I know I shouldn’t be interested in architecture as moneymaking machines. Even as a guilty pleasure, it’s increasingly not that much fun. I’m obviously an addict. This may be the last of this series of posts. You’ll understand why at the end. I thought my undergraduate first year architecture history book may have been my […]
The Chinese city of Hangzhou is on the Qiantang River that empties into Hangzhou Bay which is a large, funnel-shaped indentation on mainland China’s east coast. Pacific Ocean tides are funneled by the bay to create a tidal wave (a.k.a. tidal bore) that can be as high as nine meters and travel up to 40km/hour […]
FILM In 1956, movies were mass entertainment all around the post-war world but output was dominated by the USA across all genres. I never knew that The King and I, High Society, The Ten Commandments, and Around the World in 80 Days were all from 1956 but it’s not important. It’s a mixed bag, but […]
The 1974 building we know as Nakagin Capsule Tower was marketed by Nakagin Mansion Co., Ltd. as Nakagin Capsule Mansion <Ginza> (中銀カプセルマンシヨン <銀座>) or, more simply, as Business Capsule (ビジネスカプセル). I recently bought what looks like a newly-printed facsimile of the original marketing brochure for the building. Its yellowed paper is actually a high-quality photograph […]
For someone who’s supposed to be not only be tired of history, but of history repeating itself, I thought I ought to get this draft out of my drafts folder so it’s no longer a reminder of my history of history fatigue. I don’t know how long it’s been sitting there, but History Repeating #1: […]
Last week was the first week of semester so my choices for this post were the next installment of Yamamoto’s book or something I’d already had half a draft for and this is what follows this preamble. I did see this book in Tokyo’s Kinokuniya but didn’t pick it up. Last year, Yamamoto had another […]
For most of 1985-1995 I was not in love with architecture. That love had been mostly cerebral and unrequited anyway, so it was more of a switching-off than any one, singular event. Invariably though, when one tries to switch off, news from the other side begins to creep back in. Sometime – I don’t remember when […]
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 […]
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 […]
A draft of this post lay in my drafts folder for almost four years. The problem was that I thought something could be said about the career of Albert Speer but what? The architect Albert Speer (1905–1981) of this post is the one you might expect, the one whose only client was Adolf Hitler, and […]
Some architectural fixations are easily achieved, some boundaries easily pushed. For example and whether by accident or design, the world has always had and always will have a tallest building. I’m guessing it was the Great Pyramid at Giza 4,500 years ago but I’m more sure of recent tallest buildings such as the World Trade […]
The Nakayama House is Isozaki’s first recorded house, completed in 1964 one year after he left Tange’s office to start his own. It was later demolished and a facsimile built in 1998 at Akiyoshidai International Art Village. By 1964 it was already expected of Japanese architects to have elliptical theories about their work and how […]
It’s not just houses. No building is spared from Japan’s memory loss when it comes to its own architectural history. Earlier this year, there was a bit of a stir when it was announced Kenzo Tange’s 1964 Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium would be demolished, the given reason being that the then innovative suspension roof was in […]
The rate of building stock churn in Japan is well documented and the architectural churn it generates more so. This very real manifestation of the Futurist concern for neverending newness meshes perfectly with the post-WWII belief in continuous growth that architects are, on the whole, inclined to accept. Toyo Ito isn’t alone in decrying the […]
