POLITECNICO DI MILANO

Scuola di Architettura Urbanistica Ingegneria delle

Costruzioni Milano

Laurea Magistrale

THE ORIGINS OF ARATA ISOZAKI’S SPATIAL

CONSTRUCTIONS: JAPANESE TRADITION AND RUSSIAN

AVANT-GARDE.

Alessandro De Magistris

Oleg Igorevich Adamov

Marta Martinoglio

814329

A.A. 2014/2015

I dedicate this thesis to my family

for their warm support during my

stay abroad.

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INDEX

INDEX OF IMAGES

ABSTRACT ITALIAN

ABSTRACT ENGLISH

ABRIDGEMENT ITALIAN

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. BIOGRAPHY FACTS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON ARATA ISOZAKI’S CREATIVE ACTIVITY

1.1 The Biography of A. Isozaki: hometown context, family and archetypal images affected on Isozaki’s work

1.2 Work in Kenzo Tange’s Laboratory and influence of master’s creativity

1.3 Relationship with Metabolist’s architects and impact on A. Isozaki’s spatial construction

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CHAPTER 2. THE INFLUENCE OF DIFFERENT TRADITIONS ON ARATA ISOZAKI’S CREATIVE PROCESS

2.1. A. Isozaki’s adoption of Japanese traditional architectural concepts

2.1.1. Dissolving architecture in the natural context

2.1.2. Isozaki’s “space of darkness” and “space of illusion” as result of Japanese “lighting gradient” aesthetic

2.1.3. “Catch” and using natural element

2.1.4. “Mask” as a concept of border

2.1.5. Gentrification as organization of space come from spatial arrangement of Japanese traditional gardens

2.2. First connections to Russian Avant-Garde art and Japanese culture

2.2.1. A. Isozaki’s approach with Russian Formalism

2.2.2. Russian Avant-Garde concepts and techniques affected the Isozaki’s architectural design

2.3. Western classical architecture: Palladio, Ledoux, Boullée and the influences on A. Isozaki’s architectural methodology.

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CHAPTER 3. THE ARATA ISOZAKI’S SPATIAL CONSTRUCTION AS A SYNTHESIS OF JAPANESE AND RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE IDEAS

3.1. I.I. Leonidov: “schematic deployment” (Magnitagorsk’s project)

3.2 A. Isozaki: “incubator” architecture (Tokyo City Hall project)

CONCLUSIONS

RESULTS

INTERVIEWS

4.1. Hajime Yatzuka

4.2 Andrea Maffei

ARATA ISOZAKI’S CREATIVE BIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THANKS

INDEX OF IMAGES 4

INDEX OF IMAGES

FOREWORD

- Figure 0.1. The Poster of the Exhibition “Ma Espace-Temps du Japon”, Paris 1978. Source: Personal photography from exhibition 12x5=60 Arata Isozaki Watari Museum Tokyo 2015. (p.31)

- Figure 0.2. Plan of “Ma” Exhibition. Source: GA Architect 15, Arata Isozaki vol.3 1991-2000, A.D.A Edita, Tokyo, p.11. (p.31)

- Figure 0.2. View from the exhibition. Source: GA Architect 15, Arata Isozaki vol.3 1991-2000, A.D.A Edita, Tokyo, p.22. (p.32)

CHAPTER 1

- Figure 1.1. Arata Isozaki’s Joint Core System for Shinjuku Project, 1962. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki./ A. Isozaki, K. Tadashi Oshima – London: Phaidon Press, - 2009, p.15. (p.45)

- Figure 1.2. Scheme of design process. Source: my personal scheme made in Sketch up+ Photoshop. (p.46)

- Figure 1.3. Kenzo Tange: the Yamanashi Press and Radio Centre, Kofu, 1967, and Shizuoka building, Ginza, 1967. Source: Major, M. Kenzo Tange, - Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. – 1973, p. 32. (p.46)

- Figure 1.4. Scheme of design process. Source: my personal scheme made in Sketch up+ Photoshop. (p.47)

- Figure 1.5. Scheme of design process. Source my personal scheme made in Photoshop. (p.47)

- Figure 1.6. K.Tange’s Kagawa Administration Building, Takamatsu, 1958. Source: Major, M. Kenzo Tange, - Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. – 1973, p. 21. (p.48)

INDEX OF IMAGES 5

- Figure 1.7. Kenzo Tange’s Town Hall in Kurashiki, 1960. Source: Major, M. Kenzo Tange, - Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. – 1973, p. 17. (p.49)

- Figure 1.8. Scheme of design process. Source: my personal scheme made in Photoshop. (p.49)

- Figure 1.9. Medical Hall, Oita 1959-60. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1964-76 First – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1980, p. 32. (p.52)

- Figure 1.10. Kiyonori Kikutake: Tower City, 1958. Source: Koolhaas, R. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks…./ R. Koolhaas, H. U. Obrist – Koln: Taschen, - 2011, p. 343. (p.53)

- Figure 1.11. Fumikiko Maki: Hillside Apartment Complex, Tokyo, 1978. Source: Koolhaas, R. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks…./ R. Koolhaas, H. U. Obrist – Koln: Taschen, - 2011, p. 270. (p.53)

- Figure 1.12. Library Oita Prefecture, 1962-66. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki./ A. Isozaki, K. Tadashi Oshima – London: Phaidon Press, - 2009, p.53. (p.56)

- Figure 1.13. Scheme of design process. Source: my personal scheme made in Sketch up+ Photoshop. (p.56)

- Figure 1.14. Scheme of design process. Source: my personal scheme made in Sketch up+ Photoshop. (p.56)

- Figure 1.15. Scheme of design process. Source: my personal scheme made in Sketch up+ Photoshop. (p.57) CHAPTER 2

- Figure 2.1. Hans Hollein, Vienna February 1976, sketches of Arata Isozaki. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1964-76 First – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1980, p. 31. (p.61)

INDEX OF IMAGES 6

- Figure 2.2. Scheme of design process. Source: my personal scheme made in Sketch up+ Photoshop. (p.64)

- Figure 2.3. Arata Isozaki’s Concert Hall, Nara, 1992-98. Source: my personal photography b\w July 2015. (p.65)

- Figure 2.4. Source: my personal drawing representing the design of A. Isozaki “Clusters in the Air” compared with traditional Chinese “Goudong” system. (p.67)

- Figure 2.5. Sesshu Toyo, Haboku Sansui, 1495. Sources: Kinoshita, H. Ancien Japon. - Tokyo: Imprimerie Kokubunsha. – 1888, p. 115. (p.69)

- Figure 2.6. My personal Sketch up representation of A. Isozaki’s Gunma Museum. Source: my personal scheme made in Sketch up+ Photoshop. (p.70)

- Figure 2.7. Concept sketch of Sou Fujimoto for house in Tokyo. Source: Fujimoto, S. Sou Fujimoto Recent Project. – Tokyo: GA International ADA Edita. – 2013, p. 187. (p.70)

- Figure 2.8. Darkness at the heart of domestic interior. Source: Isozaki, A. Katsura Villa. – Milan: Rizzoli, - 1987, p. 240. (p.74)

- Figure 2.9. “Moon Room” in A. Isozaki’s Nagi Museum of Art, Okayama, Japan, 1991-1994. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki./ A. Isozaki, K. Tadashi Oshima – London: Phaidon Press, - 2009, p. 200. (p.75)

- Figure 2.10. Museum in the forest, Taoyuan Coutry, Taiwan, 2012, Sou Fujimoto. Source: Fujimoto, S. Sou Fujimoto Recent Project. – Tokyo: GA International ADA Edita. – 2013, p. 77. (p.76)

- Figure 2.11. Concept of “gradient” by Sou Fujimoto. Source: Fujimoto, S. Sou Fujimoto Recent Project. – Tokyo: GA International ADA Edita. – 2013, p. 23. (p.76)

INDEX OF IMAGES 7

- Figure 2.12. Scheme of Japanese and Western house’s relationship with atmospheric events, specially with the sun light. Source: my personal scheme made in Photoshop. (p.78)

- Figure 2.13. Isozaki’s Nara Concert Hall (roof as entire building). Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki./ A. Isozaki, K. Tadashi Oshima – London: Phaidon Press, - 2009, p. 57.

- Figure 2.14. A. Isozaki’s Tokyo Christian College. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1985-91 Third, PART1 – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1993, p. 143. (p.80)

- Figure 2.14. Kiyonori Kikutake’s Edo Museum (living the roof). Source: my personal photography b7w August 2015. (p.80)

- Figure 2.15. Arata Isozaki’s project of Oita Medical Hall, Oita Prefectural Library, 1959/1962-1966, 1970-1972 (Oita Medical Hall Annex). Source: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Phaidon. (p.80)

- Figure 2.16. Arata Isozaki’s project of Fukuoka City Bank Head Office. 1968-1971, 1978-1983 (Addition). Source: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki./ A. Isozaki, K. Tadashi Oshima – London: Phaidon Press, - 2009, p. 38. (p.83)

- Figure 2.17. Arata Isozaki’s project of Kitakyushu City Museum of Art, Fukyoka, 1972-1974. My personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Phaidon. (p.84)

- Figure 2.18. Arata Isozaki’s project of Kitakyushu Central Library, Fukuoka, 1973-1974. Source: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki./ A. Isozaki, K. Tadashi Oshima – London: Phaidon Press, - 2009, p. 21. (p.84)

INDEX OF IMAGES 8

- Figure 2.19. Arata Isozaki’s project of Fujimi Coutry Clubhouse, Oita City, 1973-1974. Source: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki./ A. Isozaki, K. Tadashi Oshima – London: Phaidon Press, - 2009, p. 88. (p.85)

- Figure 2.20. Gunma Museum of Fine Art, Takasaki, 1971-4. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1985-91 Third, PART2 – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1993, p. 99. (p.86)

- Figure 2.21. Shukosha Building, Fukuoka, 1974. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1964-76 First – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1980, p. 170. (p.86)

- Figure 2.22. Church Santa Maria presso San Satiro, Donato Bramante, Milano V sec. Sources: Bruschi, A. Bramante. – London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, - 1977, p. 200. (p.87)

- Figure 2.23. Teatro Olimpico, Andrea Palladio, 1580, Vicenza. Source: Beltrami, G. Palladio./ G. Beltrami, H. Burns. – Venezia: Marsilio. – 2008. P. 400. (p.87)

- Figure 2.24. Tokyo branch, Fukuoka Mutual Bank, 1970-71. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1964-76 First – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1980, p. 123. (p.88)

- Figure 2.25. Himalaya Center, Shangai, 2008. Source: http://www.isozaki.co.jp/.(p.89)

- Figure 2.26. Reflection of building in Kyoto Concert Hall. Source: my personal photography b/w July 2016. (p.89)

- Figure 2.27. Mito Tower’s steps stair detail. Source: my personal photography b/w July 2016. (p.92)

- Figure 2.28. Detail Kyoto Concert Hall’s square. Source: my personal photography b/w July 2016. (p.92)

INDEX OF IMAGES 9

- Figure 2.30. Sundial of Disney Center. Source: Nannerini, G. Arata Isozaki, Opere e Progetti/ G. Nannerini, M. Faiferri, D. Mandolesi. – Roma: Cdp editrice, 1996, p. 211. (p.93)

- Figure 2.31. Scheme of design process. From Ise Shrine’s fence to an urban building which is the result of a fence plus the building its self. Source: my personal scheme made in Sketch up+ Photoshop. (p.93)

- Figure 2.32. Arata Isozaki’s building for Bjornson Studio, Los Angeles 1989. Sources: Koshalek, R. Arata Isozaki, Quattro Decenni di Architettura. - Milano: Rizzoli, 2005, p. 237. (p.94)

- Figure 2.33. Villa Gamberaia, Florence. Nineteenth century. Geometrically ordered space in the landscape. Sources: Drew, P. Architecture of Arata Isozaki. – London: Granada, 1982, p. 118. (p.96)

- Figure 2.34. Heavenly Dragon Temple, Kyoto. XIV century. Harmony of water and stone. Sources: my personal photography b/w July 2016. (p.98)

- Figure 2.35. Boboli Garden, Florence. XVI century. Statue of Andromeda. In the tradition of Renaissance stone has human form. Sources: my personal photography b/w September 2014. (p.99)

- Figure 2.36. Temple of the Saiho Ji, Kyoto. XVI century. In Japanese tradition statues are carved by natural elements. Sources: my personal photography b/w July 2016. (p.99)

- Figure 2.36. A. Isozaki’s Ukichiro Nagaya Museum Ice and Snow Kaga. Source: Koshalek, R. Arata Isozaki, Quattro Decenni di Architettura. - Milano: Rizzoli, 2005, p. 86. (p.8). (p.100)

- Figure 2.37. Scheme showing an example of Japanese painting and the taste of asymmetry. The poem in sets on the lower corner leaving the center empty. Sources: my

INDEX OF IMAGES 10

personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Wright. (p.103)

- Figure 2.38. Plan Villa Katsura formed by man pavilions scattered on the territory with a large pond in the center. Sources: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Isozaki, A. Katsura Villa. – Milan: Rizzoli, - 1987, p. 72. (p.104)

- Figure 2.39. Ceramic Park Mino, Gifu, 1997-2000. Sources: my customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Koshalek, R. Arata Isozaki, Quattro Decenni di Architettura. - Milano: Rizzoli, 2005, p. 15. (p.105)

- Figure 2.40. Melnikov’house 1927-1929. Sources: my personal photography b/w September 2015. (p.106)

- Figure 2.41. Arata Isozak’s sketches of Melnikov House during is visit in Moscow. Source: Personal photography from exhibition 12x5=60 Arata Isozaki Watari Museum Tokyo 2015. (p.113)

- Figure 2.42. Isozaki: the Seven Operation of Manner. 1) Amplification, 2) packaging, 3) severing, 4) transferral, 5) projection, 6) fuseki (or chess-man), 7) response. Source: GA Architect 6, Arata Isozaki 1959-1978, A.D.A Edita, Tokyo. (p.114)

- Figure 2.43. Black square, Malevich 1915. Source: Catalog Novaia Tretiakovskaia Gallery Moscow. (p.116)

- Figure 2.44. Setting of black square in the corner of is studio instead of the traditional Russian icon to symbolize a new starting. Just a black point for the new beginning. Catalog Novaia Tretiakovskaia Gallery Moscow. (p.14)

- Figure 2.45. Arata Isozaki’s Hiroshima collage, “Electric Labirinth”,1968. Source: GA Architect 15, Arata Isozaki vol.3 1991-200, A.D.A Edita, Tokyo. (p.15)

INDEX OF IMAGES 11

- Figure 2.46. “Incubation process” performance, 1990 (concept from 1962). Sources: Isozaki, A. Unbuilt. - .Tokyo: Toto, – 2001, p. 81. (p.1)

- Figure 2.47. Giulio Romano: Palazzo del tè detail.1524-34. Sources: my personal photography b/w November 2014. (p.126)

- Figure 2.48. Skukosha Building, Fukuoka, 1974-5. Sources: Drew, P. Architecture of Arata Isozaki. – London: Granada, 1982, p. 31. (p.128)

- Figure 2.49. «Victory of the sun» opera, Luna Park, Saint Petersburg 1913. Sources: Meriggi, M. Una città Possibile Progetti di Leonidov 1926-1934./ M. Meriggi, O. Macel, D. Schmidt, Ju. Volcok. - Milano: Mondadori Electa. – 2007, p. 15. (p.128)

- Figure 2.50. “Arkitekton”, Malevich, 1926 . “Arkitekton”: “Monolithic view of materialized idea. Lazar Kiedekel, 1927. Sources: Catalog “Malevich”, Eugenia Petrova e Giacinto Di Pietrantonio. Exhibition in Bergamo 2 October 2015 to 17 January 2016,p. 80. (p.131)

- From Figure 2.51. to Figure 2.58. Sources: my personal scheme made in Sketch up+ Photoshop. (p.132)

- Figure 2.59. Scheme underlining the Old and the New site of Ise Grand Shrine, Mie Prefecture. Sources: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Isozaki, A. Japan-ness in Architecture. – Massachusetts: The MIT Press, – 2011, p. 256. (p.136)

- Figure 2.60. Arata Isozaki’s project for New Marijinsky Theatre, 2002. Sources: GA Architect 6, Arata Isozaki 1959-1978, A.D.A Edita, Tokyo. (p.136)

- Figure 2.61. Beijing building, 2003. Sources: GA Architect 6, Arata Isozaki 1959-1978, A.D.A Edita, Tokyo. (p.137)

INDEX OF IMAGES 12

- Figure 2.62. Shanghai Pudong Villa, 2004. Sources: GA Architect 6, Arata Isozaki 1959-1978, A.D.A Edita, Tokyo. (p.138)

- Figure 2.63. “Controrelief”, Tatlin, 1923. Tatlin’s concept of «explosion» and «floating fragments». Sources: my personal photography b/w Novaia Tretiakovskaia Jenuary 2015. (p.139)

- Figure 2.64. Isozaki‘s project Moca Cafa, Beijing, 2003. Sources: GA Architect 6, Arata Isozaki 1959-1978, A.D.A Edita, Tokyo. (p.140)

- Figure 2.65. «Future city», Lazar Kiedekel, 1927. Source: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Meriggi, M. Una città Possibile Progetti di Leonidov 1926-1934./ M. Meriggi, O. Macel, D. Schmidt, Ju. Volcok. - Milano: Mondadori Electa. - 2007. (p.142)

- Figure 2.66. Horizontal Skyscraper for Moscow, El Lissitzky1, 1924 and Arata Isozaki’s sketch (Cloud Props). Source: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from thesis Konovalova Nina Anatolieva, Preservation and Development of historical traditions in modern architecture of Japan: on a material of World exhibitions. 3th chapter: Russian Avantgarde and Japanese metabolism. (p.144)

- Figure 2.67. Image from A+U Architecture and Urbanism, Architecture of Ambivalence 1972. Isozaki explain the design process for Gunma Museum of Modern Art. Source: A+U Architecture and Urbanism, Architecture of Ambivalence 1972, Tokyo. (p.147)

- Figure 2.68. Ledoux, House of Four Families. Source: Drew, P. Architecture of Arata Isozaki. – London: Granada, 1982, p. 70. (p.148)

INDEX OF IMAGES 13

- Figure 2.69. Isozaki, Nakayama Residence, Oita 1964. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1985-91 Third, PART2 – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1993, p. 61. (p.148)

- Figure 2.70. Scheme showing the employing of cube module of Ledoux to design Nakayama Residence. Source: m personal scheme made in Sketch up+ Photoshop. (p.150)

- Figure 2.71. Boullèe, Royal Library. Source: Drew, P. Architecture of Arata Isozaki. – London: Granada, 1982, p. 32. (p.151)

- Figure 2.72. Yano House, Kawasaki 1975. Schematic diagram: the house is composed of two opposed semi-cylinders one within the other. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1976-84 Second – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1986, p. 55. (p.151)

- figure 2.73. Traditional Japanese haniwa dwellings. Source: my personal photography Tokyo National Museum, Ueno, August 2015. (p.152)

- Figure 2.74. Kenzo Tange’s Hiroshima Peace Monument, 1955. Source: Major, M. Kenzo Tange, - Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. – 1973, p. 31. (p.153)

- Figure 2.75. Fujimi Country Clubhouse, near Oita 1972-4. Source: Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki./ A. Isozaki, K. Tadashi Oshima – London: Phaidon Press, - 2009, p. 66. (p.153)

- Figure 2.76. Palladio, Villa Poiana Maggiore. Source: Beltrami, G. Palladio./ G. Beltrami, H. Burns. – Venezia: Marsilio. – 2008. P. 33. (p.154)

- Figure 2.77. Scheme of comparison between Villa Poiana’s rhythm of windows and the two façade of Fujimi Country Clubhouse. Source: my personal scheme made in Photoshop. (p.155)

- Figure 2.78. Scheme showing Arata Isozaki’s Tsukuba Center building, Ibaragi, Japan, 1979-83 and the gold

INDEX OF IMAGES 14

section used for the proportions. Source: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki./ A. Isozaki, K. Tadashi Oshima – London: Phaidon Press, - 2009, p. 21. (p.156)

- Figure 2.79. Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Campidoglio Square, Rome, 1534-38. Source: Argan, G. Michelangelo. – Firenze: Giunti. – 1987, p. 45. (p.156)

- Figure 2.80. Scheme presenting the design method of Piazza del Campidoglio, a “positive” space, to a “non-square” of Tsukuba Center. Source: my personal scheme made in Sketchup+ Photoshop. (p.160)

- Figure 2.81. Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, Shinjuku, Tokyo, 1988-1991. Source: Major, M. Kenzo Tange, - Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. – 1973, p. 17. (p.161)

CHAPTER 3 - Figure 3.1. Leonidov’s Magnitogorsk project, 1928.

