Travel can be a strange and inexplicable thing. Every time I return to Japan, I’m constantly intrigued by how fascinatingly different it is as a place on most spheres of life; i.e. culturally, socially, economically and architecturally. As an unashamed tourist armed with my brochures, maps and pamphlets, I’m inevitably drawn to Japan through an exotic eye and it is this exoticism and the idea of what that means for the architecture of cities that I’m most interested in illustrating throughout the following parts.

Part 2. Gardens

As a city, Kyoto is well contained within its semi-enclosed basin topography. The street grid and buildings are located mostly (if not all) on the flat and for this reason one can immediately gain an appreciation for how the tree-covered hills frame the city and add legibility to the north, east and west. I was told that the belt of greenery is more or less a reflection of the municipal government’s intention to preserve the surrounding hills for cultural and historic reasons – in some cases dedicated temple grounds. Most of the temples and its gardens inhabit areas of sanctuary to the north, east and west – between the wooded hills and city proper: a no-man’s land for spiritual connection, but close enough to the city to sense its physicality. In each axial direction, subway lines work in tandem with the seamlessly efficient bus system infrastructure to provide connections to the various tourist experiences. At first instance, Kyoto seems like a virtual city of gardens: a ‘Tourist world-city’ where experience is seemingly specifically engineered for the enjoyment of its visitors. To my surprise, not far away from my mother’s apartment was the ‘Garden of Fine Arts’ designed by architect Tadao Ando and completed in 1994 (see fig. 1). It’s a curious enclave just off the main road in Kamigamo, consisting of a series concrete ramps that lead visitors through a journey of viewing large recreations of well known art works (apparently the recreation of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement is approximately the same size as the original in the Sistine Chapel), carefully reproduced on large porcelain panels: it claims to be the ‘world’s first outdoor art garden’ (see fig. 2).

Ando uses water here to its full effect in order to create an contemplative, almost monastic experience through the scale of spaces; however it represents a disjunction to the realities of the outside world – in some ways it codifies a mini-version of an ideal Kyoto: an embryonic microcosm that attempts to anaesthetize the realities of it’s mother urban Kyoto through creating its own reality constructed from concrete, water, porcelain and the ‘great masters’. The ramps as streets, each art piece proclaims a place for reflection – a virtual Kiyomizu temple in its own right.

Fig. 1 Fine Arts Garden by Tadao Ando - plan and section

Fig. 2 View towards Michelangelo's 'Last Judgement'

Part 3. Towers

Through the dense urban jungle of Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto, one cannot readily distinguish where cities begin and end. Towers have an interesting function in this way as they have the ability to allow visitors to locate themselves within the larger city fabric (even though in some cases I still had some difficulty in determining this). Tsutenkaku tower near Dobutsuen-mae (a southern part of Osaka) is an interesting example of observation platform as urban marker. The tower’s name literally translates to ‘tower reaching heaven’ and it was originally built in 1912, originally patterned from the Eiffel tower. It was also connected to the nearby amusement park, Luna Park via an aerial tramway (see fig. 3). Its height of 64 metres made it the tallest structure in Asia at the time of its construction. A fire in 1943 severely damaged the tower, so instead of repairing the structure, it was dismantled for iron supply during the Second World War. The height of the current tower is 103 metres in total and was constructed by the local citizens in 1956. The tower is also a timekeeper – it has Japan’s largest clock on its east side, which is LED and octagonal in shape. Through its neon turret, it can inform its citizens of upcoming weather forecasts via a combination of three different colours as it is connected to the meteorological observatory – tower as weather barometer. Architecture as scientific instrument. As well as having a scientific dimension, the tower also has a spiritual one: it houses the local street god ‘Billiken’ – the god of good luck (it also houses a robotic personification of the tower). In some ways, the second incarnation of the tower represents a wider subversive architecture of urban hybridization – whether through its role as observation platform or weather sock, it remains as a ghostly neon shadow of its former self (see fig. 4). Through its different permutations and likenesses the tower has become a beacon of entertainment and subtle pragmatism, a motif that remains common within Osaka’s pleasure and amusement culture. If Tsutenkaku can be seen as a hybrid of its various representations and functions, then the next tower may be seen as a hybrid of urban archetypes and program. The ‘Floating Garden Observatory’ is a circular observation platform 173 metres high above Osaka at the top of what is known as the Umeda Sky Building (see fig. 5 & 6). The platform not only provides a panoramic view of the city skyline, it also provides a ‘tender romantic experience’ in the form of the ‘Lumi Deck’. Young couples in love can purchase a ‘Heart Lock’ from the shop below on the retail level and attach it to the ‘Fence of Vows’. The couple can measure their degree of love by sitting on a bench and holding hands across a dome that lights up the floor below in the shape of a heart, the light pattern changes to reflect the couple’s ‘degree of love’. A camera stand is also available to capture this intimate experience. The hybrid mix of being both ‘tower and garden’ lends the ‘Floating Garden Observatory’ to traverse extreme scales of human experience: from the intimacy of human courtship to the ‘feeling of bigness’ from placing oneself within the expanse of the urban largeness.

