into a one-word description. Yamamoto thus became “the community guy” which, while true, is as meaningless as ChatGPT summarizing 500 words into fifty, and then asking it to expand it back into 500. It’s like saving an image at a low resolution in Photoshop. You can re-save it at a higher DPI afterwards but there won’t be the information to fill those new pixels. All you get is a high-resolution blurry image.

We’re now up to page 208 of 262 of The Space of Power/The Power of Space and, from what I can see of the images ahead, I think the remainder of the book issuing to be examples of how Yamamoto has applied all these findings. Yamamoto’s first published project, the 1977 Yamakawa Villa is very open to the forest but we can’t really call the forest a public realm. The next project, the 1978 Studio Steps does have a theatre-like space with stepped seating and the stage backdrop is a large window facing the street. With this project we can see these nascent ideas given form for the first time.

• • • 

Architecture is the stage for activity and expression [of views]

“Power is potential power that is always latent, but cannot be depended upon or measured as force and strength can.” “People living together is the one essential physical factor where there is power, for when people are living their lives, power continues to exist along with people when there is this potential power. Accordingly, the most important physical precondition for power is the creation of nation-states based on the Western model of political organization.” (Arendt, The Human Condition , p.322, pp.323–324) Cities (the polis) are artificially constructed spaces that are worlds and are already spaces of power. “Power is born and able to exist for the first time in this space of the world. Even when the intervals between activities have passed, that which binds people together (and which these days is called an “organization”) continues to exist when people are living together.” ibid., p.324)

“Power maintains the public realm and the spaces that appear in it. Power such as this is the source of vitality for human production.” [as in handiwork, or the fruits of production, rather than industrial] (ibid. p.328) Human production (architecture) is created by power and, at the same time, is also the stage for power to operate. It is the stage for political activity. The stage (architecture) is what gives continuity to that power. “If human production (architecture) is not the stage for activity or expression of views, or if it is not the stage for a fabric of relationships of human phenomena, or if it is not the stage where the stories of activities and expression are created, then it has no positive reason for existing. If it is not a place where people can tell their stories and if it is not the place where people live, then it is nothing more than an accumulation of things arbitrarily added one on top of another by isolated individuals and having no relationship to each other. If there are not the fruits of production by persons living there, then human phenomena are as precarious as those of wandering nomads, and as empty and without benefit. (“Traditional sources” such as ancient religious texts speak negatively of this.) “Empty space, empty space, everything is empty … there is nothing new under the sun.” … Nobody remembers the person before. And the person who comes next will not be remembered by the one after.” (ibid).

The landscape of collected houses in which we live s separated from one another, is nothing more than one in which isolated individuals arbitrarily add to an accumulation of things having no relationship to each other. (Fig. 4)

This is not a stage for activity and expression and nor is it a stage for a network of human phenomena, and nor is it a stage for people to be active and to express themselves.

There were some typically dense sentences (for Arendt, not Yamamoto) in this one page but his point is clear in the last two sentences here. Cities as accumulations of arbitrary and disconnected things by isolated individuals are not fit for purpose. I will stop here because there’s a natural break in the text. The next section, Section 4, is titled “Architectural design by resident participation, and those reacting against it.

• • • 

2025/03/08 Ch. 5, pp. 208-215
2025/01/12 Ch. 5, pp. 201-207
2025/01/05 Ch. 5, pp. 195-200
2024/12/22 Ch. 5, pp. 187-195
2024/12/08 Ch. 4, pp. 179-186
2024/11/03 Ch. 4, pp. 175-179
2024/11/03 Ch. 4, pp. 169-175
2024/10/20 Ch. 4, pp.163-168
2024/10/06 Ch. 4, pp.159-163
2024/09/29 Ch. 4, pp.156-159
2024/09/08 Ch. 4, pp.152-155
2024/09/08 Ch. 4, pp.146
2024/08/25 Ch. 3, pp.135-1
2024/08/18 Ch. 3, pp.128-135
2024/08/11 Ch. 3, pp.120-128
2024/07/21 Ch. 3, pp.115-120
2024/07/21 Ch. 3, pp.108-114
2024/07/14 Ch. 3, pp.101-107
2024/06/30 Ch. 2, pp.92-100
2024/06/23 Ch. 2, pp.87-92
2024/06/16 Ch. 2, pp.78-87
2024/06/02 Ch. 2, pp.69-78
2024/05/05 Ch. 2, pp.66-70
2024/05/05 Ch. 2, pp.58-66
2024/05/05 Ch. 1, pp.46-55
2024/04/28 Ch. 1, pp.35-46
2024/04/21 Ch. 1, pp.23-35
2024/04/07 Ch. 1, pp.18-23
2024/03/31 Ch. 1, pp.14-18
2024/03/24 The Space of Power vs. The Power of Space: Preface pp. 7-11

• • • 

Revisited this week:

• Intellectual vs. Romantic
• The Architect as Ornament
• The Dacha – I revisited this post because the idea of living simply but not necessarily off-grid has started to appeal to me. It’s also ten years since I was invited to visit my first dacha.