Source: De Magistris, A. La casa cilindrica di Konstantin Mel nikov, 1927-1929. – Torino: Celid. – 1998, p.37. (p.163)

- From Figure 3.2. to Figure 3.5. My personal scheme made in Photoshop. (p.164)

- Figure 3.6. Arata Isozaki’s Tokyo City Hall project of 80’s. Source: Isozaki, A. Unbuilt. - .Tokyo: Toto, – 2001, p- 32. (p.167)

- From Figure 3.7. to Figure 3.10. Source: my personal scheme made in Photoshop. (p.169)

- Figure 3.11. Scheme represent fractal grid of Isoaki’s project New Tokyo City Hall. Source: my personal scheme made in Sketchup+ Photoshop. (p.171)

INDEX OF IMAGES 15

- Figure 3.12. Scheme representing the historical building phases. Source: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Isozaki, A. Katsura Villa. – Milan: Rizzoli, - 1987, p. 31. (p.174)

- Figure 3.13. Scheme showing the angle view of each room facing the pond. Source: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Isozaki, A. Katsura Villa. – Milan: Rizzoli, - 1987, p. 33. (p.175)

- Figure 3.14. Scheme representing the diagonal arrangement on some elements of the house. Source: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Isozaki, A. Katsura Villa. – Milan: Rizzoli, - 1987, p. 38. (p.176)

- Figure 3.15. Diagonal aesthetic of Isozaki’s Tokyo City Hall project. My personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Isozaki, A. Unbuilt. - .Tokyo: Toto, – 2001, p. 11. (p.177)

- Figure 3.16. Interior of Imperial Katzura Villa. Source: my personal customize made in Photoshop of a picture from Isozaki, A. Katsura Villa. – Milan: Rizzoli, - 1987, p. 57. (p.178).

ABSTRACTS 16

ABSTRACT ITALIAN

L’architetto giapponese Arata Isozaki è una figura artistica che si definisce “ponte” fra due culture esteticamente e filosoficamente molto lontane: quella Orientale e quella Occidentale. Il suo gesto architettonico, figlio di un’epoca storica (quella del boom economico) che ha permesso una libera espressione del suo pensiero, è plasmato da una moltitudine d’influenze culturali ed artistiche. Profondo conoscitore della cultura tradizionale giapponese e studioso della cultura occidentale, Isozaki si presenta come una delle figure più attive nel panorama sia giapponese sia internazionale, subito dopo la celebrità del suo maestro Kenzo Tange. Pochi dei suoi contemporanei si sono spinti fuori dal territorio nipponico per, sia esportare l’architettura giapponese, sia, provocatoriamente, per riproporre le tradizioni del luogo straniero. Un’ atteggiamento ai limiti del didattico che non vuole solamente presentare un gusto architettonico ma piuttosto legarsi strettamente alla cultura del sito. A. Isozaki ha speso molte parole per descrivere il suo processo creativo e le sue influenze (maggiormente in lingua giapponese) ma senza mai, a parere anche di Rem Koolhaas2, dichiarare le origini delle sue

2 Koolhaas, R. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks…./ R. Koolhaas, H. U. Obrist – Koln: Taschen, - 2011. P.43.

ABSTRACTS 17

scelte architettoniche mostrandosi tramite una maschera inespressiva che nulla svela. Ne risulta una conoscenza, a mio parere, superficiale e ormai datata di quello che ha influenzato lo spazio architettonico di Isozaki. Questa tesi si pone dunque l’obiettivo di analizzare gli ingredienti della sua “cucina” di progetto. Tramite uno studio di ricerca in Giappone, grazie all’aiuto del Professore Makoto Kikuchi3, ho studiato i principi dell’architettura tradizionale giapponese per ritrovarli nell’architettura di Isozaki. A Mosca sono stata guidata dal Professore Oleg Igorevich Adamov per approfondire le Avanguardie russe e trovarne le citazioni nei progetti dell’architetto giapponese. Attraverso uno studio separato delle influenze ne deriva l’analisi di un solo progetto come sintesi di vari flussi culturali.

La seguente tesi si dota anche di una serie d’interviste di stretti collaboratori di Isozaki: Hajime Yatzuka4 e Andrea Maffei5. Il seguente materiale è stato di grande aiuto ad affrontare un tema come l’architettura giapponese la quale si basa su concetti metafisici e religiosi lontani dalla mia personale cultura Europea.

3 Makoto Kikuchi, Master of Engineering, Professor of Shibaura Institute of Technology. Associate Architect of Arata Isozaki from 1978 to 2000. 4 See note 77. 5 See note 115.

ABSTRACTS 18

ABSTRACT ENGLISH

The Japanese architect Arata Isozaki is an artistic figure who defines himself a "bridge" between two aesthetically and philosophically divergent cultures: Eastern and Western. His architectural gesture, son of an historical era that allowed a free expression of his thought, is produced by a multitude of cultural and artistic influences. Connoisseur of traditional Japanese culture and appreciator of Western culture, Isozaki is presented as one of the most active figures in both Japanese and international scene immediately after the figure of his master Kenzo Tange. Few of his contemporaries have gone out of Japanese territory for both exporting Japanese architecture, and provocatively, revive the traditions of the foreign place. A didactic attitude that doesn’t wants to present just an architectural style but rather tightly bind to the site culture. Isozaki has spent many words to describe his creative process and its influences (mostly in Japanese) but never, even in the opinion of Rem Koolhaas6, declare the origins of its architectural choices leaving an expressing mask as typical for Japanese. The result is a knowledge in my opinion superficial and out-dated about what has influenced his architectural space. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the ingredients of his “kitchen” design. Through

6 See note 2.

ABSTRACTS 19

a research in Japan, helped by Professor Makoto Kikuchi, I studied traditional Japanese architecture principles to find them in the architecture of Isozaki. In Moscow I have been led by Professor Oleg Adamov Igorevich to deepen Russian Avant-Garde and to find citations in Japanese architect's projects. Through a separate study of the influences the result is an analysis of one project as a synthesis of different cultural streams.

The following thesis presents also few interviews to the closest collaborators of Isozaki: Hajime Yatzuka, Andrea Maffei and Makoto Kikuchi. The following materials has been great help to deal with an issue like the Japanese architecture which is based on metaphysical and religious concepts far from my own European culture.

ABSTRACTS 20

ABRIDGEMENT ITALIAN

Arata Isozaki si può definire come operatore di trasmissione e traduzione d’idee occidentali quando si trova in Giappone e di concetti giapponesi quando lavora in un contesto occidentale.

Questo atteggiamento non è però un dogma per l’architetto ma piuttosto una volontà di riproporre la cultura del sito che si presta ad ospitare la sua architettura.

Vengono citati concetti di tradizione giapponese come: l’ estetica dell’“oscurità” e del “vuoto”, la “leggerezza”, il “ma” come spazio-tempo, abbinati talvolta a caratteri occidentali di “corporalità”, “monumentalità” e “forma”. Frequente Isozaki fa riferimento all’Avanguardia russa la quale viene apprezzata dall’architetto nella sua forma e riprodotta anche in territorio russo a ricordo della cultura passata (Teatro di Marijinski a San Pietroburgo).

Nonostante A. Isozaki abbia largamente scritto della propria attività progettuale attraverso lo studio di ricerca in Giappone ho constatato la quantità nettamente maggiore di informazioni destinate al pubblico giapponese. L’approccio dell’architetto in un contesto d’ influenze “Giapponese-Europeo-Russo”, soprattutto di relazione con l’Avanguardia russa, non è stato ancora

ABSTRACTS 21

completamente esplorato. Un progetto di ricerca che ne riveli le influenze culturali ed artistiche dell’Avanguardia russa e della tradizione giapponese che hanno affetto la creatività di Isozaki è necessaria.

Molti concetti e tecniche di progettazione di Isozaki come “moltiplicazione”, “frattalità”, “maschera”, “generazione di forme”, “architettura invisibile”, sono tutt’oggi attuali nel contesto contemporaneo e possono essere utilizzate nell’educazione architettonica come nella pratica.

I ricercatori russi non hanno approfondito alcuna tesi sul processo creativo di Arata Isozaki e le sue connessioni con la cultura avanguardista. La tesi che più si avvicina alla presente ricerca è stata redatta dalla dottoranda presso Moscow Institute of Architecture N. A. Konovalova7 "Historical and contemporary traditions in Japanese architecture in examples of world exhibitions".

Nel terzo capitolo classifica e compara alcuni progetti avanguardisti russi con progetti del Metabolismo giapponese citando A. Isozaki. L’analisi avviene a livello di similitudini di forme e idee ma non a livello di approccio e processo.

7 Phd student from Moscow Institute of Moscow. Research made in Japan under Hajime Yatzuka (see note 76) tutor.

ABSTRACTS 22

Altri ricercatori russi come A.V. Ikonnikov8, A.V. Ryabushin9, V.I. Loktev10 sono autori di tesi sull’architettura Metabolista con alcuni riferimenti a Isozaki (il quale non si è mai definito appartenente alla corrente matabolista).

L’obiettivo è dunque quello di identificare l’entità e i termini d’ influenza dell’Avanguardia russa e della tradizione architettonica giapponese nel lavoro architettonico di Isozaki, basandosi sull’analisi della sua posizione teorica e di spazio costruito.

Il primo approccio alla ricerca consiste nel mostrare un quadro di contesto in cui l’architetto fonda le sue origini. Esso si compone dell’ambiente familiare, del periodo storico, dei primi studi ed il successivo lavoro presso lo studio di Kenzo Tange, nonché la vicinanza al movimento Metabolista.

8 A.V. Ikonnikov (1926-2001 Moscow). Soviet and Russian historical researcher. Phd in Moscow University of Theory and History of Architecture. 9 A.V. Ryabushin (1931-2012 Moscow). Soviet and Russian historical critic, director of Institute of Theory and Urbanism in Moscow. 10 V.I. Loktev artist and architect, author of a whole series of futuristic projects of cities and as a pioneer of a new architectural direction Metamorphic architecture of cosmical space. Professor in Moscow Architectural Institute.

ABSTRACTS 23

Ne segue un elenco dei principi della tradizione architettonica giapponese cari all’architetto spesso citati nelle sue architetture. Vengono inoltre trattati i primi incontri con la cultura dell’Avanguardia russa partendo da un’informazione contestuale di rapporti tra Russia e Giappone per arrivare alle citazioni personali di Isozaki. Tra le influenze vengono menzionate anche quelle con la cultura occidentale attraverso Palladio, Boullèe e Ledoux.

Nell’ultimo capitolo si procede all’analisi di un singolo progetto di Isozaki che viene analizzato come sintesi dell’influenza dell’Avanguardia russa e della tradizione architettonica giapponese.

I limiti della ricerca si protraggono fino all’approccio architettonico di Isozaki, al processo creativo e alle tecniche relative alla progettazione.

Sono dunque parte del materiale di ricerca: progetti, tabelle analitiche, diagrammi, modelli, schizzi preliminari, dipinti, disegni, fotografie, interviste, lavori teorici e tutto ciò che può aiutare a porre la basi per delineare il processo creativo e di progettazione di Arata Isozaki.

FOREWORD 24

FOREWORD

“We have to underline some differences in the fundamental pillars of the universes of Asia and the West. Since ever for us beauty is essentially solar and radiant, so hide it would be a contradiction; it is accompanied almost necessarily to a certain need of radiance; is the smile of being. When Hegel says that "Beauty is in the spiritual essence that is external materially" plays in the most exquisite deep faith of the West. Another aspect interprets Keats when he said: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty". The beauty must not only shine, but is also connected with the truth. All our aesthetic thought, from Aristotle to Croce, focuses ultimately on relations with true beauty. And so our city is proclaimed in squares and avenues, colonnades and palaces, cathedrals and arches exedras. Their beauty expands in the sun, is built, organic. They are linked with social and technical, but also the dialectic and geometry”.11

According to Fosco Maraini, the occidental idea of beauty is an unveiled beauty, revealed in the light of the sun in all its truth, does not have any mystical and hidden.

In Japan, the beauty is initiatory, it is worth, is the award of a long and sometimes

11 Fosco Maraini, Ore giapponesi (Milano: Corbaccio, 2000) p. 57.

FOREWORD 25

painful search, is the final intuition, possession jealous. The beauty which is straight beautiful is itself spirit of vulgarity. It can be called the smile of being. In oriental concept he beauty which is only shining, and which is beautiful in itself has the spirit of vulgarity. Latent, hidden beauty is more valued in Japan. Being is always concealed, if necessary aristocratic.

The historical relations of this concept, rather than the true and the intellect, leads us with the concept of illumination (Satori12), taste and heart (Kokoro13). In a sense it can be said romantic vision of beauty; from another point of view it can be said that beyond the beauty, being always hidden, is necessarily aristocratic.

Then pull over the city, the place where everybody daily lives, the public land, the idea of beauty would be a nonsense. Japanese cities are simple tools of life and work, temporary agencies serving the values only as a convenience. The beauty of course there is but you have to look for it, and perhaps finally be given to discover it; then, once

12 Satori (悟) is a Japanese Buddhist term for awakening, "comprehension; understanding".Commonly translated as enlightenment. 13 Kokoro (心) means "heart; mind; mentality; emotions.

FOREWORD 26

purchased, it refreshes you with refinements unimagined elsewhere, including inmates gardens and temples, or villas, where you really realize the more perfect communion between man and his surroundings.

“It’s beauty as an island, time, whispered word, moment; it is pure quality, the thrill which will then always longing”14.

Arata Isozaki is an architect in between two culture: Western and Eastern. I admire how greatfully he interpret himself in Japanese context as well as in Western context, so I decided to I inception the reading of the following thesis point out the different on the concept of beauty on these two cultures, since Isozaki has always defined himself as artist before architect and engineer.

Although his figure as an architect is not reducible to "Japanese architect" but to "architect working in Japan," as he likes to remember in his interviews, I felt it was important to show right from the beginning the distance between the western and eastern taste an aspect that, as Westerners, we have always considered as the foundation and starting point fixed and indisputable for the arts and architecture.

Arata Isozaki is defined as a great connoisseur of western culture and it shows

14 Fosco Maraini, Ore giapponesi,( Milano: Corbaccio, 2000) p. 57.

FOREWORD 27

in the multitude of the West references visible in its architecture, and away more and more from the pure Japanese style of his contemporaries. How likes to call himself, "a bridge between East and West" Arata Isozaki introduces first in Japan and dialogues Western forms but sometimes his performances are covered with a veil of orientalism. It will therefore be in this thesis that will be dismantled and scientifically cut its architecture trying to understand the origin of stylistic choices and the method of composition.

Mentioning Francesco Dal CO :” (…) this Japanese architect entertains a rapport with architecture, and one could add with “beauty” in general which is similar to that ‘hate-love’ relationship which the young monk in Kyoto, the protagonist of Mishima’s story, had with Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion15 ( he burned it because the beauty of the Pavilion was unsustainable for him. ed. )”.16

15 Kinkaku-ji (金閣寺), "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" is a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. It is one of the most popular buildings in Japan. Kinkaku-ji's history dates to 1397, when the villa was purchased from the Saionji family. In 1950, the pavilion was burned down by a monk, Hayashi Yoken, who then attempted suicide behind the building. The present pavilion structure dates from 1955, when it was rebuilt. 16 Isozaki Arata. Arata Isozaki Opere e Progetti

(Roma: Cdp editrice, 1996) p.23.

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Another important difference between Japanese and Western architecture is the centres on the spatial quality of ‘emptiness’. For Japanese architect spatial emptiness denotes the Buddhist paradox of substantial existence.17

In Buddhist thought the basic meaning of existence is expressed in the truly non-existent which is called ‘ma18’. ‘Ma’ is literally defined as “the natural interval between two or more things” existing in a continuity or “the gap between two things”. By comparison the word ‘ma’ does not differentiate between Western understandings of time and space. Rather it describes both time and space through a notion of interval. This usage is the basis for understanding all spheres of the environment, life and art to the extent that architecture, fine art, music, drama and gardens in Japan can be called “the art of ma”.

The metaphysically perfect spaces of Kazuo Shinohara inspired a generation of young Japanese architects, among them Toyo Ito, with the concept ‘emptiness’ or ‘ma’. The Japanese and Western interpretations of

17 Kazuo Shinohara, ‘The Japanese Conception of Space’, in The Japan Architect, (Tokyo: 1964) p.39.

18 Ma (間) is a Japanese word which can be roughly translated as "gap", "space", "pause" or "the space between two structural parts.