Scales of human emotion are channelled through the confluence of the ‘garden tower’ – to almost parody the role that 19^th century English and French gardens had (most noticeably in literature) as environments for romance and subtle nuance. The perversion here though is that visitors have the opportunity to not only enjoy the view, but also witness (in a voyeuristic way) the falling out between a couple once they’d realised there relationship had been a complete sham from the glowing wonder of the Lumi Deck.

Fig. 3 The original Tsutenkaku tower and aerial tramway circa. 1912-1920

Fig. 4 The current Tsutenkaku tower in all its neon glory

Fig. 5 Umeda Sky Building diagram

Fig. 6 Umeda Sky Building and The Floating Garden Observatory

Part 4. Arcades

My Father once told me a common Japanese saying, where ‘people from Kyoto put their money on their backs, whereas people from Osaka put their money in their stomachs’. I think this saying has some truth to it; Kyoto does have the feeling that their inhabitants spend more time and money on fashion as opposed to the people of Osaka, spending their earnings on food and entertainment. If Kyoto can be seen as the reserved, quite traditional and well-dressed father figure in the family of Japanese cities then Osaka would be the slightly grungy teenager that eats too much and spends too much time at entertainment arcades. Shinsai-bashi and Doton-bori are the hedonistic heart and soul of Osaka. They are made up of a network of pedestrian only arcades, usually two to three storeys high and covered with a barrel-vaulted ceiling (this varies depending on the arcade’s distinct identity). These arcades provide the blood that pumps the consumer heart, through an immersion of lights, sound, general pandemonium and wave after wave of people it creates a euphoric overload of sensual experience and anachronistic pleasure – the arcade becomes the perfect architectural device to facilitate the experience (see fig. 7). Firstly, arcades allow the visitor to feel like they have entered another ‘womb-like’ world – a kind of mini-city where calendar time has been replaced by periods between eating kushi-katsu and getting the latest fix from a gaming parlour. The narrow format of the arcade (being two-sided) means that the visitor can really only go either side – going forward or the way they came can be a long journey, so there is really no escaping once they are in there. Secondly the arcade’s pedestrian only nature makes one feel like they are a part of something larger – i.e. to feel like a part of the scene, as characters in a virtual theatre of wanton apocalyptic consumerism and abandon.

The arcades of Dobutsuen-mae are a slightly different story – while the arcades of Shinsai-bashi and Doton-bori house the most contemporary of Japanese cosmopolitan culture, Dobutsuen-mae’s arcades are quieter in comparison, virtual ghost towns inhabited by the homeless and frequented the most by a noticeably older generation of Osaka citizens (see fig. 8). It made me think of the possibility that the Shinsai-bashi arcades may become like Dobutsuen-mae as an inevitable sign for its future as a hub for Osaka’s consumer and entertainment culture.

Fig. 7 Shinsai-bashi arcade by night from bridge

Fig. 8 An arcade in Dobutsuen-mae

Part 5. The tourist and the city

In some ways the architecture that a tourist encounters is very much in flux: it is the compression of time and space – thus condensed experience: buildings become momentary material, which frame that very experience as slippages of time and shards of space governed by subway timetables and airport itineraries. For the tourist, architecture (and the city for that matter) becomes a constantly shifting sea of images, sounds and smell – a kinaesthetic melting pot of expectation constrained by the limitations of one’s budget. I’d like to think of it as that old adage of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did the architecture of cities generate the tourist culture or the other way around? If I were to infer from the impressions of my recent visit, I would have to say that the former may be more evident, but in reality I would assume that it would perhaps be a complex amalgam of both.

