Ex libris

Kengo Kuma "Anti-object: the dissolution and disintegration of architecture"

KENGO KUMA
"ANTI-OBJECT: THE DISSOLUTION AND DISINTEGRATION OF ARCHITECTURE"
Translation: Alexandra Purnichescu
ProCultura Publishing House, 2017
First Romanian edition, translated from the English edition published by AA Publications, Ltd. in 2008, by Alexandra Purnichescu
Foreword by E. S. Kisaburo Ishii, Ambassador of Japan to Romania
Edition coordinated and edited by conf. dr. dr. arh. Mihaela Pelteacu and drd. arh. Daniela Maria Puia, University of Architecture and Urbanism "Ion Mincu", Bucharest.

text: Dorin ȘTEFAN

A subjective position

Before my first reading of Kengo Kuma's book - ANTI-OBJECT -, so recently, I had read a few books by/about architecture that more annoyed me than charged me up. Of course, the problem is with me not with them, because I was expecting "truths", looking for dumiriri, looking for confirmations. He irritated me with his avowed leftism Kenneth Frampton ("... as Marx authoritatively prophesied..."¹). He irritated me with Marxist, more recently neo-Marxist leftism. They applaud those who have not lived the practical consequences. I cannot applaud them. Those who don't know that the intellectual elite of interwar Romania was liquidated in the name of Marxist-Leninist ideology do.
But where to find uncontaminated "truths"? Can a critic, an analyst or a writer be objective despite his adherence to an ideology? Will the subconscious of an uncommitted but sympathetic sympathizer not contaminate objective "critical analysis"? Can no one be objective? Even the most objective opinions, declared objective by some at the time of their enunciation, will be "discovered" false by others years later. What about subjective statements? Do we have subjective "truths"?
Still in the heat of the moment, I find on the inside cover of Reiner de Graaf's book, Four walls and a roof: the complex nature of a simple^profession2, a motto-quotation from Le Corbusier, said towards the end of his life: "It is life that is right and the architect who is wrong". Was Corbu being honest? Objective or subjective? Leafing through De Graaf's book, I come across an image of a stupid house: "Can a house be beautiful simply because of what we know, not because of what we see". Yes, but the house in the picture is still stupid. To me. In fact, I am irritated, in these texts, by the positions, su(b)positions and pre-positions that chip away, bit by bit, at the (Japanese) porcelain of the "architect's house". I have the impression that each critical architect, or each critical architect, in order to make a place for himself on the stage, "discovers" a particularity, broken out of the whole, and parades it on the market as a new truth about architecture.
Architects broke away from the stonemasons. In the beginning they all worked side by side, in a row, helping each other, building, experimenting, failing, building again. Their wall was the long-negotiated expression of collective labor. One of them, a cleverer one, realized that it would be more "efficient" if they would think before they built. If he would just tell them how to do it, without constantly "consulting" the others. Collective work. Individual decision. Would the assumption be collective or individual? Is he, the architect, who has stepped back to see without being seen, objective in his decisions? I don't think he can be objective. Objective can be the collective decision. Objective is only the anonymous artificial built environment. Millions of square meters of spaces built for mass needs. The anonymous artificial built environment is anonymous, true and objective. Built out of necessity for millions of anonymous, collective, equals.
The architect confuses them because it is personal and subjective. The architect delights them because he is personal and subjective.
Then let's talk about subjectivities.
On first reading, I didn't get rid of the prejudices with which I began the reading even after finishing it. And I don't know if I will after the second reading. Because it's a fantastic book to be read cold. The prejudices are many.
Kuma is not among my Japanese heroes - I have discovered a sensitive architect.
Kuma attacks the object, which is one of my "heroes" - I have discovered a different kind of object.
Kuma begins his story by relating a chance encounter with a realization by Bruno Taut in Japan, and I suspected him of staging it - I later discovered a clarifying ^confession3 by Kuma about this detail.