FOREWORD 29

‘emptiness’ are fundamentally different. In the West ‘emptiness’ convey such negative associations as inner conflict, torment and spiritual disintegration, whereas, for Japanese ‘emptiness’ denotes the very essence of existence.

Explains Gian Carlo Calza: "Grasp the real vacuum value may serve to divert attention from the concept note of emptiness that can leave inconvenience, “horror vacui”, a concept more familiar to us, to" silence ". The silence evokes a feeling of peace, tranquility, serenity, non-thinking, no jumble of noises or worry.(...) If we swing our experience between the concept of emptiness and the silence, here it is that the vacuum is no longer a negative: pictorially vacuum can be a fog that interrupt the vision of a mountain, but also becomes the illusion of a world that is there and that the observer can imagine and it is trying to imagine that takes a process of personal training: you make an effort, you become creative. "

The appreciation of vacuum descended from some religious experiences alien to Japanese tradition oldest.19

In 1978, Arata Isozaki was the designer of the exhibition "MA - space-time in Japan" held at the Decorative Arts Museum for the

19 Gian Carlo Calza, Stile Giapponese,( Torino: Einaudi, 2002) p. 11.

FOREWORD 30

Festival d' Automne in Paris. This first retrospective showed that boldly as the Japanese, there is no difference between the two concepts of time and space as perceived by Westerns.

Figure 0.1.The Poster of the Exhibition “Ma Espace-Temps du Japon”, Paris 1978.

Arata Isozaki offered visitors an exposition where the representation of the sacred and profane intermingled. The visitor was thus faced throughout exposure to the fragile border between the traditional and the avant-garde feature of contemporary Japanese culture.

FOREWORD 31

Figure 0.2. Plan of “Ma” Exhibition.

To make the presentation of this concept in the context of this exhibition, seven expressions space had been cleared in a separate room so that each visitor presentiment space aurally, visually and sensual. The seven concepts of expression of Ma had been selected in the vocabulary of Japanese tradition. Every word, sort of recognition of space and time, was represented by an artistic form.

Figure 0.2. View from the exhibition. A path made by stones is showing how ‘ma’ can be

FOREWORD 32

realized spatially. The architect, trough design of path, can regulate the fast of visitor’s walking and so the ‘ma’. Is also visible a moon platform and an unavailable stair which is frequently used by Isozaki to create a space of illusion.

INTRODUCTION 33

INTRODUCTION

Actuality of research

Japanese architect Arata Isozaki (b. 1931) calls himself as a "bridge between East and West". For Japanese architects he became some kind of operator that broadcasts and translates ideas of Western culture. On another hand, for Western architects he shows and explains ideas of Japanese traditions. In his works he combines Japanese features – "hiddenness", "secretiveness", "duration of perception" – and western features – "openness", "corporeality".

Architecture of Russian Avant-Garde as an "art of constant beginning", where "concrete" meets "virtual", "objectivity" "abstract" gets close to Isozaki. For him it becomes an example of link between architectural ideas of East and West and a source for his creative inspiration. He constantly refers to Russian Avant-Garde in his project argumentation, works and interviews.

Architecture of Isozaki is seemingly known and well theoretically covered. However his architectural approach in the context of "Japanese-European-Russian" influences and especially relationship with ideas of Russian Avant-Garde is not fully explored. A special research revealing influences of Russian Avant-Garde ideas and their effects on Isozaki's creativity is becoming necessary. Moreover many ideas and design techniques of

INTRODUCTION 34

Isozaki – "multiplicity", "fractal", "mask", "flow", "form deployment", "invisible architecture" are still relevant today and could be used in architectural education and practice.

Degree of problem and development of research

Russian researchers have not done a separate study of Isozaki creative process and its relationship with the Russian Avant-Garde.

The closest to the work is the study of N. A. Konovalova20 "Historical and contemporary traditions in Japanese architecture in examples of world exhibitions". In the third chapter, she classifies and compares some projects of the Russian Avant-Garde and Japanese Metabolism rather on the level of similarity of individual ideas and forms, but not at the level of the approach and process.

Other Russian researchers A.V. Ikonnikov21, A.V. Ryabushin22, V.I. Loktev23 made

20 Phd student from Moscow Institute of Moscow. Research made in Japan under Hajime Yatzuka (see note 76) tutor. 21 A.V. Ikonnikov (1926-2001 Moscow). Soviet and Russian historical researcher. Phd in Moscow University of Theory and History of Architecture. 22 A.V. Ryabushin (1931-2012 Moscow). Soviet and Russian historical critic, director of Institute of Theory and Urbanism in Moscow. 23 V.I. Loktev artist and architect, author of a whole series of futuristic projects of cities and as a pioneer of a new architectural

INTRODUCTION 35

researches on Metabolism architecture, featuring some parts about Isozaki. They found and explored some ideas specific for Metabolism, such as a "group form", "capsule modeling", "doubling the surface of the earth", "the idea of incompleteness", "the idea of the core", as well as connection of Metabolism and Buddhism. However Isozaki never considered himself as a Metabolist (although relied on them), kept a distance with them, tried to make his own architectural approach.

On the other hand Isozaki has spent many words about his creative process, through books and articles, in particular the "About My Method", issued in 1972 on A+U, number 1. Isozaki divides his method in seven manners: "to multiciplity", "to pack", "to cut", "to transcript", "to project", "to place", and "to response". But the fact remains that this research work on its process of design is dated.

Aim of research

Basing on the analysis of theoretical positions and spatial constructions of A. Isozaki to identify the impact of Russian Avant-Garde ideas and Japanese traditions on his architecture, reveal the character of their correlation.

direction Metamorphic architecture of cosmical space. Professor in Moscow Architectural Institute.

INTRODUCTION 36

Tasks of research

– to make analysis of crucial facts of A. Isozaki creative biography and show creative relationship with Kenzo Tange and Metabolism;

– to explore and classify influences of Japanese traditional culture, Russian Avant-Garde art and architecture and Western culture which A. Isozaki cited in his spatial constructions;

- through a comparative analysis between one of A. Isozaki’s project and an I.I. Leonidov’s one, identify characters of influences from Russian Avant-Garde and traditional Japanese architecture.

Boundaries of research

Studied only architectural approach of A. Isozaki, processes, and techniques relating to his design.

Object of research

Considered the projects, analytical charts, diagrams, models, preliminary sketches, collages, drawings, paintings, photographs, interviews, theoretical works of A. Isozaki everything that gives the material that form the basis of the architect's design process.

CHAPTER 1 37

CHAPTER 1. BIOGRAPHY FACTS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON ARATA ISOZAKI’S CREATIVE ACTIVITY “The Metabolists had no skepticism toward their utopia. I thought they were too optimistic...” Arata Isozaki.

CHAPTER 2 38

1.1 The Biography of Arata Isozaki: hometown context, family and archetypal images affected on Isozakis’s work

Arata Isozaki was born 1931 in city of Oita on the North coast of the island of Kyushu , where many of his project were built. As the architect Kenzo Tange, who was born in Imabari, a village on the nearby island of Shikoku, Isozaki grown up in a small provincial city far from Tokyo. Kyushu influenced Isozaki’s development in more subtle ways, for it is not too fanciful to detect in his career some of those southern traits which in the past have set its people apart from northern Japanese. Some part of Isozaki’s independence of mind, rebelliousness, openness to Western influences, and conservative attachment to ancient Japanese archetypes comes from this southern personality. The inhabitants of Kyushu are notably more extroverted and lively then their northern counterparts. The remoteness of Kyushu enabled the central government to isolate, and thereby, to control, the introduction of new knowledge and technology outside Japan. In the development of cultural and trade contacts with China, Kyushu was of singular importance. Besides the approach of the Portugal to Japan in sixteenth century was from South, and it was to Kyushu that they came bringing Christianity. For this reason,

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Kyushu, so remote from the center of political power, yet so exposed to foreign contacts, has played a crucial role in the introduction of new knowledge, technology, and culture to hermetic Japan. The exposure of Kyushu to powerful new influences and technology from China and West, combined with its distance from the capital meant that any rebellion was costly and difficult to put down. These factors encouraged a degree of independence and progressive attitudes which have at times flared into open rebellion. So the specialized role of Kyushu in Japanese history, its exposure to new cultural influence, coupled with its remoteness and independence, throws some light on the spiritual climate of Isozaki’s architecture and may go some way in explaining his appetite for Western architecture, his independence of mind, and his rebelliousness. Isozaki’s capacity for absorbing Western architectural motifs is unmatched by his contemporaries. Isozaki is a prolific essayist and writer and his involving in writing is something he shared with his father Soji Isozaki, who was a leading figure of “haiku”24 poets from Kyushu. Isozaki’s involvement in the creation of new meanings in architecture is consonant with his name Arata, which means ‘newness’.

24 Haiku (俳句) is a very short form of Japanese poetry, which consists in in three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on respectively.

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An important feature to understand Isozaki’s attitude towards architecture is his idea of architecture as “events” instead of an “inert objects”. It means a constant referring to the history and so events, orbiting each building. In his book Japan-ness (MIT Press, 2006) he cited three earlier architectural events by nicknames: “Ise”, “Chogen,” and “Katsura,” corresponding respectively to Ise Grand Shrine25, Southern Gatehouse of Todaiji26 (directed by the monk Chogen) and Katsura Imperial Villa27.

25 Ise Grand Shrine (伊勢神宮), located in the city of Ise, Mie, Japan, Shinto shrine is dedicated to the goddess Amaterasu. The architectural style of the Ise shrine is known as shinmei-zukuri (神明造, is an ancient Japanese architectural style typical of holiest Shinto’s shrines) characterized by extreme simplicity and antiquity: its basic principles date back to the Kofun period (250-538 C.E.). The Shrine buildings use a special variant of this style called Yuitsu-shinmei-zukuri (唯一神

明造?), which may not be used in the construction of any other shrine. The old shrines are dismantled and new ones built on an adjacent site to exacting specifications every 20 years at exorbitant expense, so that the buildings will be forever new and forever ancient and original. The present buildings, dating from 2013, are the 62nd iteration to date and are scheduled for rebuilding in 2033. 26 Todaiji (Great Eastern Temple) is one of Japan's most famous temples and a landmark of Nara. Located in Nara Park, in central Nara, Todaiji was constructed in 752 as the head temple of all provincial Buddhist temples of

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After years, having visited outstanding buildings around the world, he conceded that his faith to constructive genius of Great South Gate has only been strengthened. Every summer time, on his way to hometown, he has been used to revisit this place try to grasping new inspirations.

The Great South Gate of Todaiji holds some features which are recognizable in Isozaki’s architecture as such eclecticism, out of scale volumes and pure geometric shapes.

Todaiji, Ise and Katsura were likewise constructed amidst turmoil, yet their construction was miraculously achieved though much disturbed by external conditions. Thus Isozaki affirms we should never treat architecture as mere “object” but rather as “event”.

1.2. Work in Kenzo Tange’s Laboratory and influence of master’s creativity

After graduating from Architecture Department of University of Tokyo, Isozaki attended the post-graduate course under Kenzo Tange of

Japan. The monastery Todaiji was founded by Emperor Shomu(724-749) when Nara was the capital of Japan. After most of the buildings were destroyed in 1180, Todaiji was reconstructed under the abbot Shunjobo Chogen (1121-1206) in a style he saw in China. 27 See note 77.

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P.h.d which he doesn’t complete. At that time Tange was assistant of professor Eika Takayama28 , both prominent figures in Japanese history. Takayama, president of the Society of Urbanism, had participated in the project for Daido and reconstruction of Tokyo; Tange was destined to become the protagonist of architecture and urban Japanese. This period of environment was challenging for intellectual maturation of Isozaki, quickly became Tange ‘s assistant. Arata Isozaki’s architectural ideologies developing started with Tange, and extended including the personality of Kunio Maekawa29, student of Antonin Raymond30 and Le Corbusier.

28 Takayama Eika (1910-1999 Tokyo). professor at University of Tokyo, colleague of Kenzo Tange, architect and master designer. Masterplan for the Technopolis Tsukuba Science City (1961) and the Komazawa Olympic Park (1964). 29 Kunio Maekawa(14 May 1905 – 26 June 1986) was a Japanese architect especially known for the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan building (concert hall located in Ueno Park, Tokyo, 1961), and a key figure of modern Japanese architecture. After graduation in 1928, he travelled to France to apprentice with Le Corbusier. In 1930 he returned to Japan and worked with Antonin Raymond (a student of Frank Lloyd Wright) and in 1935 established his own office Mayekawa Kunio Associates. 30 Antonin Raymond,(10 May 1888, Bohemia- 21 November 1976 Pennsylvania), was a Czech American architect. Raymond was born and studied in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), working later in the USA and Japan. His initial work with American architect Frank Lloyd

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Many of the best Japanese talents, among them Sachio Otani31 (who later designed the Kyoto International Conference Hall), Fumihiko Maki32, and the Metabolist member Kisho Kurokawa33, were students at that time in Tange’s seminar. Isozaki collaboration with

Wright, with whom later worked on the Tokyo Imperial Hotel. Along with British Architect Josiah Conder, Raymond is recognized as one of the fathers of modern architecture in Japan. 31 Sachio Otani (1924 Tokyo-2013) was a noted Japanese architect. In 1946 graduated from the University of Tokyo. He began his career in Kenzo Tange's studio, where he helped design the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (1955). In 1960 he started his own practice, and has sub-sequently designed a number of memorable build-ings including Kyoto International Conference Center. 32 Fumihiko Maki( 1928 in Tokyo)is a Japanese architect who. in 1993 received the Pritzker Prize for his work, which often explores pioneering uses of new materials and fuses the cultures of East and West.

33 Kisho Kurokawa (1934-2007) was a leading Japanese architect and one of the founders of the Metabolist Movement. Kurokawa studied ar-chitecture at Kyoto University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1957. He then attended University of Tokyo, under the supervision of Kenzo Tange. With colleagues, he cofounded the Metabolist Movement in 1960s. Among his famous projects the early Nakagin Capsule Tower (Ginza, Tokyo, 1970–1972) and later The Nation-al Art Center, Tokyo, Roppongi, Tokyo, 2000–2005).

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Kenzo Tange lasted until 1963 and till that date the young architect took part in interpreting at the outstanding engagements like “1960 Master Plan for New Tokyo” and the Yoyogi National Gymnasia of Tokyo. Tange influenced Isozaki not least by his mastery of forms, but himself was in turn influenced by Isozaki, who in addition to being an excellent draughtsman was also a fertile source of ideas. Isozaki’s “Join Core” project for example, inspired such Tange project as 3D city planning, the Tsukuji Re-urbanization Plan, the Yamanashi Press and Radio Centre, Kofu, and the Shizuoka Building in Ginza.

Figure 1.1. Arata Isozaki’s Joint Core System for Shinjuku Project, 1962.

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Figure 1.2. Scheme of design process: 1. Rise up trunks above the city where elevators are housed inside the cylinders. 2. Link the “joint core” structurally by long-span trusses which accommodate office space and expand these structures for a comprehensive proposal of a “City in the Air”.

Figure 1.3. Kenzo Tange: the Yamanashi Press and Radio Centre, Kofu, 1967, and Shizuoka building, Ginza, 1967.

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Figure 1.4. Scheme of design process: 1. Elevate and grouped together in a bundle solid service towers (elevators and staircases. 2. Adjusted horizontal slabs, clipped or removed in order to satisfy the changing conditions of the people.

Tange realized the principle of Isozaki‘s “core system” compacting in a single site or even, as regards Shizuoka building in Ginza, in a single trunk element. In the years between 1955 and 1958 Tange designed several buildings with an exaggerated trabeation expression, mostly evident in the Kagawa Administration Building, Takamatsu, 1958, and the Town Hall in Kurashiki,1960.

Figure 1.5. Scheme of design process.

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Figure 1.6. K.Tange’s Kagawa Administration Building, Takamatsu, 1958.

Figure 1.7. Kenzo Tange’s Town Hall in Kurashiki, 1960.

These projects preceded Isozaki’s three parts division first manner and must invariably have influenced him. The Oita Medical Hall was designed in 1959 while Isozaki was still a member of Tange’s atelier and it contains the most explicit of all lsozaki’s interpretations of the sacred pillar. The Medical Hall provides an important link with

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the burgeoning mega structure movement. The auditorium has been taken from a length of the oval tube, and the fragment so obtained, elevated above the surrounding city on four sturdy legs.

Figure 1.8. Scheme of design process.

Figure 1.9. Medical Hall, Oita 1959-60.

1.3 Relationship with Metabolist’s architects and impact on Isozaki’s spatial construction Although Isozaki belongs to the same generation as the Metabolists Noboru Kawazoe, Kiyonori Kikutake34, Fumihiko Maki, Masato

34 Kiyonori Kikutake (192 –2011) was a prominent Japanese architect known as one of the founders

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Otaka and Kisho Kurakawa, he never at any time formally joined the Group. During an interview in 1971 with James Stirling Isozaki conceded: “Some of our tendencies are the same, but I always felt differently. I never became a member of the Metabolism35 Group”36.

of the Japanese Metabolist group. He was also the tutor and employer of several important Jap-anese architects, such as Toyo Ito. Kikutake is known for his "Marine City" project of 1958, which formed part of the Metabolist Manifesto launched at the World Design Conference in Tokyo in 1960 under the leadership of Kenzo Tange. Among his famous projects: Edo-Tokyo Museum, To-kyo 1993.

35 Metabolism (新陳代謝) was a post-war Japanese architectural movement that fused ideas about architectural megastructures with those of or-ganic biological growth. It had its first inter-national exposure during CIAM's 1959 meeting and its ideas were tentatively tested by students from Kenzo Tange's MIT studio. During the prepa-ration for the 1960 Tokyo World Design Confer-ence a group of young architects and designers, including Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa and Fumihiko Maki prepared the publication of the Metabolism manifesto. They were influenced by a wide variety of sources including Marxist theo-ries and biological processes. Their manifesto was a series of four essays entitled: Ocean City, Space City, Towards Group Form, and Mate-rial and Man, and it also included designs for vast cities that floated on the oceans and plug-in capsule towers that could incorporate organic growth. Although the World Design Conference gave the Metabolists exposure on the interna-tional stage their ideas remained largely theo-retical.