One thing that I can be sure of is that cities in general are vastly complex organisms; they are not only built up of accretive layers of infrastructure, public/private economic interests, street patterns, planning rules and regulations (et cetera) – but also the inexplicably intangible layers of human desire and anxiety conditioned by hundreds of years of society and culture. These aspects to me are not easily quantifiable or even statistically manageable in any readily available way, but they are documented – not conventionally in any library or bookshelf – but rather within the cities themselves.

Dale Fincham

Image sources:

Fig. 1 Fine Arts Garden by Tadao Ando – plan and section (image from tourism brochure)

Fig. 2 Fine Arts Garden – view towards Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’ (photo by author)

Fig. 3 The original Tsutenkaku tower and aerial tramway circa. 1912 – 1920 – source: http://homepage1.nifty.com/masaaki/osaka/osaka1.htm

Fig. 4 The current Tsutenkaku tower in all its neon glory (photo by author)

Fig. 5 Diagram of Umeda Sky Building (image from tourism brochure)

Fig. 6 Sky Building from below (photo by author)

Fig. 7 An arcade in Shinsai-bashi by night from bridge (photo by author)

Fig. 8 An arcade in Dobutsuen-mae (photo by author)

I am continually drawn to her work, which is not accidentally architectural: she speaks very well on the subject of her work as studies/cosmologies/maps of cities and other tectonic and cultural spaces/structures.  I danced with the idea (and still do, often) of using this work in my architectural research, but whether or not I weave this into an academic enquiry, it remains a formative series of works in my worldview of architecture, and the greater ‘expanded field’ of things/worldliness.

(Please click to get the super-size-me size).

I’ve recently acquired a monograph ‘Black City’ which is the first to publish a substantial collection of her work, past and present, and it is simply amazing.  I’ve selected a few of my favourites here, but you can view some of her work here, at White Cube who represent her, and here is a video/interview with Mehretu in Berlin, where her latest exhibition ‘Grey Area’ was shown (at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin) which has now travelled to the Guggenheim New York if you’re there, go see it!

An interpretation that I dallied with for a while, and hope to re-animate in the future, is the notion of syncretism, which refers to an ‘attempt at reconciliation of two opposing or different principles, practices, or parties…’, in my reading and understanding (or at least the part that I enjoy about it) is the idea of an equilibrium which nontheless sustains its aspects of tension. This idea not surprisingly was something that I was reading in architecture schools –my subject of interest– how an academic is responsible for simultaneously critiquing a body of knowledge, whilst disseminating it, or how an architecture student grapples with the hypothetical studio project (with all its fantasy, experimentation, failure, risk etc etc), whilst knowingly attempting to replicate and learn principles of the real world.  They are contradictory objectives, but they have to be maintained.

This is clearly not an idea exclusive to architectural education or architecture or architects, which is why I mentioned my deep interest in this work as a framework or doorway into an expanded field of thinking and being.  The obvious subject of some works in particular address the City, and it is immediately obvious that these works are grappling with the coded, multi-layered, crumbling, ghosting, dynamic, etc etc, representation of the City.  They are both fragmented, but approach wholeness; they surround the void with speeding and violent (or beautiful) mass and lines and points; they are architectural, but never building; they are constructed, of deconstructions; they attempt new meaning by obfuscating prior meaning… and they are huge.  The Seven Acts of Mercy (pictured here) is over 6 metres long, and nearly 3m tall.

I think these works probably explain more about me than I have been able to explain them to you about architecture (or the City), but I still wanted to share.  I’d love to hear from anyone in NY who could make it along to her show, it’s open til October I think.

“It’s time to stop dreaming and start building, Allen said.

Allen, 61, for years has been calling attention to the widespread existence of “food deserts” in cities across America, where whole communities lack access to fresh, nutritious, affordable food, and underserved populations have high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.” Full Article here.

I reckon this is awesome and if anyone has a spare 7 million lying around this seems like a good cause.  Freerange 2 touched on a lot of issues relating to this with its theme of Gardening and Violence. Have a look.

A lasting impression was the excitement that a revitalised and active member of an incredibly famous group (in the architecture community) was to some extent continuing its work some 30 years later, in a reasonably radical way.