Still suspecting him, I was and still am thinking of a "detectivistic" style of dis-citation. "Detectivistic" both for Kuma's text and for my thoughts. In the above-mentioned book, of course, among the 20 Japanese architects is Kengo Kuma, but there are also almost all the Japanese architects I was following/watching: Tadao Ando, Hiroshi Hara, Itsuko Hasegawa, Arata Isozaki, Toyo Ito, Kisho Kurokawa, Fumihito Maki, SANAA, Kenzo Tange. Some of them I glimpsed: Shigeru Ban, Kengo Kuma, Yoshio Taniguchi, but there were others: Jun Aoki, Hiroshi Naito, Noritaka Tange (Kenzo's son), Terunobu Fujimori, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kazunari Sakamoto, Yasuhiro Yamashita. I saw "mine" and they impressed me by objectifying: Tadao Ando through curves and concrete ramps apparently in post-Corbusian language ("today, as an architect, I still feel fear"⁴); Hiroshi Hara "cutting" Kyoto in two through the new train station ("I still have the '60s revolution in me"⁵); Itsuko Hasegawa from whom I understood that the curtain wall can be something else; Arata Isozaki through the simple-complex at the "Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art" in the '70s; Toyo Ito by the peerless "Sendai Mediatheque"; Kisho Kurokawa by "metabolism" and "Nakagin Capsule Tower", but also the hotel in Bulgaria or the Bucharest conference in the 1980s; Fumihito Maki by the "Spiral Building" in Tokyo, 1985; SANNA by the "New Museum" in New York; Kenzo Tange contemporary in creation with Le Corbusier and that may say it all. Yes, Le Corbusier and all about object architecture.
So in the heat of the moment, ANTI-OBJECT is a very readable book; it is exciting and clear; confusing and clear at the same time; composed of alternating texts; enjoyable in its story, hard to disentangle in its judgments; fascinating to read without trying to understand it, just to accept it; it is a superb love story of Kuma's love of architecture; it is a subtle literary speculation. So, in the heat of the moment, Kengo Kuma communicates very well, he knows how to make himself heard, he keeps you 'in-text' and implicitly in his architecture. You, the reader, are the observer, but you are also "in-text".
Kuma is honest, lucid and personal: "... I wanted to put my thoughts in order and evaluate my limitations as well as to be critical... I wanted to challenge architectural criticism and draw attention to objects in order to expose them to debate. If I succeeded in this, the book has accomplished its mission" (p. 8).
I can agree that architecture can also be "egocentric and coercive", I can agree that "buildings that are deliberately designed to distinguish themselves from their surroundings are very different from those that attempt to mitigate this isolation" (p. 7), but I don't buy the objective anti-object arguments. On the other hand, starting from Kuma's above quote itself, which includes two somewhat synonymous terms, building and architecture, I would have liked to have discovered the idea that only buildings break away from their surroundings, and architecture saves the image of the building broken away from its surroundings. Kuma does not make this distinction, in the sense that architecture would be a qualification of the building, something other than the building.
Pg. 29: - "...in a space dominated by objects, the subject remains to the end an object..."; I think the architect/author, in the desire to attack the object, generalizes; for me, the subject remains the subject and will dominate through reason the relationship with objects; we can have physical or psychological discomfort living in an environment dominated by objects; we can accept the idea that objects displace space, but I think we can have a "mutually beneficial" relationship with objects.
Pg. 32: - "...modernism simply substituted the problem of time for the problem of transparency and movement. Modernism realized the connection between space and time by creating an architecture of glass objects or by turning elements of movement, such as staircases or ramps, into objects. In this way, time could be captured in photographs which then traveled to all corners of the world..."; in architectural terms, because we are in this context (in the con-text, Kuma "attacks" Le Corbusianism), time means space physically traveled; looking at a photograph we can only have a mental journey, as long as movement is intrinsic to perception we could not accuse photography of substitution through absence; "...a space that looked so unattractive in photographs was difficult to imagine..."; in this context, pro Bruno Taut and anti-object, Kuma accuses photography of misleading; photography from being an objective witness of the accusation, in the previous Corbusian con-texts, becomes a subjective witness of the defense; photography is a filter, it is a filter that reduces the perception of architecture and all the more so it could not monopolize perception. Paradoxical, or symptomatic, Kuma's annoyance with photography, thinking of the Japanese affinity for photography.