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Isozaki has maintained an ambivalent relationship with Metabolism ever since he was asked to joined them when they came together, named their philosophy and published their manifesto at the 1960 World Design Conference. He refused. Yet he participated in the Metabolistis’s 1962 exhibition “This will be your city” in Tokyo, shered many of their ideas throughout the 60’s, and worked with them on Expo ’70 in Osaka. Outside Japan, Isozaki was often mistaken a member of the Metabolists, though he remained independent and critical of the unquestioning “progressivism” he thought they proclaimed. When Metabolists dreamt of renewal, Isozaki spoke of ruins. He preferred to keep the company of artists, filmmakeres, and writers rather than fellow architects. Whilst Isozaki’s aims differed from those of the Metabolist Group it is equally clear that he was strongly influenced by the Group’s conception of form, particularly Kiyonori Kikutake’s schemes. Isozaki’s early

Some smaller, individual buildings that em-ployed the principles of Metabolism were built and these included Tange's Yamanashi Press and Broadcaster Centre and Kurokawa's Nakagin Cap-sule Tower. The greatest concentration of their work was to be found at the 1970 World Exposi-tion in Osaka where Tange was responsible for master planning the whole site whilst Kikutake and Kurokawa designed pavilions. 36Isozaki Arata, “Interview with James Starling”, Japan Architecture and Urbanism, August, 1971, 17.

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buildings, notably the early mega skeletal series, are not pure mega structures; what interested Isozaki was the adaptation of Metabolism’s mega-aesthetic to the scale of the individual building, enlarging members. The origin of tubular hall of the Medical Hall, Oita 1959-60, and the hollow hypertrophic beams of the Oita Prefectural Library, is constant with the appearance of similar cylindrical tower structures in the early Metabolism project of Kiyonori Kikutake.

Figure 1.10. Kiyonori Kikutake: Tower City, 1958. Kikutake introduced the cylindrical core in his early Metabolism proposal.

Fumihiko Maki’s influence can be noticed in Isozaki’s Gunma Museum which pays tribute to Makis’s Apartment Complex, Tokyo. The consistent international Modernism of Maki’s early work has given way to an eclecticism

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which conforms to the new Mannerist sensibility that is much closer in style to Isozaki.

Figure 1.11. Fumikiko Maki: Hillside Apartment Complex, Tokyo, 1978. A conscious affinity between the architecture of Isozaki and Maki in the 1970s.

Figure 1.12. Library Oita Prefecture, 1962-66.

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The early ‘60s project of Oita Library refers to metabolism themes like human body’s circulation system as Isozaki explained.

“The project still showed the influence of Metabolism, was originally conceived as "growing architecture ". (...) The basic structural system is designed to allow the extension of the spaces walkable to accommodate those dimensions. (...) The original inspiration for the project was an analogy with the human skeleton (concrete structure), with the circulatory system (pipes), and with the muscles (the composition of the interior space), with obvious affinity interconnections between trunks, arms and plates underlying the "joint system central". This building was constructed with concrete unfinished concrete brut, widely used in Japanese Neobrutalism”37.

Isozaki and the Metabolist Group have little in common, for where the Metabolist viewed urban as essentially a matter of technological adjustment, though this was given a thoroughly Japanese interpretation by means of analogies with growth in nature and cell replication, Isozaki was largely uninterested in change or in technology for its own sake except where technology served to reinforce his aesthetic interests. The

37 Arata Isozaki, Quattro Decenni di Architettura, trad. L. Zarri( New York: Rizzoli, 2005)p 35.

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idea of a change of skyline of the entire city was a possible thought in a city like Tokyo where the urban context is in a continuous metamorphosis. “While in Western cities there is a drawing of the city and the streets and the contexts has the precise points of reference, the city as Tokyo are presented as systems with undifferentiated urban characteristics and always different, which could continue indefinitely in any direction. The buildings are demolished and quickly replaced by others, with new forms and functions, in a time span of about twenty years.. These cities have no real consistency as European cities, instead keeping the temporariness, and the precariousness of a micro infrastructure”.38

Therefore Isozaki and members of the Metabolisms developed a concept of purely organic city development (aggregation of various towers) and each member has referred to a natural element such as marine colonies, DNA structure or as Isozaki to vegetal elements, particularly trees.

38 Andrea Maffei, Le opere, i progetti e gli critti Toyo Ito,( Milano: Electa 2001)p 77.

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Figure 1.13. Scheme of design process.

1. Kiyonori Kikutake’s “Marine city” 1958. The shapes of the towers refers to rock bar-nacle shells colonies and the intent was to create a floating metropolis in the ocean; self-sustainable, flexible, clean and safe, earthquake-proof, impervious to flooding and away from urban sprawl on the main land.

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Figure 1.14. Scheme of design process.

2. Noriaki Kurokawa’s “Helix city” 1961.

Figure 1.15. Scheme of design process. 3. Arata Isozaki’s “Clusters in the Air” 1961.

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CHAPTER 2. THE INFLUENCE OF DIFFERENT TRADITIONS ON A. ISOZAKI’S CREATIVE PROCESS “I had two ideas at the moment: to start from zero and Malevich.” Arata Isozaki.

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A clear idea of Isozaki’s profile was describe by Hans Hollein39. “(..) What is Isozaki’s colour? Black or white? Of course black and white. But here I would add another dimension, mixture. Black and with transforms into grey. He is really grey. This is not meant derogatory. With a more poetic metaphor, Isozaki would call this “twilight”. Twilight equalizes, and this equalizing of heterogeneous elements is a fundamental phenomenon of Isozaki’s architecture that is why he can do marble halls and robots and computer cities. It is architecture of dissolving but subsequent resolving.

That is why he can easily absorb a variety of influences without being derivative, but always highly original”.40

Isozaki himself, for instance in his comprehensive documentation in A+U in 1972, has indicated whom he considers the figures or the realizations, the buildings partaking on the boards of the “eternal” game.

39 Hans Hollein (1934–2014) was an Austrian architect and designer and key figure of postmodern architecture. Some of his most notable works are the Haas House and the Albertina extension in the inner city of Vienna. In 1985 Hollein was awarded the Pritzker Prize. 40 Hans Hollein, in Arata Isozaki Part 1,(Tokyo: Kajimi Institute Print., 1993) p.22.

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They are : Michelangelo, Stirling, Van Allen, Peruzzi, Ledoux, Neumann, Loss, Hoffmann, Venturi, Piranesi, Wright, Charreau, Hollein, Kiesler, Borromini, Le Corbusier, Pichler, Tange, Malevitch, Mies va der Rohe, Fuller, Kahn, Terragni, Magritte, Sinan, Johson, George de la Tour, Duchamp, Sullivan and De Chirico.

Isozaki himself declare:” An architectural work is hardly the product of one person’s effort. Even if it is designed, drafted, supervised, and executed by a single architect, innumerable factors outside the architect’s control are inevitably involved in the process"41.

41 Ishii Kazuhiro, Arata Isozaki Part 1,(Tokyo: Kajimi Institute Print., 1993) p. 31.

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Figure 2.1. Hans Hollein, Vienna February 1976, sketches of Arata Isozaki.

2.1 Arata Isozaki’s adoption of Japanese traditional architectural concepts

From initial formal viewpoint Isozaki’s works are basically conceived not in the Japanese sense of proportions, but rather in Renaissance like purely geometrical patterns such as squares and circles. His architectural expression does not depend on columns, beams and other structural components, but consists of heavy masses composed of concrete walls. Japanese

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lightness is dispensed with, and instead a heaviness that lodges in the ground prevails.

Through deeper analysis it’s notable that the formal approach is partly to traditional Japanese shapes (heaviness of roof and trunk as backbone) how much deeper are respected spatial principles of Japanese architecture.

-Columns like trunk of the house

The construction columns for the project ‘City in the Air’, appropriates the elaborate brackets and monumental expression of the Great South Gate of the Todaji, 1199.

This raises an important question concerning the role of sacred expression in Isozaki’s architecture.

In Japan the sacred implied by large scale and the suggestion of strength and, in this case, the width of trunk column is not merely structural needs but also a sign of spiritual power.

Tange made a great play of trabeation beam forms in the 1950s and Isozaki inherited something of this in his early work. However, Isozaki went much further than Tange in giving his beams a superhuman expression, inasmuch as the process of hypertrophy is allowed to proceed to the point where instead of the beams being mere an element of construction, they now begin to include interior space. The dimensions of Isozaki’s beams are by now superhuman, and the

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expression of strength, which or so long had been the hallmark of Japanese architecture, acquired, under the influence of Brutalism, “an unprecedented monumentality in the Iwata Girl’s High School, the Oita Library and the Kitakyushu Museum of Art.

Isozaki transformed the primitive archetype of the central sacred pillar when he made it the basis for his invention of form. Indeed the ancient sacred dimension was obscured and overlaid by turning it on its side, increasing its scale, and hollowing out its interior so that it now becomes a hollowed-out vessel and container of human activities. In trabeated mega skeletal and tunnel form, square and semi-cylindrical tubes are laid next to one another and the underside left open to produce more extensive conventional spaces. In the Oita Medical Hall 1960 the auditorium is located at the first floor ‘flattened oval beam; later, in the Iwata Girls’ High School, 1964, the teaching spaces are formed within a series of vertically stacked beams. The Oita Prefectural Library, 1966, marks a further stage in the application of the modified sacred pillar. Here the trabeated form is achieved by stacking square tubular beams of concrete between a central spine and transverse beams supported on columns. On the outside, the end profiles imply that the interior space is made up of a number of isolated square tubes, whereas, it is evident once inside that the beam soffit has been omitted and the inverted

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‘U’ profiles of beams used to cover a more or less open interior.

Figure 2.2. Scheme of design process. From structural pillar of Japanese Pagoda to a horizontal living pillar. Kitakyushu Museum of Art and Oita Library

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-Respect of traditional shapes

Figure 2.3. Arata Isozaki’s Concert Hall, Nara, 1992-98.

In the project of Nara concert Hall, Isozaki proceeds with a series of references to majestic temple residing in the city of Nara, the Great Buddha of Todaiji Temple. Having to juxtapose with it, Isozaki copied size reaching the same height. The most significant reference, however, it can be seen in the choice of treatment of the exterior. Isozaki, in fact, processed surfaces as single big roof, witnessing the highest devotion to the Japanese architectural tradition. Tiles floors of the same dark grey of old roofs. Moreover outer shape is 90 degrees rotated ellipse or a clothoid curve, a curvature which consistent

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with the forms of the ancient temples.

-Traditional wooden joinery and “Tokyo42” brackets systems.

Isozaki in Clusters in the air project evokes the structural elements found in traditional Japanese wooden structures, such in the “masuhijiki” (ancones) and “tokyo” (capitals) of Nandaimon Gate43, Todaiji Temple in Nara. he system is Chinese in origin and is called “Dougong”44.

42 The Tokyō (斗栱) is a system of supporting blocks and brackets (elbow wood) supporting the eaves of a Japanese building, usually part of a Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine. The use of Tokyō is made necessary by the extent to which the eaves protrude, a functionally essential element of Japanese Buddhist architecture. The system has however always had also an important decorative function. Like most architectural elements in Japan, the system is Chinese in origin (on the subject, see the article Dougong) but has evolved since its arrival into several original forms. 43 The existing Nandaimon (Great South Gate) was constructed at the end of the 12th century based on Song Dynasty style (960–1279), after the original gate was destroyed by a typhoon during the Heian period. The current building was finished in 1709. Until 1998, it was the world's largest wooden building. 44 Dougong (斗拱) is a unique structural element of interlocking wooden brackets, one of the most important elements in traditional Chinese architecture.

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Figure 2.4. My personal drawing representing the design of A. Isozaki “Clusters in the Air” compared with traditional Chinese “Goudong” system.

2.1.1 Dissolving architecture in the natural context

Nature offers many images of emptiness that usually can’t perceive. In Western painting clouds are substantially vision and not allude to anything, stand for themselves, or at most a weather condition and serve to build solid, such as Tiepolo’s paintings; while in China and Japan the clouds are something in between the visible and the invisible. Those are a break in the vision, and serve to stimulate in the viewer an attitude of inquiry, creative. One of the most famous paintings of Japan, the landscape in ink broken (Haboku- Hatsuboku45) painted by

45 Haboku (破墨) and Hatsuboku (溌墨) are both a technique employed in ink wash painting, as seen in landscape paintings, involving an

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Sesshu Toyo (1420-1506) lends itself very well to this kind of analysis because the fog and clouds are empty vehicle.

But the vacuum effect is designed to undo or upset the sense of distance, so as to induce read more clearly the first floor, while the fog get the observer be prospectively affected not so significant. So the vacuum effect allows you to place emotionally the importance of the objects depicted in the space, creating a hierarchy of relationships different from that to which we are accustomed to in the West, and that is architecturally based on progressions conceptual, rational; not here, it is more sentimental.46

Gunma Museum of Isozaki plays a role of blank white sheet in a natural context, surrounded by forest that instead express itself fully. Located within a park, for its reflective surface and chromatically homogeneous skin, it is visible around the green as a cancellation and subtraction of this.

abstract simplification of forms and freedom of brushwork. The two terms are often confused with each other in ordinary use. Generally, haboku relies on a layered contrast black, gray and white, whereas hatsuboku utilizes "splashes" of ink, without leaving clear contours or outlines. In Japan, these styles of painting were firmly founded and spread by the Japanese painter Sesshu Toyo. 46 Gian Carlo Calza, Stile Giapponese,( Torino: Einaudi, 2002) p. 29.

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As also visible in Sou Fujimoto47’s sketches, architects of the next generation, architecture in Japan is never in the first plan in its context. Building, since traditional architecture, should be at first compatible with nature, which is the real protagonist in landscape. Architecture lies fragilely on the ground, adopting a basic aspect and shapes (bare of any ornaments), so it can be the background of nature. The Gunma Museum has a potential space that would not be so sensitive and deep except that the building allows nature in the first place to show itself.

47 Sou Fujimoto (1971) is a Japanese architect graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1994, and established his own office, Sou Fujimoto Architects, in 2000. Noted for delicate light structures and permeable enclosures, Fujimoto designed several houses, and in 2013, was se-lected to design the temporary Serpentine Gal-lery pavilion in London.

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Figure 2.5. Sesshu Toyo, Haboku Sansui, 1495.

Figure 2.6. My personal Sketch up representation of A. Isozaki’s Gunma Museum.

Figure 2.7. Concept sketch of Sou Fujimoto for house in Tokyo.

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2.1.2 Isozaki’s “space of darkness” and “space of illusion” as result of Japanese “lighting gradient” aesthetic

The domain par excellence of mysticism and art, in Japanese culture, serves to promote, both for the artist and the viewer, a connection with the undifferentiated, Satori48. At these depths it is located the sources of aesthetics connected to nature, which informs not only the gardens, religious practice and ritual but art in general. According to Japanese culture the Satori are hidden in the deep darkness and is from there that is possible to catch them, mystically. From this point is possible to understand the deep worship of Japanese for penumbra and almost deep darkness which is a main features traditional Japanese houses.

It was between 1960 and 1970 that Arata Isozaki passed through a sombre period of dejection started as a student, working for the Masterplan of Tokyo in with Kenzo Tange and culminating at the Open Day of Expo Osaka 1970. For the previous occurrence, still student, he confesses that he met the real darkness during a nervous breakdown. Telling

48 Satori (悟り) is a Japanese Buddhist term for awakening, comprehension; understanding. Satori is often used interchangeably with kenshō. It refers to the perception of the Buddha-Nature or emptiness. According to some authors, kenshō is a brief glimpse, while satori is considered to be a deeper spiritual experience.

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about his second experience of meeting darkness he asserted:"For months I was sick in bed, (...). It was then that I realized that I had to leave the studio of Tange and put me on my own. Addressing the melancholy hospital, I resolved to make the dark bases of my theories space and time.(…)During my professionally participation in national event Expo '70 the only vocabulary allowed was Modernism. This situation gave me a great nervous tension and ruined me physically. In those circumstances colors blurred and I started to see just empty. The substance lost ground and turned into shadow. I had the sensation that the twilight, the time of the devil, was dropped on the world. I decided that from that moment in the design of the buildings would have chased the void as far as possible, to bring the physical objects to the non-color, and made this procedure a method.”49

Those confessions are related to an inner psychology emotional state rather than a space talk, but still are ancient foundation of Japanese spiritual culture.

During this psychologically moment of his life, Isozaki deepened the theme of darkness in his architecture.

49Arata Isozaki, Quattro Decenni di Architettura, trad. L. Zarri( New York: Rizzoli, 2005) p. 75.

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The “Space of Darkness" essay (1964) by Isozaki provides the surest basis for an interpretation of his role and work, although subsequent writings of 1974 (“Rereading In Praise of Shadows”) and 1980 (”Rethinking Space of Darkness) offer additional clues and pointers. All three make reference to the compelling even if short didactic work by the now internationally celebrated novelist and essayist Junichiro Tanizaki50 entitled “Praise of Shadows”51.

Tanizaki's ostensible theme was the overemployment of artificial means of lighting in prewar Japan, whether in public places, on the Kabuki stage52, or at night in towns. More than anything, he was against the tendency to brighten domestic interiors unduly. A high degree of illumination contradicted cultural usage which had evolved over centuries and in accordance with which human life and especially household ritual proceeded in a state of semidarkness.

50 Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965 Tokyo) was one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. 51 In Praise of Shadows is an essay on Japanese aesthetics by the Japanese author and novelist Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. Originally published in 1933 in Japanese. The theme is the comparisons of light with darkness used to contrast Western and Asian cultures. 52 Kabuki (歌舞伎), is a classical Japanese dance-drama theatre.

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Figure 2.8. Darkness at the heart of domestic interior.

Isozaki admits that he himself is out of sympathy with Tanizaki’s rejection of the bright, shiny implements of daily modern life, but then, even Tanizaki claimed that it would be impossible for a modern Japanese to exist under the conditions sketched in his essay. It is, rather, the speculation that “In Praise of Shadows” provokes which is Isozaki's theme in his “Space of Darkness" essay. In European practice generally and not only in baroque examples, such as the Transparent at Toledo already mentioned-light and shadow are treated as "independent opposing elements.” While dramatic effects are obtained under these conditions, light and shadow never mix physically, as they appear to do in Japanese spaces.

“Space," then, such as it exists in Japanese buildings, is conceived of simply as the

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“degree of intensity of light".

It can be called space as a gradient. This feature is visible in modern Japanese architecture and in Isozaki as well.

Figure 2.9. “Moon Room” in A. Isozaki’s Nagi Museum of Art, Okayama, Japan, 1991-1994.

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Figure 2.10. Museum in the forest, Taoyuan Coutry, Taiwan, 2012, Sou Fujimoto53.

53 As the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto says, “gradiation” will became the keyword for the future of Japanese architecture. For instance, there are infinite colorific degrees between white and black, and innumerable values between 1 and 0. Gradiations lay dormant in diverse places. They can be found in between: interiority and exteriority; architecture and urbanism; furniture and architecture; private and public; theatre and museum; house and streets; matter and space; morning and night; comprehensibility and incomprehensibility. The idea of graduation will herald the immense possibilities of architecture.53

Figure 2.11. Concept of “gradient” by Sou Fujimoto.