Westminster University has just published the Archigram Archival Project online. It is an amazingly comprehensive digital archive of the entire Archigram oeuvre, containing hundreds of projects and thousands of staggering images produced by the group in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

“Almost 10,000 items are included in this archive, including digital versions of drawings, collages, paintings, photographs, magazines, articles, slides and multi-media material, accompanied by original texts by Archigram wherever these are available. Around half of these items belong to the 202 projects currently listed and given project numbers by Dennis Crompton in the Archigram Archives. The rest are supporting and contextual material such as letters, photos, texts and additional projects provided by the depositors.”

What I find interesting given this new availability is the possibility for a renewed enthusiasm and experimentation in architectural representation, especially from the student body, which in large, produces increasingly frigid architectural representations –a tangential discussion to be had relates to the uptake of digital representation in architectural practice, which in my mind is still largely in a state of clumsy infancy in most conventional architecture schools and practices: the uptake seems too excited by production rather then quality-.

What I find interesting is the conceptual and intellectual rigour and consistency applied throughout the body of work, which radically attempted to imagine future conditions for modernity, the city, the suburb (and so on, the breadth is phenomenal), and to a huge extent has been proven as fairly accurate.  Commodity-fetishism, virtual nomads, techno-environmentalism and invisible network cities are just a handful of ideas flooding through the work, which remember, was created when only snippets of these conditions were evident -the mobile phone was really only taken up in the 70s.  In some ways the work might be framed as evolutionary, exploring and fantasizing about the things they saw around them, and developing those aspects they thought would persist.
A few favourites:

Sin Centre

“Entertainments Palace’ on the site of the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, London. Originally ‘failed’ as student final thesis project at the Regent Street Polytechnic

The Polytechnic failed the scheme and continued to do so several times even after its prominent display at MOMA and published status as an epoch-making and original technic icon.”

This makes me think of the stories heard (in nz…a few years back) of students being failed in final years of study, only to retort that the university wasn’t able to argue its case based on the assessment criteria, and eventually were forced to pass the student under legal presuure.  I wonder what it would take to fail these days, sure you could do it by being crap -maybe, but it would be interesting to see which directions you could take architecture that might be considered un-architectural enough to be denied by the university.  I know I tried… and there’s plenty to be analysed there, but I havn’t been bothered yet.

Plug In University Node

“The University Node was an exercise to discover what happened to the various notions of gradual infill, replacement and regeneration of parts on to a Plug-in City megastructure: but with a specific kind of activity.”

Instant City

“Instant City forms part of a series of investigations into mobile facilities which are in conjunction with fixed establishments requiring expanded services over a limited period in order to satisfy an extreme but temporary problem.”

Sorry about the clumsy formatting, but i like how hungry the images get all over the website.

Love it.

I just read a great article by Architect Denise Scott Brown who discusses what is like to be married to a Architect while they work and live together, and how her husband receives almost all of the recognition.  Denise Scott Brown and her husband Mrs. Robert Venturi wrote what is one of the seminal books of the late twentieth century in architecture, Learning from Las Vegas.

“When Bob and I married, in 1967, I was an associate professor. I had taught at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Berkeley, and had initiated the first program in the new school of architecture at UCLA. I had tenure. My publication record was respectable; my students, enthusiastic. My colleagues, mostly older than I, accorded me the same respect they showed each other, and I had walked the same corridors of power they had (or thought I had).

The first indication of my new status came when an architect whose work I had reviewed said, “We at the office think it was Bob writing, using you name.” By the time we wrote Learning from Las Vegas, our growing experience with incorrect attributions prompted Bob to include a note at the beginning of the book asking that the work and ideas not be attributed to him alone and describing the nature of our collaboration and the roles played by individuals in our firm. His request was almost totally ignored. A body of theory and design in architecture apparently must be associated by architecture critics with an individual; the more emotional their criticism, the stronger is its focus on one person.”

A few years ago at a conference we organized a very interesting conversation emerged about how we select the 20 or so international speakers we were inviting.  (Incidentally I think we actually invited Scott-Brown) We didn’t really have a system apart from interestingness until about 2/3s of the way through we noticed that almost all the men were speakers.  I raised this issue at a meeting, with my thoughts been that we should focus on speakers that would balance out the conference from then on.  Interestingly a few of the females at the table rejected this notion as been inversely sexist because we were then selecting women based on gender rather than skill or interest.   I’ve never quite got my head around how to deal with that problem either.