Pg. 36: - "...thus buildings came to play a central role in the twentieth century precisely because they were against the times. Architects understood this too. Le Corbusier ended Vers une une architecture with the words "Architecture or revolution. Revolution can be avoided". Like Keynes, he was suggesting that revolution could also be prevented by large-scale building...; thus, over several pages, Kuma makes a beautiful cause-and-effect construction, passing Le Corbusier, the main one still accused of failing architecture in the object, and bringing Keynes' economic thinking to support the "process"; "... as Le Corbusier had predicted, revolution had been avoided thanks to architecture. More clearly, architecture functioned as a highly effective reactive mechanism for institutions wishing to avoid a revolution....", more clearly, I think the author is applying the cause-effect cure cure remedy a bit simplistically to the world in the 1920s.
Pg. 46: - "... the true character of a material and of a building can be discerned by the way the edges are treated, a rather subtle operation. At the scale of a building, some edges can be of crucial importance..."; yes; subtle both figuratively and literally (in Kuma's Water/Glass project, 1992-1995). Subtle and reflective, literally and figuratively. Yes, and beautiful, and subjective (for me).
Pg.47: - touché: "... as a movement, modernism was object- and idea-oriented and aspired to an international (i.e., universal) style in architecture, embodied by pure geometric forms (such as the cones and spheres fetishized by Le Corbusier)...".
Pg. 48-50: - "... we have become so accustomed to perceiving space and time as two different dimensions that we forget that this is the fundamental nature of the world and come to believe that the connection between time and space is a contradiction..."; Kuma often needs and appeals to such sentences in getting at the anti-object; the arguments made in favor of architectural spatialization are perfect, I have reservations about the construction of the argument leading towards the anti-object; I find it rigid, didactic and subversive (of the object) "...if the wall is an exclusively spatial element - its presence is easily perceived from a distance and from a vantage point (i.e., timeless) - the floor unfolds as the subject moves. It reveals itself fully only gradually, in other words, over time. The floor therefore has a double character, spatial and temporal...".
Pg. 59: - "... since the period of Ancient Greece and Rome, artifacts were conceived with the idea of standing out as silhouettes against a natural background - which allowed architecture to assert its superiority over nature..."; I believe that the foundations of ancient Greek architecture are much more complex, the assertion against the background is a much later consequence;
"... any element placed on a post becomes an object, no matter what material it is made of or how discreetly it is positioned. Most contemporary works of art are anoste precisely because they are indebted to this particular quality of the plinth..."; of course, here we can say that Brâncuși is the exception that proves the rule; but, especially with Brâncuși, the plinth is part of the artifact; with "Măiastra", a plinth elaborated separately for each variant is a sculpture in itself;"... the plinth and the work articulate an antithesis between, on the one hand, the theme of ephemerality and death, and, on the other, the theme of triumph over death...", says the Brâncușian exegete Matei Stîrcea-Crăciun6.
Pag. 61: - "... the starting point was the restoration of the topography..." (in the case of the project for the Kirosan Observatory, realized by Kuma between 1991-1994), probably the most conclusive example of Kuma's work that could have generated the anti-object and not the relationship with Bruno Taut's work (which still seems to me to be secondary, as an anti-object scaffolding, being in fact an intervention almost of its own imposed by the physical context - especially since the Observatory, as a project, would have begun in 1991). The Kirosan Observatory is an extraordinary multimedia project, a "turning" of practical and theoretical perspectives; although it brings solid theoretical arguments, it is, in another way (a something else), a form of perhaps much more subtle and much more argued conduction/induction of vision, but somewhere, on another plane, not far from the photography imputed to Le Corbusier; for, in the end, Kuma gives ".... a warning designed to instill a fear of consequences in those who wish to dominate the world through the view 'from above' - arrogance and through objects - wealth..."; the haunting subject-objects that I, having lived in both communism and capitalism, don't quite know where to place.
Pg. 73: - "... placing something on a high position asserts its presence and reduces it to the status of an object...", Kuma also draws the line when explaining how to operate in Theater No; at the same time, the story of the project for a Theater No in the forest (1995-1996) is an open lesson in understanding the role of surfaces, planes, treading levels, the flowing gaze, demarcations, materials, matter, time; "... by allowing matter to express time, we can stimulate its fluidity. For all this to be possible, we must have a critical attitude towards matter, but at the same time believe in the potential that surely lies hidden within it...".
Symptomatic of contemporary Japanese architecture is the general expectation of expression between the modern and the vernacular. From this perspective, the architect Takamasa Yoshizaka (1917-1981) was first exposed. He had worked between 1950 and 1952 in Le Corbusier's studio, was a recognized nonconformist, and designed the Japanese Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. An object? And yes, and no; "...in many ways, the building was clearly a failure," says Kuma; "...on the one hand, with Westerners looking for a 'Japanese' object, and on the other hand, with Japanese looking for a 'Western' object...".