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As the novelist Tanizaki explained :”In the temples of Japan a roof of heavy tiles is first laid out, and in the deep, spacious shadows created by the eaves the rest of the structure is built. Nor is this true only of temples; in the palaces of the nobility and the houses of the common people, what first strikes the eye is the massive roof of tile or thatch and the heavy darkness that hangs beneath the eaves. Even at midday cavernous darkness spreads over all beneath the roof’s edge, making entryway, doors, walls, and pillars all but invisible. The grand temples of Kyoto Nishi Honganji and the farmhouses of the remote countryside are alike in this respect: like most buildings of the past their roofs give the impression of possessing far greater weight, height, and surface than all that stands beneath the eaves.” 54

Making spaces to live, Japanese first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow they set together a house.

There are of course roofs on Western houses too, but they are less to keep off the sun than to keep off the wind; even from without it is apparent that they are built to create as few shadows as possible and to expose the interior to as much light as possible.

54 Junichiro Tanizaki, In praise of shadows,(Tokyo: Leete'S Island Books,1977) p. 11.

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If the roof of a Japanese house is a parasol, the roof of a Western house is no more than a cap, with as small a visor as possible so In Japanese tradition there is no use of glass, concrete, and bricks, for instance, made a low roof necessary to keep off the driving wind and rain. The way in which, from ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends. And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows, it has nothing else.

Figure 2.12. Scheme of Japanese and Western house’s relationship with atmospheric events, specially with the sun light. In Wester houses shadow and light never mix physically, as they appear to do in Japanese spaces.

A Japanese room might be likened to an ink-wash painting, the paper-paneled shoji55 being the expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is darkest. Essentially

55 Paper shoji: traditional translucent paper over a frame of wood.

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the space called alcove is an empty space marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into it forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void. Describing the beauty of darkness J. Tanizaki declared: ”This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament. “

Modern Western civilization appears determined to banish this darkness the objective of this effort, is to seek only luminosity and Visual clarity (more functionalization in architecture).

The essential architectural tool whom create the darkness is certainly the building's roof, which in Japanese tradition has an high symbolical importance.

Isozaki formally translates the roof under which is formed the space of darkness as a single building. This is the case of Nara Concert Hall and. Tokyo Edo Museum, symbol of modernism by Kiyonori Kikutake clearly shows this quote of tradition. The living space, in this case the museum exhibition, is located in the only "container "roof. This volume is in fact appears as the silhouette of a typical Japanese extruded roof, standing on four vertical supports.

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Figure 2.13. Isozaki’s Nara Concert Hall (roof as entire building).

Figure 2.14. A. Isozaki’s Tokyo Christian College.

Figure 2.14. Kiyonori Kikutake’s Edo Museum (living the roof).

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-Space of darkness space of illusion.

Isozaki explained the concept of darkness, which is so far for Western sense of beauty with these words:” Darkness as a consciousness space of imaginary and illusionary world. A reflection of reality associated with depth psychology, magic, and symbols”.56

His aim is therefore to grasp and show the concept of darkness in is architecture, as a personal sphere of one who lives a certain space.

Architecturally Isozaki mainly equips with two instruments to achieve the effect of semi-darkness: lack of artificial light and double walls system. The first is also used by the architect trough a limited use of openings, or if any, arranged longitudinally in lower part of facade, as seen in the Kyoto Concert Hall.

His buildings, like most in Japanese territory, comply with opening times that do not exceed, for the great majority of cases, 5 p.m., so as not to incur problems of artificial light. As shown in the Museum of Modern Art in Gunma Prefecture, the architect provided skylights in showrooms spread through an opaque material, daylight comes

56 Arata Isozaki, Japan-ness in Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press), 2006 p.66.

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faintly to the work of art.

Concerning the second tool used to obtain a mystical atmosphere of darkness he showed a particular predilection to the use of double wall structures. So in his architecture ‘walls’ play a protagonist role, they embrace darkness inside. Of Particular salience in this regard was the way he composed his double walls for the Oita Prefectural Library and the headquarters building of Fukuoka Mutual Bank. Typical of Isozaki’s architectural construction methods prevailing in the 1960’s, the first example is composed of a central zone delineated by twin walls which corresponds to the buildings core, and to which the necessary rooms are attached according to the program. In the case of Fukuoka City Bank Head Office, this concept has been developed on an even greater scale.

Figure 2.15. Arata Isozaki’s project of Oita Medical Hall, Oita Prefectural Library, 1959/1962-

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1966, 1970-1972 (Oita Medical Hall Annex).

Figure 2.16. Arata Isozaki’s project of Fukuoka City Bank Head Office. 1968-1971, 1978-1983 (Addition).

Under this same category of tendency should also be included his use of tubular details in squares cross-sections (Oita Prefectural Library, Kitakyushu City Museum of Art) and semi-circle cross-sections (Fujimi Country Club House, Kitakyushu Central Library).

All these buildings possess an empty longitudinal spine bounded by two thick walls with whom the buildings spread out perpendicular to the spine. Darkness space diminishes the spectator’s awareness of the surrounding enclosure and focuses his awareness on this individual consciousness.57

57 Ishii Kazuhiro,”A guide to the world of Arata Isozaki”, in Arata Isozaki Part 1,(Tokyo: Kajimi Institute Print., 1993) p. 32.

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Figure 2.17. Arata Isozaki’s project of Kitakyushu City Museum of Art, Fukyoka, 1972-1974.

Figure 2.18. Arata Isozaki’s project of Kitakyushu Central Library, Fukuoka, 1973-1974.

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Figure 2.19. Arata Isozaki’s project of Fujimi Coutry Clubhouse, Oita City, 1973-1974.

The state of darkness is intended by Isozaki also as a state of illusion. Thus, writes Isozaki:”I am now convinced that we must replace darkness with a metaphor of illusoriness. As it gradually becomes a part of this overall illusoriness, darkness floats free and assumes a very different quality from what Tanizaki had in mind." Isozaki's concern, therefore, was the evolution of a working method for confronting this new space of illusion.

This term is a fundamental component of Isozaki’s irony and wants to heightening the spectator’s mistrust of his perceptions, an awakening of feeling that is no firm ground anywhere beneath his feet. This perception increases the individual’s alienation from reality. Two examples of deliberate illusion in Isozaki’s architecture deserve mention. They are the reverse perspective large marble platform at the end of the entrance lobby of the Gunma Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, and the fake doors in the entrance lobby of the Shukosha building.

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Figure 2.20. Gunma Museum of Fine Art, Takasaki, 1971-4.

The irrational reverse perspective of the marble stepped platform is meant to awaken a feeling of uncertainty and alienation from reality.

Figure 2.21. Shukosha Building, Fukuoka, 1974.

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During Renaissance the discovery of prospective was used as an aid of realism in painting, however, architects were quick to realize that perspective could be manipulated to control the perception of depth. Bramante introduced a false perspective in the sanctuary of S. Satiro, and an impressive perspective effect is produced in the Scala Regia by the convergence of the rising barrel vault. Palladio constructed a series of exaggerated perspectives in the permanent scenery of the Teatro Olimpico.

Figure 2.22. Church Santa Maria presso San Satiro, Donato Bramante, Milano V sec.

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Figure 2.23. Teatro Olimpico, Andrea Palladio, 1580, Vicenza.

In the entrance lobby of the Gunma Museum of Modern Art the marble platform converges to spectators instead of vanishing in the distance, as is more usual, and this result in a sculptural paradox. Here the perspective effect is used in an irrational way that contradicts normal vision.

In Tokyo branch of the Fukuoka Sogo Bank and on façade of the recent Himalaya Center of Shangai an anagram involves the transposition of the letters to form a new word are used to construct the façade. The vault of Fujimi Country Clubhouse was projected in a shape of question mark. The contradiction in scale enhances the quality of illusion, unreality and ambivalence. To increase the depth the vault is a doubled black on itself in a seemingly arbitrary fashion.

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Figure 2.24. Tokyo branch, Fukuoka Mutual Bank, 1970-71. Letters have been used structurally to construct the street façade

Figure 2.25. Himalaya Center, Shangai, 2008.

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2.1.3 “Catch” and using natural element

Nature is at the heart of traditional life in Japan, just as in the foundation for the architectural forms and construction materials of traditional Japanese buildings.

The ancient Japanese sought their symbols and divine images in nature, in rocks, trees, and water. This way of looking at nature is still at the very core of the Japanese spiritual today.

Nature is not constant or stationary but temporary and changing, like the never ending cycle of the seasons. Then, the Japanese believe that nature, in spite of violence, always contains an element of harmony or order.

In this respect, a room, and so a building, is nothing but a springboard or steppingstone from which man can enter the more expansive world of nature. Traditionally, the focus of each room was the Shinto58 ancestral altar or the special alcove known as the to ko no ma alcove.

58 Shinto (神道), also called kami-no-michi, is the ethnic religion of the people of Japan. Shinto today is a term that applies to the religion of public shrines devoted to the worship of a multitude of gods (kami). One-third participants who claimed not to believe in religion had a Buddhist or Shinto altar in their home.

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The tea ceremony rooms, or “chashisu”, of the aristocracy and were also extremely small for this reason, because they allowed their user to find deeper communion with nature. Entering through a small, square door called “nijiriguchi”, which requires bending low to pass through and symbolically separates the small, simple, quiet inside from the crowded, overwhelming outside world. From the tea room was permitted to users to view the moon, symbol of the great void.

In Japanese architecture the space is a space that is given by Nature, is not that which is based upon a human will to three dimensionality, but a leaning toward or sinking into Nature59.

Isozaki, as every Japanese architect, used his own vocabulary of shapes and tools to include natural essence in his buildings. It is not a prerequisite to forcibly incorporate natural elements in the architecture but it is the only known way by the Japanese to create an architectural space.

The principles frequently recalled by Isozaki and his translation into architectural forms can be summarized as:

1. Natural change of a body subjected to weathering. As in Japanese tradition, the true symbol of nature, the moon, could be

59 Arata Isozaki, Japanness,( Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011), p. 47.

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fully observed only in its reflection in a pond (as in Villa Katzura’s design), Isozaki provides often adjacent building a film of water, so that, at the blowing of the wind, the reflection of this change.

Figure 2.26. Reflection of building in Kyoto Concert Hall

2. The imperfection of the raw material. Use of materials not fully drafted but left in their natural state in parts.

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Figure 2.27. Mito Tower’s steps stair detail. Stones are cut just on the upper part while the perpendicular part is left in its natural imperfections.

Figure 2.28. Detail Kyoto Concert Hall’s square. Benches and sitting place are massive rocks.

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3. Natural periodic cycle time. As present in many Tange ‘s buildings, also for Isozaki, the presence of the "time" factor materializes in a large sundial.

Figure 2.30. Sundial of Disney Center.

2.1.4. “Mask” as concept of border

The main features on the Japanese fence is that set a limit to infinity on the outside (becoming a symbol of security and faith) and inside create a universe in miniature, a new infinity of is own60. This is the concept of the multi fences of Ise Shire which were erected to symbolize the border between forest and sacral place.

According to this relation with the fence, Japanese contemporary buildings seem to be an single object deriving from a merge of building with fence. The result is often a

60 Teiji Itoh, Architettura Giapponese,(Milano: Silva Editoriale d’arte, 1963), p.67.

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blanked façade bereave of any details closer to the image, as Isozaki is used to name, a mask.

Figure 2.31. Scheme of design process. From Ise Shrine’s fence to an urban building which is the result of a fence plus the building its self.

From 1968 to 1989 Isozaki projected an architecture where the exterior shell was constructed out of references. It was a strategically adopted stance taken when the world seemed in abeyance and history seemed missing. Rem Koolhaas, who contributed to the book Arata Isozaki 30 an essay entitle “Beyond Ma(sk)” characterizes this as a mask Isozaki wore. Koolhaas seems to regard the Japanese as a people who express themselves only through a mask as on a Noh stage61.

Isozaki’s interpretation of Ise Shrine’s

61 Noh (能), is a major form of classical Japanese musical drama that has been performed since the 14th century. Emotions are primarily conveyed by stylized conventional gestures while the iconic masks represent the roles such as ghosts, women, children, and old people.

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fence as security is the basic concept of his architecture during 70s and 90s. As he asserted “The outside world is savage and will readily invade the building and crush one to death. For one’s own protection, one must build a shell. Buildings were originally shelters in the sense that they protected one from the elements. However, today, buildings need to be shells and to protect one from the even more deadly and powerful force of the urban environment. 62In subsequent works, shells have been used as masks. The Kitakyushu Central Library (1974) is an early work; more recent works involving masks include Domus: Interactive Museum about Humans (1995) and Nara Centennial Hall (1998).

Figure 2.32. Arata Isozaki’s building for Bjornson

62 Arata Isozaki, GA Architect 15,vol.3,( Tokyo: A.D.A Edita, 1991-2000), p 110.

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Studio, Los Angeles 1989.

The result of denial of public and privilege of private space leads a creation of comfortable mini universe in the inner private space. To create it Japanese tradition showed many manner of rescaling objects to preserve preciously inside houses. The construction of the garden, as well as a bonsai or a bonseki (ancient Japanese art of creating miniature landscapes on black lacquer trays using white sand, pebbles, and small rocks), an arrangement of flowers or a tea ceremony, is always creating a "microcosm".63 The theme of micro universe inside the building is constant in Isozaki’s architecture, through using of small garden or meditation places as in Okanoyama Museum Graphic Art (1982-4). But the action of rescaling objects in order to create a micro universe (reducing) in Isozaki’s creative process behave also on the other direction (enlarging). As him self declare, there are many exemples of this manner. "In my thirty years of activity or widely sought often simple procedure that turns objects into architecture. The electronic robot (Expo '70, Festival Plaza), the cubic structure (the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma), wave signs mentioned (Tsukuba Center Building), the

63 Jiro Takei and Marc P. Keane Sakuteiki Records of Garden Making,( Rutland: Tuttle Publishing, 2011) p. 101.

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tetrahedron (Art Tower Mito), the sundial (Team Disney Building): architectural languages are historically recognized everywhere.”64

2.1.5 Gentrification as organization of space come from spatial arrangement of Japanese traditional gardens

Japanese garden is at the antipodes of geometric garden, Italian style. The flower can only be flower just where there will be flowerbeds, the gravel roads where it is decreed (characteristic path), the tree where expected to be hedge or row. This is a process of artificiality; man imposes its law in what basically despises matter, for celebrate what especially interests him, their thoughts. In oriental garden, however, there is an external and abstract schema that position from outside on the ground and that things have to fill; things are dynamic and naturally changeable. The Western garden is hierarchical; man, animal statues, plants, soil and water. The oriental garden is fusion; man-leaf, sun-joy, water-thought. It can be synthesized as a “lack of hierarchy”.

Two conceptions of the garden: similarities and contrasts

64 Arata Isozaki and K. Tadashi Oshima, Arata Isozaki, (New York: Phaidon Press, 2009)p.36.

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Figure 2.33. Villa Gamberaia, Florence. Nineteenth century. Geometrically ordered space in the landscape.

Figure 2.34. Heavenly Dragon Temple, Kyoto. XIV century. Harmony of water and stone.

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Figure 2.35. Boboli Garden, Florence. XVI century. Statue of Andromeda. In the tradition of Renaissance stone has human form.

Figure 2.36. Temple of the Saiho Ji, Kyoto. XVI century. In Japanese tradition statues are carved by natural elements.

Japanese gardens do not have to see the hand of man. The aim of those is fusion of man with nature and therefore a messy and asymmetrical arrangement, full of unexpected

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angles. While in Western culture the protagonist is the man, anthropocentric system, in East culture Nature is at the center of the system.

Reproduction landscape is the fulcrum of garden’s aesthetics and its main aim is the effect of immensity of the garden in a small space.

“Japanese visit gardens, essentially cosmos-centric, to dive spiritually in the flow of the absolute (...).Western visit gardens, normally highly anthropocentric, builted as a celebration of the domain of the humans on the whole”.65

In the garden vegetation, although important, is somehow considered auxiliary to the compositions of stones. It is composed mainly of trees and shrubs; plants and flowering trees. The buildings and gardens enhance each other and are articulated in close relationship; the latter follows the layout of the buildings, which will incorporate the views making it one of the architectural elements. The bearing elements of the structures, extremely ductile, are the roof and the support pillar and the walls, for the most part consist of sliding, allow a total interpenetration of the interior space with the outside; the transition is mediated and

65 Fosco Maraini, Ore giapponesi (Milano: Corbaccio, 2000 p. 18.

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enhanced by the veranda that surrounds the building.

This relation between interior and outside is organized in a sequence of specific viewpoints which, combined together, create a scenario. In Japanese traditions the path made by different size of stones, as in Villa Katzura, was designed to conduct the visitor trough different scenarios, looking from the garden to direction of house or to panoramas in the garden itself. A more complex scenario was thought from inside to outdoor, trough using small size of patios or trough the shadows of trees on semitransparent walls. The aim was to let the visitor feel surrounded by nature even inside the house.

The tendency to organize the vision as articulated in the process space-time sequences, typical of Japanese mentality, manifested in numerous artistic expressions: in depictions of painted scrolls, folding screens with several doors and sliding doors. In the specific case, it follows in a conception of the fence as a path, which results in the tea garden.

Isozaki frequently includes in his architectural composition a large empty space filled by a thin steel wires representing trees able to slightly move according to the blow wind. Those are works of the Japanese sculptor Aiko Miyawaki, Isozaki’s wife. Isozaki adopted also in his architecture

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nijiriguchi66 windows, long horizontal cuts set in the lower parts of the wall, from where is possible to gaze the garden and the traditional roji67.The aim is to have a constant relationship with the surrounding nature and enhance its value from different views.

Figure 2.36. A. Isozaki’s Ukichiro Nagaya Museum Ice and Snow Kaga.

66 Square door called nijiriguchi, or "crawling-in entrance," which requires bending low to pass through and symbolically separates the small, simple, quiet inside from the crowded, overwhelming outside world. From inside, through nijitiguchi, is possible to gaze the roji garden path. 67 Roji (露地), dewy ground, is the Japanese term used for the garden through which one passes to the chashitsu (architectural spaces designed to be used for tea ceremony).

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Gentrification.