In principle my personal position is that the discriminations against women (not to mention racial) are very deep rooted in our cultures and also in the past.  Correcting behaviours from our past that we now see as abhorrent is not a simple or easy process.  Changing a law or even a perception does not necessarily signal a shift in behavioral change.  So  I think at a points we do need to make active effort to live in the world we want to,  and not think that the current one will automatically correct itself.  I’m not sure what the best mechanisms for this are, but I suspect positive discrimination is one of them.

On a further note, I was at a meeting last night and we ended up talking about pregnancy at design firms. It turns out there were no senior women Landscape Architects with children in Melbourne that anyone could think of, and in none of the architecture firms at the table were there any senior positions held by women with children.  I find it deeply disturbing that ones gender and the very natural decision to bear children to mean such a fundamental sacrifice in ones financial and professional position.

“The methodological and conceptual roots of this approach stem from the discipline of Science Studies, with the writings of the French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour forming the primary source for its subsequent development. Latour first developed his ideas in relation to the analysis of scientific and technological controversies in his book Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Controversy analysis is also part of the Actor-Network-Theory developed in his most recent book Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ”

The published work samples to date seem to have followed the London Olympic Stadium with some animated network diagrams, with a bunch more seemingly in pipeline. The project sounds interesting, I would be curious about the production of outcomes which might effect the design or regulatory processes of similar schemes, so that the work becomes more then the recording of traces and relationships, but I’m ahead of myself there without having gone into this in any considerable depth.

Here’s some more about the project and its supporters:

“Documenting and visualising recent controversies in architecture, it also aims to address a broader audience interested in the design of cities, spatial networks and built environments as well as planners, representatives of city government, NGOs and citizens. As it is a part of the EU-funded project MACOSPOL, Mapping Architectural Controversies draws on a variety of documental sources and visual methods to explore the multifarious connections of architecture and society.”

London Olympic Stadium Visualisation

1. Geoffery Bawa (Sri Lanka)
2. Gerald Melling (NZ)
3. Peter Rich (South Africa)
4. Donovan Hill (Brisbane)
5. Laurie Baker (India)
6. Herzog de Meuron (Swiss)
7. Sumangala Jayatillaka (Sri Lanka)
8. John Scott (NZ)
9. Paulo Solari (America)
10. I guess I have to put Gaudi in there.

I’d be very interested to know what other people think.

ps. I’m well aware that there are no women on this list which is a devastating comment on something.  I’m not sure if its my tastes, the architecture profession, the media, the institutions…

The Flaming Lips Wayne Coyle takes us on a tour of his house in the midst of refurbishment. Finished it packs a little more heat than this crappy video suggests, take a look at the pictures at Design Milk.

(Click on the pictures for full size photos)

Laki worked as one of Geoffrey Bawa’s main draftsmen and landscape advisers, and without any formal training as such he has more knowledge of how to build both houses and landscapes than most other people on the island; architects or not.  His latest design invention, which he is happy for me to promote, is his startling a-frame palm tree house, or Areca Palm house, which can be seen below.

On first glance this looks like a tidily designed and well proportioned A-frame house with a raised timber platform inside to provide a bedroom and bathroom.  Upon close inspection I was startled to see that the Areca Palms are infact pre-grown and then re-planted on an angle to provide the primary structure.  As can be seen in the photos these palms are alive and still growing vertically! Because this construction process relies largely on pre-grown palms and labour (which is compartively cheap in Sri Lanka), it is a much cheaper model for housing than alternative conventional one or two bedroom options.  ( If anyone has any further questions about this amazing house and its construction please contact me mrbarnabyb(at)gmail.com and I’ll pass them onto Laki)

I take something of a big-tent approach to design and architecture and prefer not to spend too much energy following the seams and fissures in language which are used to divide disciplines, and so I’m quite comfortable with the idea that design is an inherently intellectual activity.

I’d like to renew this discussion by exploring a specific aspect of these statements.  I am personally rather ambivalent about the need for Architecture or Architects to realise the intellectual component of their disclipline as I find the concept of Intellectualism, or the Intellectual rather void of meaning until there is some content poured into the phrase.  For my mind being intellectual is a means, not an ends, and is a rather neutral position until the ends are more explicitly explored.     So I’ve become curious to understand what the purpose of intellectualism is?

Purpose is itself an interesting word which in this context is meant to suggest force and direction rather than a neat resolution.  It asks what is the tractory of intent of Intellectualism?  Where does it lead?  I fear if we don’t ask these questions, and answer them honestly we risk becoming trapped by our own language, becoming imprisoned in our own textual constructions.