After reiterating his critique of the object, the capitalism of postmodernism, Kuma says he was asked to reformulate the Pavilion: "I designed the interior as a garden. "The wooden 'bridge' inside the pavilion has been extended outside, reaching all the way to the trees planted by Yoshizaka, making the articulation between inside and outside disappear."
Pg. 96: - "... our aim was to reinterpret as a temporal entity a building that Yoshizaka had originally designed as an object. However, to completely strip architecture of its object character is impossible, since architecture is made of concrete matter. Fully aware of this impossibility, we nevertheless tried to rethink the building. We sought to transform it into a continuous and linear path and to make it 'oscillate' endlessly between temporal form and object. A subtle approach to sequence and speed is particularly important in such a plan. Many people mistakenly regard architecture as immutable, because compared to many other aspects of everyday life, including our own bodies, buildings seem immune to the effects of time. Therefore, people have become less sensitive to the idea of time in the context of architecture. They need to be reminded that a spatial arrangement is not in the least different from a configuration of time. They need to understand, once again, that buildings are also fragile elements subject to the effects of the passage of time: from a certain point of view, they can be fleeting experiences. We have therefore focused on sequence and speed rather than on forms and materials...".
I have taken a longer quote because, in the context of defining the intervention on the Pavilion originally designed by Yoshizaka, Kuma also defines himself in terms of his architectural credo. I wonder whether he makes this concession to the object only in this context, "Yoshizaka had originally designed it as an object", or to architecture as a whole: "The total detachment of architecture from its object character is impossible".
Kuma uses both terms, architecture and building/construction. Two terms, in the sense of architecture versus building or construction. I come back and wonder again whether they are synonyms or is there a semantic differentiation, in the context of architectural discourse, between architecture and building/construction. I think architecture qualifies the building. Artificial built space can become architecture. How? With Kuma we find the answer in/through Anti-Object. I "read" that for Kuma architecture emerges from the building. And it appears when time enters into the "composition" of the building. Building is space, object, architecture is more: "... people have become less sensitive to the idea of time in the context of architecture...". With Kuma it is not only time that makes the difference, it is above all time.
In his struggle with the monumental (indirect and capitalist) object, Kuma proposes to change the entrance to the Pavilion "... when you enter through the emergency exit, the building does not have the possibility to assert itself...". I remember, when I was at the Biennale, the surprise of searching for the entrance, a beneficial search in preparation for the journey and in differentiation from the other pavilions; I did not perceive this change of access as a cancellation of the object. In the book, this change seems sought, forced, but of less importance is the motivation as long as the effect is positive. In fact, this motivation, obsessive and obstinate, this search for the annulment of the object is part of the anti-object manifesto. At the base of Kengo Kuma's architecture we find many more "motivations" than those explicitly stated in the manifesto: subjectivism, sensitivity, emotion, intuition, intuition, culture, faith and, why not, intelligence.
I find common points with Kengo Kuma in the use of technology in architecture: "... nowadays, we are already moving in real space surrounded by and equipped with numerous electronic devices - the merging of real and virtual space has already been largely realized. With the help of various technologies, we move repeatedly and simultaneously between completely different spaces. However, urban design, architectural design and the design of theater space hardly accept the idea of this fusion..." (p. 109).
Page 111: - "... a memorial is an extension of the tomb, one of two extreme architectural forms. Its objective is to endure, to interpose itself between subject and time. At the other extreme, the role of a building is to intervene between subject and space, in other words to shelter. Architecture oscillates between these two extremes...". I subscribe without comment.
But, a few sentences further on, Kuma forces his way into the polemic when he invokes a purely functional solution in architecture, the spatial flexibility of multi-purpose built spaces, considering that the modernists were in fact seeking in this way to link up with the cubist "fashion", with the concern to integrate time into architecture (see: "... the cubists, for example, tried to render in a single painting a series of sequences unfolding in time..."). And because his approach in the project "Acoustic Memorial Park, Takasaki, Gumma" (1997-'98) is towards architecture as memory, in the continuation of the above quotation (the multi-purpose spaces), he points out again: "... the typical modernist method involved substituting time for space, without taking into account any time-related phenomena such as memory...". Excellent demand, excellent architectural solution, so why does he need to force the introduction? I think a motivation tendered before the idea is stated is literary speculation.
The statement that concludes the Anti-Object book is paradoxical and that is why it is extraordinary: "... we must continue to avoid the stability, unity and aggregation known as the object...".
The final enunciative is pre-prepared: "... architecture is another name given to the state of aggregation of matter (i.e. the creation of an object)...", and that came along the lines of Leibniz ("monad has no window") - the image of the unaggregated universe and implicitly critical of any form of aggregation of matter into an unchanging stable.
Personally and subjectively, I hate objects that occupy my architectural space.

NOTES

1. Kenneth Frampton, Arhitectura moderna: o istorie critica, Editura Universitară "Ion Mincu", 2016, p. 11.
2. Reiner de Graaf, Four walls and a roof: the complex nature of a simple profession, Harvard University Press, London, 2017.
3. Roland Hagenberg, 20 Japanese Architects - interviews and photos by Roland Hagenberg, Garden City Publishing Co Ltd, Taiwan, 2009.
4. Idem, key quotes said by the architects in 20 Japanese Architects.
5. Idem.
6. Matei Stîrcea-Crăciun, Brâncuși. Limbajele materiei, Anima, 2009, p. 395.