The universe structure, come from Chinese origin, deeply assimilated by the Japanese culture, based on triadic compositions principle of Heaven (vertical), Earth (horizontal) and Human (diagonal). The dynamic that characterizes life processes was in fact created by the breakdown of static state represented by the symmetry. The Japanese aesthetic is based on the principle of harmony as a dynamic equilibrium, obtained mainly through asymmetrical provisions that refer to the vision of life now mentioned. Talking about aesthetic Japanese culture is at the antipodes harmony of Palladian symmetry. This attitude is visible in any artistic expressions (paintings, gardening, theatrical stage arrangements and architecture). Is a system which privilege a no center composition that may be called gentrification.

Figure 2.37. Scheme showing an example of Japanese painting and the taste of asymmetry. The poem in sets on the lower corner leaving the center empty.

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As Isozaki explain Tokyo itself is a no center city, where the religious center and the city center are split in two different poles of the urban territory, all elements have the same importance, there is no hierarchy. The result is a city with many centers, a fragmentary urban organization.

Analyzing traditional residence and temples planimetry is visible that they are like a dissemination of pavilions in a naturally rich in vegetation. Their appearance dimensions are radically different from the bodies of unit buildings, often monumental, featuring classical Western architecture. The key issue is the presence of specific architectural elements of the garden: smaller pavilions of various types as covered galleries (suiwatadono), bridges and, in a later period, the tea pavilions. These pavilions are not arranged in geometric or random, but according to a particular aesthetic intention addressed to the interpenetration with the natural rhythms.

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Figure 2.38. Plan Villa Katsura formed by man pavilions scattered on the territory with a large pond in the center.

Isozaki adopted himself the atomized space settlement. In the project for Ceramic Mito in Gifu the fractured quality of the exterior form is heightened in order to avoid the creation of a ‘whole’. The plan follows traditional ceremony manners, a variety of heterogeneous pavilions are integrated with the surrounding natural context.

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Figure 2.39. Ceramic Park Mino, Gifu, 1997-2000.

The gentrification attitude is visible in many Japanese expressions from art filed to food arrangement. As Roland Barthes wrote: “Occidental food, heaped up, linked to a certain operation of prestige, tends toward the heavy, the grand, the abundant the copious; the Oriental follows the converse of movement, and tends toward the infinitesimal: the cucumber’s future is not its accumulation or its thickening, bit its division, its tenuous dispersal (…) there is a convergence of tiny and the esculent”68.

The fragmentation of the parts it may be called “fractal69” referring to arrangement of

68 Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs, tran. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) p.20.

69 A fractal is a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating

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Clusters in the Air and many others Matabolist’s organic projects.

In conclusion is confirmed that Isozaki mentioned Japanese traditions as principles rather that formal plasticity. While, as we shall see in the course of the argument, Isozaki refers expressly to other cultures (Russian Avant-Garde and Western) in a merely formal order. Regarding Japanese culture, he evokes a more spiritual doctrine than formal.

2.2. First connection between Russian Avant-Garde art and Japanese culture

Japanese art was gradually transformed in the Meiji period of the late 19th century and early 20th century after the Meiji (1868-1912) restoration which heralded Japan's entry onto the global stage.

The J. Rimer70’s book “A hidden fire, Russian and Japanese cultural encounters” explain how

pattern that displays at every scale. It is also known as expanding symmetry or evolving symmetry. 70 J. Thomas Rimer (1933) is an American schol-ar of Japanese literature and drama. Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature, theatre, and art at the University of Pittsburgh. Rimer has written about Classical Japanese literature, as well as modern Japanese drama, and has translated several works. He has written sever-al works for a popular audience, and has been

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the discussion of the Russian icon painter Yamashita Rin71 (the war prints of the Russo-Japanese conflict) and the work and theories of Bubnova72 introduce the varied ways in which Russia affected Japan during these historically important years.

From the mid-nineteenth century, Japan was aggressively entering the modern industrialized world and striving to become equal of the economic and military power of the West. During these years Japanese engaged in a great deal of experimentation and reaching out to new ideas. New kinds of art were being attempted, and art was being put to uses features of traditional Japan and West.73

Perceptions of Japan as a closed and traditional society changed in the aftermath of the Meiji restoration. There was a rush to modernize and industrialize Japanese society. Some artists were beginning to recognize the hegemony of industrial society and its

credited with making Japanese drama more acces-sible to Americans. 71 Yamashita Rin (1857-1939) was a painter of icons for the Japanese Orthodox Church. Studied in Russia, and her work can be found in over forty churches across Japan. 72 Varvara Bubnova (17 May 1886 – 28 March 1983) was a Russian painter, graphic artist (master of lithography) and pedagogue. 73 James Rimer, Hidden fire, Russian and Japanese Cultural Encounters, (Standford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

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profound implications for art and culture. It spawned a counter culture in Japan with a tendency to rebellion by those who saw in modernism progressive opportunity but also its tendency for alienation. However it was Russian artist David Burliuk74 who translated to Japanese audiences developments in Russian art. On October 14th he organized an exhibition in Tokyo entitled “The first Exhibition of Russian Paintings in Japan”. Burliuk was Father of Russian Futurism and he was a keen student of Japanese culture and much like his idol Gauguin he immersed himself in Japanese culture and art.

As well as the Russian futurist David Burliuk and Victor Palmov75, the development of a modern art movement in Japan during the 1920s owed much the presence of Vasvara Dmitrievna Bubnova. She was a contributing member, and other talented artists living in the capital,

74 David Davidovich Burliuk (1882– 1967) was a Russian and Ukrainian Futurist, Neo-Primitivist, book illustrator, publicist, and author associated with Russian Futurism. Burliuk is often described as "the father of Russian Futurism". Traveled through United States, Siberia and Japan.

75 Victor Palmov (1888–1929) was a Russian-Ukrainian painter and Avant-Garde artist (Futuristand Neo-Primitivist) from the David Burliuk circle. In 1920–1921, together with Da-vid Burliuk, he travelled to Japan.

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such as Mikhail Matiushin76, Olga Rozanova77, and Pavel Filonov78, joined, as did major Moscow futurism painters, including Kasimir Malevich79 and Vladimir Tatlin80. Some of the

76 Michael Vasilyevich Matyushin (1934 in Leningrad) was a Russian painter and composer, leading member of the Russian Avant-Garde. Matyushin's view of art and society and the two became a seed for the Russian Cubo-Futurism movement evolving parallel to Italian Futurism. Produced the experimental theatre show Victory Over The Sun, an opera by Velimir Khlebnikov, and Kazimir Malevich (stage design). 77 Olga Vladimirovna (1886– 1918,Moscow) was a Russian Avant-Garde artist in the styles of Suprematism, Neo-Primitivism, and Cubo-Futurism. In 1912 Rozanova started a friendship with the Futurist poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh. In 1916 joined the group of Russian avant-garde artists Supremus that was led by Kazimir Malevich. 78 Pavel Nikolayevich Filonov (1883–1941) was a Russian Avant-Garde painter, art theorist, and poet. During the years 1913 to 1915, Filonov was close to Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, and other Futurists. 79 Kazimir Malevich (1878_1935). Painter and theoretician, studied in Moscow, was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of Avant-Garde Suprematism movement. 80 Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) Soviet avant-garde painter and architect. He studied in icon art in Moscow. Although colleagues at the beginning of their careers, Tatlin and Malevich quarrelled fiercely and publicly at the time of the “0.10” Exhibition in 1915 (long before the birth of Constructivism), also called "the last Futurist exhibition".

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earliest translations of Aleksei Gan’s81 Kostructivism and other Avant-Garde writings were translate into Japanese. Two major Japanese architects, Imai Kenji82 and Murano Togo83, met with Russian avant-gardists like Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksei Gan in the late 1920s. Murano Togo was also impressed by Iakov Chernikhov84’s publications during his stay in Leningrad.

The events of the Revolution compelled Bubnova to return to the front line of the art world: she took part in the famous debate on construction and composition in the INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow between January and April 1921. She attended meeting as a member of the Institute of First

81 Aleksei Gan (c.1895– 1940) was a key figure in the development of Constructivism after the Russian Revolution. In 1921, Gan was one of the seven artists, including Alexander Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova, who announced themselves as the first Working Group of Constructivists. 82 Kenji Imai (1895- 1987 Tokyo) was a Japanese architect, travelled to USSR, Scandinavia, Italy and Spain in 1926. 83 Togo Murano(1891– 1984) was a Japanese architect he was recognised as a master of the modern interpretation of the sukiya style (Katsura Imperial Villa, Kyoto is an example, see note 99). 84 Yakov Georgievich Chernikhov (1889 Ukraine–195 Moscow) was a constructivist architect and graphic designer. His books on architectural design published in Leningrad between 1927 and 1933 are amongst the most innovatory texts (and illustrations) of their time.

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Public Collections held in the Monumental Art Section at INKhUK headed by Kandisky. During these meetings she made friends with such important artists as Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Liubov Popova.

Another personality which collaborate to spread Avant-Garde ideas in Japan was the Japanese artist, playwright, novelist and drama producer Tomoyoshi Murayama (1901 –1977)

Initially drawn to the genre of Constructivism as typified by the work of Wassily Kandinsky, he later became dissatisfied with the detachment of Constructivism from reality and developed his own style by using a collage of real objects to provoke concrete associations.

In 1925 he founded the magazine "Architecture International", whose title is borrowed from an essay of the same name by Walter Gropius. Meanwhile been published some studies devoted to the problem of the relationship between art and machine.

In 1926 he published the Studies “Constructivists”, which spreads awareness of the Avant-Garde movements, from Futurism to Expressionism, from Cubism to Russian Constructivism.

“During the decay 1960-1970 in Japan the left side ideology become popular among students and many were reading about Marx, Lenin and

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Trotsky as well”85. Arata Isozaki visited Moscow in 1990 and he been to Konstantin Melnikov86’s House located in Staraya Arbat. He visited it with Victor Melnikov and Kisho Kurokowa as well.87

Figure 2.40. Melnikov’house 1927-1929.

85 Interview Hajime Yatsuka, Tokyo 22 July, Shinjuku, Tokyo. 86 Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov (1890–1974) was a Russian architect and painter. His architectural work, compressed into a single decade (1923–1933), placed Melnikov on the front end of 1920s Avant-Garde architecture. Although frequently associated with the Constructivists, Melnikov was an independent artist far from Constructist’s ideas. 87 See note 19.

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Figure 2.41. Arata Isozak’s sketches of Melnikov House during is visit in Moscow.

2.2.1. Arata Isozaki’s approach with Russian Formalism.

“The first approach of Arata Isozaki with Russian Formalism88 was his meeting in New

88 Russian Formalism originated in 1915-16; it had its apogee in the early twenties and was suppressed about 1930. Both the American and Russian critical movements are contemporaneous with a great modernistic literature. The Formalists found themselves to be contemporaries of Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, revolutionaries both in art and in politics, whereas the most influential literary contemporaries of the American New Critics were T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. “We, the Futurist poets”, declare the manifesto called Word as Such88, “thought more about the Word than about the Psyche, mercilessly abused by our predecessors. Let us rather live by the word as

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York with Eisenmann when, during his occasion, the American architect presented him the book of Formalism “Prison of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism” by Frederic Jamenson”89.

Isozaki affirmed “The philosophy formulated firmly modernist architecture fused function and form, supporting a kind of utopian progress, and led to the so-called International Style, which was supposed to be universal. I felt that this should have been and that the reconstruction would have to start from where the architectural discourse was reduced to zero. My doctrine of "Manner", influenced by Russian formalism, was an attempt to put the automatic movement of

such than by our own experiences”. This aggressive anti-psychologism may strike one as inconsistent with the position taken by leader of Western European Futurism, F.T. Marinetti. In his famous Technical Manifesto of Futurism Literature, Marinetti insisted that the principal aim of the new poetry was to express the modern sensibility in the language of the mechanical age.

“What really matters is form: If there is a new form, there must also exist new content. It is form that determinate content”. Primacy of form over content, this was the battle cry of early Russian Futurism.

89 Interview Hajime Yatsuka, Tokyo 22 July, Shinjuku, Tokyo.

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forms at the centre of the architectural approach”.

His idea of "Manner" (meaning its design steps issued in essay “Mannerism”, 1979) was affected by the Russian formalism and the discovery of language that leads him often cite Noam Chomsky90, from whom he takes the views on the signs division in pragmatic, semantic and syntactic. 91

Figure 2.42. Isozaki: the Seven Operation of Manner. 1) Amplification, 2) packaging, 3) severing, 4)

90 Avram Noam Chomsky(1928) is a American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics," Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. 91 Arata Isozaki, Quattro Decenni di Architettura, trad. L. Zarri( New York: Rizzoli, 2005)p. 66.

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transferral, 5) projection, 6) fuseki (or chess-man), 7) response.

1) Amplification. Isozaki hypothesized an infinite grid in three dimensions, according to the formula 1:1:1. The grid was thus capable of ensuring production of perfectly ”neutral" and lucid spaces, which engendered a sensation of suspension or weightlessness. 2) Packaging was, by contrast, conceived of as an outright rejection of the Modern Movement’s insistence on spatial homogeneity (i.e., the ideal of continuity between a building's interior and exterior). 3) Severing, Isozaki discovered, was a technique that operated in terms of both time and space. Spatially, severing implied a break in development and extension of any of the various material infrastructures which are a part of modern buildings. Thus, various ducts and beams, which would normally remain hidden, are thrust into visibility, although the process can be either real or symbolic, as in the Gita Prefectural Library. 4) Transferral relates to the selection process which human beings anywhere in the modern world must exercise with respect to image transmission. Electronically transmitted pictures, for example, are characterized by extreme diffusion of meaning in accordance with the famous phrase “the medium is the message.” Through so-called transferral, the image in question can either be made to fit into your hand or blown up to the scale of an entire building. 5) Projection entails the production of virtual images, usually (though not always) in an ordered series. A warping or unbalancing effect takes over,

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as in an exploded diagram; thus the whole need no longer take precedence over the parts in the controlled, Renaissance fashion. 6) The word fuseki came from an old text on gardening and involves the concept of “interval" (ma). The latter term will shortly become for Isozaki a kind of shorthand notation for an entire constellation of themes related to so-called Japanese space/ time. Fuseki originally referred to placement of stepping-stones in a Japanese garden, though its present day use is restricted to deployment of pieces in the game of go. 7) The seventh and final aspect of “manner” Isozaki chose to call response, and here he refers once again to information transmission processes.

So Isozaki articulates the idea of use the pure geometric shape of cube. According to the grammar of Chomsky the main structure, the text, is produced by the transformation of the deep structure of grammar through manipulations produced by subtraction, omission, etc.

Rhetorical manipulations such as suppression, the juxtaposition, the deviation can also be found in works such as the Fukuoka branch of the bank in Saga, in the Museum of Art Kitakyushu, 1974, in the project for the Tokyo City Hall in 1985, the new library Departmental Oita and museum in Gunma.

Evoking Roland Barthes: “Does there exist any system of objects of any dimension that can

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do without articulated language? Is not the word the fatal rely of any signifying order?”92.

2.2.2. Russian Avant-Garde concepts and techniques affected Isozaki’s architectural design

The term of “Russian Avant-Garde” was assigned to radical innovative movements that started in the prewar years of 1907–1914 and it came from the foreground of the Russian revolution and matured during the first post-revolutionary decade.

During this period between the Revolution and 1932 Avant-garde ideas clashed with the newly emerged state-sponsored direction of the Socialism Realism moment in arts.

As I have already mentioned, reporting words from Professor Hajime Yatsuka, in Japan in 1960, thirty years later the end of Avant-Garde, left side ideology become popular among young students and many were reading Russian writers such as L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky and A. P. Chekhov. At that time Japan was still trying to overcome the psychological and human disaster of the atomic bomb. Many architects were enclosed in a possible urban planning of reconstruction, first Kenzo Tange.

92 Roland Bartes, Système de la mode (Paris, 1967), p. 9.

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The members of the movement Metabolist had embarked on a highly optimistic ideology parallel to other utopian movements, such as for instance the British movement Archigram93.

At that time Arata Isozaki was in a moment of pessimism toward the modern movement and deep criticism of the utopian optimism of architect group Metabolist.

In an article issued on Global Architecture Document 77, published in 2004 Isozaki declared his interest during 70’s on Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin’s creative methods.

The exhibition “Electric Labyrinth” for the 14th Triennale di Milano, 1968, Isozaki showed a ruined megastructure introduced into the

93 Archigram was an Avant-Garde architectural group formed in the 1960s, based at the Architectural Association, London that was Neofuturistic, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist, drawing inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality that was solely expressed through hypothetical projects. The main member of the group was Peter Cook. The pamphlet Archigram was printed in 1961 to proclaim their ideas. Committed to a 'high tech', ‘light weight’, infra-structural approach that was focused towards survival technology, the group experimented with modular technology, mobility through the environment, space capsules and mass-consumer imagery. The works of Archigram had a Neofuturistic slant being influenced by Antonio Sant' Elia's works. Buckminster Fuller and Yona Friedman were also important sources of inspiration.

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devastated landscape of Hiroshima, is the earliest example; later on the exhibition “Incubation Process” in 90s, presenting the project “City in the Air”, 1960-62. In those two landscapes reduced in rubbles Isozaki intended to depict the zero point, the “tabula rasa94” as he asserted “I had two

94 Japan 1944-1945. By the end of the war, the tabula rasa Japan experienced in Manchuria 12 years earlier arrives, shockingly, in its own cities: US firebombing destroyed 50 percent of Tokyo, 60-80 percent of 17 other cities, and 99 percent of Toyama. Then, on August 6, 1945, the United States drops the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; Nagasaki is destroyed three days later. In the immediate aftermath, future Metabolist Kenji Ekuan and Atsushi Shimokobe (working for the Tokyo police) visit Hiroshima’s ruins; Tange, together with Sachio Otani and Takashi Asada visit the following years. Tange Lab, an experimental architecture studio forming at Tokyo University, starts producing new masterplans for ground zero in Hiroshima and destroyed districts of Tokyo, but discovers that erasure of the erasure of the urban fabric does not necessarily produce a tabula rasa where anything is possible: there is a bizarre mixture of flatted city and an intact land ownership system that makes radical planning still difficult. Modernist repertoires of urban planning cannot apply; new ideas will be required. The Japanese trauma associated with land- saturated on its own mountainous archipelago, then liberated in foreign territories, now scorched at home- forms a critical backdrop for growth of a new generation of architects that will become the Metabolists..

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ideas at the moment: to start from zero and Malevich.”95

Referring to Malevich’s work he declared:” The first time I confronted zero degree of architecture was 1970, around the time the Cultural Revolution failed. I myself first thought of the idea of reduction to zero degree in the early 1970s. I began to feel that there must be some inherent law that generated form from within. The automatic generation of form and the design process thus overlapped, as I described in “About My Method” (1972)”. And he continued:” I wrote that the first things to emerge from a zero degree condition were “the circle and the square”. These I translated into three dimensions, into square frames and spheres for example. I developed them into works such as the “Gunma Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts” (1972) and the semicircular vault of “Kitakyushu Central Library” (1974).96

Melevich’s “Black Square on White97” is believed to be a substitute for a Russian icon. It all began with an exhibition held

95 28.06.2005 “Starting from the destruction”, Russian newspaper. 96 Arata Isozaki, Global Achitecture 77, (Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita,2004) p.58-59. 97 Malevich’s “Black Square” was like a slogan signifying the final point and death of traditional figurative art and beginning of new abstract art. The initial point of a new world based on the laws of language of simplest elements and spatial relation.

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in 1915 in Petrograd entitled “0.10” (Zero Point Ten). “Black Square on White” appears in an upper position in a corner of his room, where various compositions are displayed. This was traditionally the position an icon would occupy in a room in Russia. The idea that this was meant as a substitute for an icon is corroborated by the fact that the photograph of Malevich’s deathbed shows the same painting hung above his head. The painting also appears on his grave. Before his death Malevich told: “ Finally I’ll see the wonderful world of Suprematism”. Malevich made traditional faces and human figures more and more abstract until in the end he reduced everything to a black square. This painting was his starting point; one might say it was the beginning of what is known as Suprematism. “Zero Point Ten” meant the show was an exhibition of zero degree by ten artists. Various episodes have been related concerning the “0.10” exhibition. There was a long standing rivalry between Malevich and Tatlin. During preparation, a curtain was hung so the two men would not have to speak to each other. Tatlin created a works called the “Corner Relief” an early example of what today would be called the spatial Vladimir’s collages. Malevich on the other hand created a two-dimensional work of zero degree. Subsequently, Tatlin stressed production through material technology,

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quasi- natural laws of plastics; his work eventually prepared grounds for Constructivists aesthetic connected to functional attitude to a form creation and search for expressive and mighty (powerful) constructions. On the contrary, Malevich reduced everything to zero level. From there, he took to explore what might be described as the artificial, quasi- mechanical generation of form according to the new laws of art and his own artificial language of forms. The two artists who were in the same place at the same time subsequently took very different paths in art.

Figure 2.43. Black square, Malevich 1915.

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Figure 2.44. Setting of black square in the corner of is studio instead of the traditional Russian icon to symbolize a new starting. Just a black point for the new beginning.

The new forms generated from rabbles ground in Isozaki’s exhibitions, “Electric Labyrinth” and later “Incubation Process”, where pure interpretation on the expressing his forms as Malevich expressing his idea of basic forms. Isozaki himself affirmed:” Malevich undertook studies of how a basic form called “Arkitekton” facilitates the development of design. It seemed to me that the attempt I made to reveal the generative process of form in “About My Method” had already been tried. My work was like a follow-up experiment but the forms produced were entirely different from those of Malevich.”98

98 Nota1,p. 65.

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Within the project “Clusters in the Air” (1962) Isozaki starts from “tabula rasa” bold earth surface from a ruined landscape and grows as a tree to create a new city layer using the simplest initial shapes and entire project is treated as symbols of human activity.

Figure 2.45. Arata Isozaki’s Hiroshima collage, “Electric Labirinth”,1968.

Figure 2.46. “Incubation process” performance, 1990 (concept from 1962).

The metaphor of ‘ruins’ used to describe the zero point, the “tabula rasa” is very frequent in Isozaki’s concepts. It’s a suggestive of a feeling of instability and the untrustworthiness of the material world. As we can see on the walls of the Giant Hall

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of the Palazzo Tè brutish giants overbalance and fall amid the crashing stones. Lest the psychological import of the scene escape us, Giulio Romano dropped every third triglyph around the courtyard to reinforce the atmosphere of impending disaster and ruins. We can think about two things implied by the ‘ruins’ metaphor. Firstly, it is connected with a state of anxiety and uncertainty, and secondly it symbolizes the loss of wholeness, integration and balance.

The split travertine facing of the Shukuoka building is used in much the same fashion as Giulio Romano’s dropped triglyph to express the theme of decay and disintegration.

Recalling Filippo T. E. Marinetti, Italian poet and founder of the Futurist movement, Isozaki say:” Ruins are the state of our city, and the future city will itself became a ruin one day”. That means a city in a constant process of interchange a constant rebirth, regeneration of the structure.

For Malevich and Tatlin, it’s very characteristic to interpret form destruction as momentary act, explosion as destruction of the world basics. Arata Isozaki, on the other hand, treats such as destruction as a process lasted long time, and an architect interfere into this process in the middle and he had to make a next step in this situation of interchange.

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Figure 2.47. Giulio Romano: Palazzo del tè detail.1524-34.

Figure 4.48. Skukosha Building, Fukuoka, 1974-5. In much the same way as Giulio Romano’s dropped triglyph the supported sloping travertine facing is used by Isozaki to express decay and disintegration.

In Russia during first half of XX century a theatrical Futurist performance premiered took place at the Luna Park of Saint Petersburg,.as a symbol of the new artistic and intellectual era. It was the "Victory of the Sun" (1913) with a prologue added by

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Velimir Khlebnikov99, and the stage was designed by Kasimir Malevich. The performance has become famous as the event where Malevich made his first "Black Square" painting (in 1915) and it was intended to underline the end of the old Russian artistic era to welcoming a new starting point and the “New Sun” (new vision of the reality. This event can be compared to Isozaki’s performance "Incubation Process", both praise the end of the previous era to impose themselves with new basic forms at the beginning of a new “day”.

Isozaki explained:” I created a simulation model. There, the architect only needed to provide tools. He did not need to make drawings. Computers were still not very advanced at the time, so I used nails, wires and an aerial photograph. Observers were asked to drive nails wherever they liked into the photograph and other people were then asked to connect those nails with wires as they saw fit. This model was intended to show that countless individuals, strangers to each other, acting according to their own separate logic, try to establish interrelationships in a place and end up creating something. I felt

99 Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov (1885– 1922), was a poet and playwright, a central part of the Russian Futurist movement.

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that this was similar to the way the city in reality was created”.100

Figure 2.49. «Victory of the sun» opera, Luna Park, Saint Petersburg 1913.

In both performance Isozaki and Malevich tried to presented the concept of New. For Malevich the world should be presented anew, in a different manner where clear elements are reduced to absolute geometrical configuration or material without any indication on previous culture. Sunlight create so a tissue of opera discussion.

Isozaki otherwise wanted to create and add some unified structure, a new layer floating on “tabula rasa101”.

100 Arata Isozaki, Global Achitecture 77, (Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita,2004) p.64-65. 101 “Tabula rasa” as not finished process of decay, disintegration with some ruins including parts of the previous forms.

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Figure 2.50 “Arkitekton”, Malevich, 1926 . “Arkitekton”: “Monolithic view of materialized idea. The principle of variable organic growth, development through split-multiplication repetition.”

Lazar Kiedekel, 1927.

Isozaki directly quotes the Malevich ‘s artistic work in designing New Museum of St. Petersburg Marijiski in 2003. “In the competition for Mariinky Theater, I took a position close to that of, not Tatlin, but Malevich. That is because I know from my own work that reduction to zero always ends up propagating various icons. Malevich helps us understand that truth. The Suprematist idea of the generation of form. Once form is recognized as an icon, then that ties in with

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historical conditions; form begins a process of automatic generation.”102

The manner used by Isozaki for the New Marijinski Theatre in Saint Peterburg to animate the Malevich composition, to present it in the moment of explosion, were those following:

Figure 2.51.

1.Explode the elements from Malevich’s composition to have got them as the separated entities with specific characters,

Figure 2.52.

2.Assembling the elements in a compact initial composition,

102 See note 4, p. 58-59.

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Figure 2.53.

3.The elements start moving according to the movable Suprematism trajectories.

Figure 2.54.

4.Alternating variants of composition,

Figure 2.55.

5.Stress the elements setting closer and bringing away,

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Figure 2.56.

6.Development of inner spaces (spaces between the plates),

Figure 2.57.

7.Adding few three-dimensional elements,

Figure 2.58.

8.Materialization of form and introductions of tectonics.

Confirmation of the new Malevich’s state of composition as icon.

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If the formative process starts with Malevich’s painting as a reference source, the concept of designing an Avant-Garde style building (Theatre Marijinski II) standing close to classical style building ( Theatre Marijinski I) come from Japanese ideas of ritual re-building shrines every few years. The most striking example is sacred Ise Grand Temple. This sacred building is composed by two alike structures standing on next to the other. One of them is dismantled and re- built on an adjacent site every 20 years, so that the buildings will be forever new and forever ancient and original and follow the vital cycle.

The method of juxtapose the New and the Old Marijinsky Theatre is the same approach of the traditional cyclical conception of vital buildings in Japan. “The building is not static but changes constantly”, as stated A. Isozaki.

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Figure 2.59. Scheme underlining the Old and the New site of Ise Grand Shrine, Mie Prefecture.

Figure 2.60. Arata Isozaki’s project for New Marijinsky Theatre, 2002.

Isozaki’s referring to Malevich is visible also in other project like primary sketches

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for Beijing building and plans of Shanghai Pudong Villa. In the first project Isozaki retraced the automatic generation process of the basic form “Arkhitekton" to focus entirely on a condensing format. Shifting the planes, surfaces and fixed for a moment in which they could arrange, aggregate another compositions. It’s also visible a referring to De Stijl style used only primary color slong with black and white.

Basic patterns of circle/cross/square referred to Malevich’s works are applied to the Villa Pudong.

Figure 2.61. Beijing building, 2003.

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Figure 2.62. Shanghai Pudong Villa, 2004.

Isozaki cites in his influences also Vladimir Tatlin103’s “Controrelief”, underlining the substantial different which distinguished him (supporter of Constructivism and tree-dimensional objects) from Kazimir Malevich (founder of Suprematism movement which favored two-dimensional art). Isozaki asserted “Constructivism emerges through Tatlin. Through Constructivism, Stalinism comes into being, culminating in the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. That process is repeated in history and my project “Cafa Moca” is an example”.104 Isozaki asserted: “Tatlin, whose compositions suggested floating fragments of industrial products, has taken another direction: the integration of architecture with real life and technology, which was to become the basis of Russian Constructivism”105. He also reported the imagine of the Flying Machine in his

104 See note 5. 105 Arata Isozaki, Arata Isozaki (New York, Phaidon Press, 2009)p. 228.

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references which is the synthesis of Tantlin’s work: plastic deformations of the material elements, incorporation of a man into animal machine skeleton, an aggregation of bones, stressed skin a masculine effort of a quasi-animal machine.

Figure 2.63. “Controrelief”, Tatlin, 1923. Tatlin’s concept of «explosion» and «floating fragments».

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Figure 2.64.Isozaki‘s project Moca Cafa, Beijing, 2003.

In Mosca Cafa project Isozaki applies the Tatlin’s exploding and compenetration of object seen in "Controrelief". The energy of shift was used by Isozaki to create a place that is far from conventional white cube serving modern art. The entire volume is not intended as massive body but as infra-space across several juxtaposed curved surfaces. A metallic framework at roof level sews together the edges of the facade whose individual parts seem to all be placed in tension. The entire material is stressed in a twisting motion that breaks the whole creating a final object in a state of pure static tension. While Tatlin can be simplified as a craftsman who worked with natural materials putting them in stress, Isozaki kept from him some figurative

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imagines of twisted surface connected by cable in tension but ignoring the nature of the components which was a fundamental step for Tatlin.

“Floating Worlds and Future Cities” is a utopian project which will be inspiration guideline for many future architects, included Isozaki. Different historical time but similar cultural context prompt Khidekel106 and Isozaki on the same will to evolve vertically above the old city.

But while Khidekel has always represented the horizontal structure of skyscraper raise on a first layer of wild nature layer (first modern ecological manifesto), Isozaki never mentioned a virgin earth ground but rather a second city layer.

106 Lazar Khidekel (1904-1986) studied under Marc Chagall, Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky at Vitbesk School of Art and later moved in Moscow. His personality was fundamental to introduce the architectural view in the Suprematism’s ideas.

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Figure 2.65. «Future city», Lazar Kiedekel, 1927.

"With the elongated appearance of each monochromatic volume a new form of revolution was achieved. Khidekel architectural visions transcended the rhetorical games of the revolution by developing complete cities out of sublime architecture. Long before Friedman’s Architecture Mobile, Constant’s New Babylon, and Isozaki’s Clusters in the Air, Khidekel imagined a world of horizontal skyscrapers that through their Suprematist weightless

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dynamism seemed to float ad infinitum across the surface of earth."107

The Isozaki sketches that represent the project of El Lissitzky108, Horizontal Skyscraper, representing the vertical supporting parts in white, almost to disappear, and he titled them "Cloud Props". The intent of Isozaki is to get inspired by the El Lissitzky’ theme Horizontal Skyscraper, for what concern the concept of "rising". But the Russian architect was referring to the following topics:

1. Create a system of high-rise buildings in downtown Moscow that worked together and not individually;

2. To grow horizontally as it is this to which man is accustomed, rather than vertically.

Levitation is a concept that appears frequently in Isozaki’s projects of 60’s. One that best relates to the theme is "Clusters in the air". But the difference with El Lissitzy ‘s Horizontal Skyscraper is

107 Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski, Pure hardcore icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture (London: Artifice,2013) p.35. 108 El Lissitzky (1890-1941) was a Russian artist, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian Avant-Garde, helping develop Suprematism with his mentor, Kazmir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union.

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the desire of Isozaki to represent a modular skyscrapers intersect each other, creating a single system, expectation that El Lissitzy had predicted only on a semantic level.

Figure 2.66. Horizontal Skyscraper for Moscow, El Lissitzky109, 1924 and Arata Isozaki’s sketch (Cloud Props).

In summary is confirmed a thought that Arata Isozaki has got the most close resembles to Russian Avant-Garde within the utopian outlook on the world. The first step of Russian Avant-Garde is to destroy the "old world" (Pre-Revolutionary Russian social organization) and to form a “new world” based on the new principles of life and new architectural language. This situation of destruction is similar to a certain extent to Japanese situation the Second World War. The idea of "zero degree", artistically

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materialized by Malevich, but felt ideologically by many Avant-Garde artists, is borrowed from Isozaki as a "starting point" for the “new future”. In the reconstruction of the new world, it does not refer to the new modern culture, but rather to the cultural traditions. So there appearing forms belonging to abstract world. Artists created a new language of art and grammar (Russian Futurism) of artistic and architectural forms. Both Avant-Garde and Isozaki draw their architectural vocabularies from the traditional languages. In Russia the Avant-Gardists were referring to a traditional symbols find in Russian villages such as so called, "izba" (a traditional Russian wooden country house). Isozaki deals with ancestral Japanese principles embodied in the Imperial Villa Katzura. Both also cite fervently the traditional forms of universal heritage (pure geometrical Platonic shapes).

2.3. Western classical architecture: Palladio, Ledoux, Boullée and the influences on A. Isozaki’s architectural methodology

Isozaki has practiced till 80’s an architectural purism based on fundamental geometrical forms such as the cube and cylinder, not unlike in many respects the anti-Baroque principles of Claude-Nicholas Ledoux (1736-1806).

The relationship between Isozaki and the French revolutionary architects of the late

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eighteenth century arises partly because both represent attempts to develop new principles in opposition to the dominant style of the preceding period Mannerism as an anti-Renaissance trend, Neo-Classicism as an anti-Baroque110 and so Isozaki’s Individualism as anti-Modern.

Admittedly, this over simplifies the issues, nevertheless it is equally true that contemporary architecture has aligned itself, with periods of transition in which there is a struggle to break free of a preceding and fundamentally classical phase of development.

The Nakayama Residence and Clinic, Gita, 1964 illustrates the close similarity between Isozaki’s manner and the anti-Baroque architecture of the French Revolution. A leading principle of that architectural revolution was the method of repetition of inorganic composition-additive form. The

110 Instead of complex geometry of Baroque, elementary geometrical solids such as the cube, the cylinder, the pyramid, and even, the sphere, were introduced to develop new organizations. The independence of the constituent elements is expressed by their simple repetition, or by dramatic antithesis, a kind of composition ad infinitum. In contrast to the Baroque, the revolutionary composition of the eighteenth century had as its aim the concept of the independence of the individual elements.

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elemental cube may be repeated at the same size, or alternately in a different size.

Figure 2.67. Image from A+U Architecture and Urbanism, Architecture of Ambivalence 1972. Isozaki explain the design process for Gunma Museum of Modern Art.

The connection between the Nakayama Residence and the anti-Baroque compositional modes of architecture can be demonstrated by comparing its composition by Ledoux, the House of Four Families.

Figure 2.68. Ledoux, House of Four Families.

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Figure 2.69. Isozaki, Nakayama Residence, Oita 1964.

Ledoux’s designs consist in:

1. Employ the motif of a cube and set four of them on a base of square.

2. Set on each corner four smaller cubes or belvederes.

3. Repeat the motif four times.

4. Leaving a cruciform void between the belvederes.

Thus, the theme of reverberating cubes is generated in the third dimension (z axes).

The motif of a cube surmounted on each corner by four smaller cubes or belvederes was taken up by Isozaki in the Nakayama Residence.

1. Set four cubes of 36 m cubes, surmounted by four additional 18 m cubes.

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2. Between large cubes leave a cruciform void (on which took place the small cubes mounted over the crossing in the same pattern as the large cubes).

3. Hence the small cubes, which in Ledoux’s scheme are belvederes, become skylights.

4. Raise the structure on concrete columns to have an open ground floor for the Clinic.

Inside the Residence the space is structured round a central living room subdivided by a centrifugal arrangement of free-standing furniture elements to allow the interior to be changed.

Figure 2.70. Scheme showing the employing of cube module of Ledoux to design Nakayama Residence.

If Claude-Nicolas Ledoux is the chief inspiration for additive cubic form, then Étienne-Louis Boullée supplies the leading historical antecedent for Isozaki’s elaboration of continuous cylindrical form.

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For in analysing the historical sources of each mode it is apparent that a single design by Boullée, the Library Hall, was decisive. The principal compositional element of the design is a large barrel vault. A tremendous tension develops from the contrasting arrangement of such units as colonnades and the book stacks, and the barrel vault.

Figure 2.71. Boullèe, Royal Library.

The design was an important influence on Isozaki’s adumbration of the barrel vault in such work as the Kitakyushu Library.

The primitive hut archetype is a recurring idea in Isozaki’s work.

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Figure 2.72. Yano House, Kawasaki 1975. Schematic diagram: the house is composed of two opposed semi-cylinders one within the other.

In Isozaki’s Yano House project the elevation of the lower vertical cylindrical wall evokes the facial features of a clay “haniwa”111. Saddle-shaped roof were typical of the “haniwa” dwellings for nobles and Kenzo Tange elected to commemorate this house type in the hyperbolic paraboloid shaped arch of the Hiroshima-Peace Memorial.

111 The Haniwa (埴輪) are terracotta clay figures which were made for ritual use and buried with the dead as funerary objects during the Kofun period (3rd to 6th centuries AD) of the history of Japan. Haniwa were created according to the “wazumi” technique, in which mounds of coiled clay were built up to shape the figure, layer by layer.

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Figure 2.73. Traditional Japanese haniwa dwellings.

Figure 2.74. Kenzo Tange’s Hiroshima Peace Monument, 1955.

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Figure 2.75. Fujimi Country Clubhouse, near Oita 1972-4.

The vault is doubled back on itself in a seemingly arbitrary fashion to increase the depth.

Of all Isozaki’s buildings, the Fujimi Country Clubhouse near Oita is the most Palladian. It comes closest to realizing the ideal Palladian villa. Isozaki’s recreation of the Platonic archetype is imbued with sophistication and witty allusion, but a detailed comparison instantly reveals the historical references to Palladio’s Villa Poiana Maggiore and Malcontenta to be more implicit than real. Isozaki is more concerned to draw attention to such relations than he is to studiously repeat the specific Palladian motifs. The two end sections of the severed barrel vault preserve the traditional wall treatment of solid pierced by vertical openings with a central emphasis and balanced subsidiary accents on either side, but the

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specific patterns of these important elevations can only be seen to resemble the Palladian original in a general way.

Figure 2.76. Palladio, Villa Poiana Maggiore.

Figure 2.77. Scheme of comparison between Villa Poiana’s rhythm of windows and the two façade of Fujimi Country Clubhouse.

Nevertheless, in a subtle way Isozaki manages to recall the essence of the ideal Palladian villa. The barrel vault roof of the Clubhouse is a joke on the golf club metaphor is raised above and suspended over the main lounge and dining hall on the second floor which is placed on an elevated base that isolates it from the landscape. The isolation of the building from its setting is increased by the

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white stucco walls and the fluid whale-like humped shape of the barrel vault. Isozaki chose to express the Western origin of golf, and such associations as leisure and rural gentility by giving it a Palladian form.

Figure 2.78. Scheme showing Arata Isozaki’s Tsukuba Center building, Ibaragi, Japan, 1979-83 and the gold section used for the proportions.

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Figure 2.79. Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Campidoglio Square, Rome, 1534-38.

For he project of Tsukuba Civic Centre, planned for completion in 1982, Isozaki enclosed an inverted Surrealistic version of Michelangelo’s Piazza of the Campidoglio on two sides by a concert hall, hotel and shops. The fenestration of the buildings is a mixture of Ledoux and Michael Graves. Thus, the porch adjoining the concert hall and the plaza entrance of the hotel are inspired by elevations from Ledoux’s Royal Saltworks at Arc et Senans. Ledoux’s bandaged column shafts are repeated in the entrances of the hotel and the gateway to the concert hall.

The Tsukuba Center is presented as a composition of elements mentioned by various sources that overlap in a fragmentary way. A very Japanese approach in interpreting aspects of the Western tradition, "eclecticism schizophrenic" is defined by Isozaki. The method in fact reminiscent of

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the traditional Japanese architecture and gardens projects employing principles of composition not compositional and not hierarchical. We find a mixture of present classical and modernist elements. The central square of Tsukuba Center does not reflect the principle on which it was based but its being is turned over and is "embedded" in the soil thus forming a void.

Isozaki explains that this solution to eliminate literally the square and then the center, was his reaction to being forced to confront the nation.

The impression of those who live in the place is the absence of a scenario dictated by the architect but the look passes hectic from one item to another without conceiving the hierarchy.

Mentioning Francesco Dal Co:” The outcome is a paradoxical assembling of ruins, so exceptionally accomplished as to appear ‘deep freeze’ presences, where the contraposition between the arbitrary formal choice, as opposed to the obsessive perfection of the fabric detailing, produces strident themes where it is impossible to not notice cacophonous notes, and an over predisposition for kitsch”.112

112 Arata Isozaki, Opere e Progetti,( Roma: Cdp

editrice, 1996) p. 75.

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As Francesco del Co states, there are many themes assembled together and Isozaki himself explained it as a combination of “sezione aurea” and “ying and yang”.”... I have refined my design approach in a tribute to the golden section, that is the Western method of establishing divisions, and the philosophy of yin and yang, the method Eastern correspondent. Given my experience of superimposing the West and Japan to create gaps in the interpretation and construction, I was able to design ambivalently, to produce something that was neither Eastern nor Western, but both together. (...) I used a central patio cashed and I placed the exhibition galleries in two adjacent wings, distributed according to section auras. This composition creates a vortex that stimulates a process flow like a path, important projects of Oriental Japanese gardens. This achieves spatial divisions both Eastern and Western.

Architectural shapes projected on the ground are based on Platonic solids, but at the same time allude to historical precedents such as the pyramids, the Palladium, the type of building and so on. (...). My goal was rather to dismantle architectural styles apparently integrated and separate them, so that, at the time when they were appeared in ruins, was

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created a schizophrenic state of suspension”.113

In the essay “La Pizza Italiana”, Sustainable Design, January 1965, Isozaki had already denied any contemporary meaning to the idea of community and excluding that the square can still have a meaning. He had the opportunity to express their theoretical hypotheses with the Festival Plaza Expo in Osaka. But after the disappointment suffered in Osaka, in the early Seventies he claims to want to "withdraw from the city" and that's the beginning of a negation of the public place that will take place ten years later with the design of a "non-square" (1979-1983 Tsukuba Centre Building, Ibaragi, Japan).

113 Arata Isozaki, Quattro Decenni di Architettura, trad. L. Zarri (New York: Rizzoli, 2005)p.24 .

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Figure 2.80. Scheme presenting the design method of Piazza del Campidoglio, a “positive” space, to a “non-square” of Tsukuba Center.

At the same way in 1988 Kenzo Tange conceived the New Town Hall in Tokyo. The architect, winner of the competition, revisits the tower of Notre Dame in Paris to evoke an urban symbolism but omits the “navata”, the central space reserved for the public; it is a result of a commercial building, no different from its neighbor.

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Figure 2.81. Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, Shinjuku, Tokyo, 1988-1991.

The Western architectural influence is the quote by Isozaki of Western architectural archetypes. References to "piazza italiana", the "volta" of Boullè and the cubic forms of Ledoux, are a clear intention of Isozaki to returne a didactic information to Japanese visitor. It may be deduce that Isozaki used an ambivalent attitude in the 80s. In Japanese territory he referred to a Western architecture, while in Europe and America and used Japanese archetypes (Olympic Games Main Sports Hall Sports Hall Sant Jordi, Barcelona, Spain and several private houses in California).

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CHAPTER 3.

THE ARATA ISOZAKI’S SPATIAL CONSTRUCTIONS AS A SYNTHESIS OF JAPANESE AND RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE IDEAS

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Arata Isozaki often refers to the work of the Russian architect Ivan Leonidov. Through images of his projects there are some, but rare quotes, evokes Leonidov’s architecture. Here I relate to two projects: Magnitagorsk (I. I. Leonidov), and Tokyo City Hall (Arata Isozaki) presenting more or less similar concepts in some extent and applications, but dissimilar and discordant at the same time.

3.1. I.I. Leonidov schematic deployment (Magnitagorsk project)

Figure 3.1. Leonidov’s Magnitogorsk project, 1928.

Leonidov stand out clearly in a design of some guidelines parallel along which, as a later stage, would be located the residential complexes, clubs and theatres, united by traffic highway, parks and landing points for airships.

In Leonidov’s creative process there is a phase of "Entering the field uniform" with

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the introduction of a geometric network and the overlap with a natural landscape.

In the example of settlement planning for Magnitogorsk Leonidov superimposes with an orthogonal grid the natural relief, leaving intact the sources and trees. In the beginning of design the whole area was simply lined in square cells. Then he displaced the square architectural volumes checkerboard, alternating green spaces. In this picture we can gradually replace some architectural forms with other (pyramids, cones, cones curved).

Simplifying design steps to Magnitogorsk:

Figure 3.2.

1. Appearance of sketches that have no defined shape, semi-geometries, with the addition of terms.

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Figure 3.3.

2. Introduction of the geometric grid su-perimposed on the natural landscape. The geometric network makes the idea of an imaginary grid of precise coordi-nates, which penetrates deep within a forest environment and lively mix of architectural composition.

Figure 3.4.

3. Localization of indefinite forms in cell grid. In the world of Leonidov this geometric network serves as a mounting table for the semi-geometric images. These will displace in the grid cells, "germinating" and saturated with meaning and individualize them.

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Figure 3.5.

4. Replacing indefinite forms with regular geometric figures getting from arche-typal images. The recreation of the historical forms. 114

The composition for Leonidov is not a dogma, but just a scheme. There could not be a lit-eral or final reference to the concrete land-scape as well as there could not be an ulti-mate form. The architect does not attempt to make a final, "frozen" form. The task of ar-chitect is to identify, outline the form. Ac-cording to Leonidov a task of architect is to make a "pure scheme which, activating and stimulating, is getting architecture growth". He made scheme of architecture deployment, predict and guide a development. It seems to be so whatever form will be, will be and the form is not paralyzed in its final borders.

114 Oleg I.Adamov, "L’immagine-la geometria-la forma architettonica: il processo creativo di I.I.Leonidov“, Una città Possibile Progetti di Leonidov 1926-1934, ed. O. Macel, M. Meriggi, D. Schmidt, Ju. Volcok (Milano: Mondadori Electa, 2007) P.80.

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It is self-sufficient and acquires a certain freedom and independence of its layers from the architect.

3.3 Arata Isozaki “incubator” architecture (Tokyo City Hall project)

Figure 3.6. Arata Isozaki’s Tokyo City Hall project of 80’s.

In project for Tokyo City Hall the grid is growing seizing a 3d form.

“The urban infrastructure, which had been a two-dimensional grid in the age of masonry construction, developed into a three-dimensional grid through the introduction of steel-frame and megastructural construction. The disorderly array of tall buildings we see today consists, deep down, of a similar grid. The metropolis generated homogeneous space in order to deal with greater numbers, and the three-dimensional grid was the basis of that space(…) Le Corbusier, who considered himself a Cartesian, was quick to anticipate the

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homogeneous character of the twentieth-century city.”115

In Arata Isozaki’s thought the machinery of the metropolitan government and its activities have by nature a grid structure rather that a tree-form. It possesses the fractal characteristics of a structured grid.

So his rigorous application of a universal Cartesian grid to all the surfaces, particularly the exterior, has the effect of increasing the abstraction of the forms and reducing their appearance of mass and solidity, the building no longer weighs down upon the ground and, instead, it appears levitating and getting lack of weight all together. The next step in the design process is in use of pure forms as a new a start from primordial forms.

Has Isozaki explain, in Western architecture history, pure geometric forms inevitably appear in times of revolutionary change, but they are usually considered anomalous and their radicalism dismissed. At the time of designing the Tokyo City Hall the architectural atmosphere in Japan was a way revolutionary, in search of a new guideline that may could reinterpret the tradition, such as in the evoke of Kenzo Tange, but rather overlooked at international current of modernism.

115 See note 3, p. 205.

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Simplifying design steps to Tokyo New City Hall:

Figure 3.7.

1. Lay down 2D grid which invests the sur-rounding landscape and create the “zero degree point”.

Figure 3.8.

2. Let the grid grow vertically in 3D to create the scheme into everything will be incorporated in a high medium rise.

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Figure 3.9.

3. Set pure Platonic forms which will in-clude the functions in their inner. Three forms rules (sphere, pyramid and cube).

Figure 3.10.

4. Rise some of them up, to create a se-cond layer ground which will be visible from distance the elements representing the Municipal Administration.

Not the final result, but the process of form generation is important for Isozaki. He affirmed “The idea of planning the whole has been abandoned; planning has been reduced to the control of the transportation system and zoning. There is no predicting what will happen where. The urban silhouette is created

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from a chain of indeterminate incidents (events)”.116

As for the Japanese architect the duration of process is essential as well as a memory of stages of form development. On every stage form opens in a new way, and on every stage architect is being in condition of "tremulous" anticipation, on the border of opening, of birth of new change of form.

Figure 3.11. Scheme represent fractal grid of Isoaki’s project New Tokyo City Hall.

In the Project for New Tokyo City Hall Isozaki interprets the fractal figures as an incubator for the generation on the new pure geometrical shapes. He didn’t propose a final composition but rather a scheme in which forms could be generated. Isozaki called it

116 Arata Isozaki, Arata Isozaki (New York, Phaidon Press, 2009)p. 202.

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“rhizome117” process where the parts continually undergo creation and extinction.

He used the fractal structure as a cage in which forms can be generated.

The principle of self-generation form can be compared with Imperial Katzura118 Villa.

At the beginning (16th century) the settlement of Katzura Imperial Villa was indeed composed by three houses and an arbor facing the pond but later (17th century) the plan grown

117 Rhizome is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972–1980) project. It is what Deleuze calls an "image of thought", based on the botanical rhizome, that apprehends multiplicities. 118 The Katzura Imperial Villa, an outstanding example of seventeenth-century Japanese architecture, has survived the perils of the time and periodical careful restoration. Arata Isozaki issued the article:” The diagonal strategy: Katsura as envisioned by Enshu’s taste”, published in “Katzura Imperial Villa”, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2005. He is recognized as the most original Japanese scholar of Katzura, who has reconstructed the villa’s history and sifted the conjectural attributions. In the past other great architects have interpreted the imperial villa and Japanese architecture, from Bruno Taut, “discoverer” of Katzura, to Walter Gropius, Kenzo Tange and Manfred Speidel.

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expanding around, respecting the ground levelling.

The growth may be called a fractal119 process in which sizes of rooms depending on quantity of tatami120 module. The result is a fractal grid which in its growth generate its own form.

Figure 3.12. Scheme representing the historical building phases. Adding room process respected the tatami size,

119 See note 30. 120 A tatami(畳) is a type of mat used as a flooring material in traditional Japanese-style rooms. Tatami are made in standard sizes, with the length exactly twice the width.

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changing their measure according to the number of tatami used.

Isozaki’s project shows also another fundamental of traditional Japanese composition: “aesthetic of the diagonal and asymmetry”.

Figure 3.13. Scheme showing the angle view of each room facing the pond. The left side is longer then the right one, keeping the composition in asymmetric arrangement.

The aesthetic of diagonal was first used in set arrangement of Imperial Katzura Villa. The dynamism of “flying gees” method, as Isozaki named, consists in the formation by which a group of building that could be rigidly aligned on the same central axis begins to dislocate away from the axis

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successively to the point of giving up the symmetry and the centrality.

The theme diagonal comes from the tea ceremony: sumikake (corner arrangement) and sujichigai (shifting streaks). The tea master used to arrange the tools for the preparation of the beverage in diagonal and in a corner of the set. Also other elements taking part in the arrangement of the tea house were deliberately set in a diagonal axes compared to the main axes (guest axe).

Figure 3.14. Scheme representing the diagonal arrangement on some elements of Villa Katzura’s the house.

Isozaki dedicate one of his “Seven Manners” which describes seven operations of his designing process to the “shifting” theme. The project that mostly embodied this modus

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operandi is the Gunma Modern Art Museum. In many of his building is visible a gesture of rotating (Oita’s Girls School), shifting or transcript, as he likes to named. The common feature between those acts of design is the desire to change the axes on one element, part of the whole, to emerge the asymmetry of the entire structure.

New Tokyo City Hall presented a double gesture of asymmetry: on façade trough the high radio tower located on the right corner of the building and breaking the asymmetry of the volume and leaving a large empty space above the roof (façade’s patter as well). The second action is visible on roof’s plan through the rotation of the pyramid volume.

Figure 3.15. Diagonal aesthetic of Isozaki’s Tokyo City Hall project.

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The grid structure of New Tokyo City Hall may be simplified as the result of horizontal and vertical lines intersected together. The ef-fect of infinitive space ensued from this system is recognized in Imperial Katzura Vil-la’s interior. The horizontal dark lines of the blue-dyed cotton tatami edging and the vertical dark lines of the aged columns appears indeed like modular lines that articulate a whole three-dimensional space, creating the impression of infinite.

Figure 3.16. Interior of Imperial Katzura Villa. The result of white space defined by lines, impose a sense of infinite and alienation.

The theme of the illusion is so understandable in a space like a mirror rooms, where the modules are reverberate all around. Isozaki practised for long time the “space of illusion” stating also, in a

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provocative way that one of the best architecture in the world is the “Mirror room” at “Tokyo’s Fun Park”. The adoption of some object as not accessible stairs or sinking walls are used by Isozaki to get the visitor's sense of displacement and not belonging to the realities. The infinite repetition of the cube module in New Tokyo City Hall and the resulting levitation on pure forms on the roof are intent to represent an illusionary composition.

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CONCLUSIONS

1th Chapter.

Basing on an analysis of Isozaki’s biography and relationship with Kenzo Tange and Metabolists it is possible to draw a profile of the architect, defining the results of those influences on his architectural design process. Since the first years of his professional activity Arata Isozaki located himself in architectural context as individual architect and not as a member of any ideological group. Tis attitude occurred first as detachment from Kenzo Tange’s firm and then as a refuse from the participation in Metabolism’s Group. Whilst his individualist character it’s getting equally clear that Isozaki was strongly influenced by his mentor’s devotion to history and by Metabolist’s conception of forms. During his working years at K. Tange’s Laboratory Isozaki has assimilated his master tendency sought to rediscover traditional Japanese architecture to create a new Modern architectural style. It’s very specific situation than both, Tange and Isozaki, influenced each other, but what united them is definitely a rigorous respect for so called Japanese archetypes. While in the period during which Isozaki worked in Tange’s Lab. this trend within the interest for traditional heritage was

CONCLUSIONS 180

not particularly well comprehended by the young architect. After few years, Isozaki seemed to come back to this respective attitude to the Japanese architectural history. The concepts developed by Isozaki together with his teacher can be summarized as: “sacred pillar” and “trabeation”. The buildings developed according to the first concept are a long series and almost all residing in Oita Prefecture. Some years later, already autonomous architect, Isozaki presented more complex versions of “sacred pillar”. The ideas dated back to tradition as the handling of the concept relating to “heavy Japanese roofs”, appeared when Isozaki had been already separate from his master. The rediscovery of attachment to history and ambition to citation the traditional shapes is one of the major Isozaki’s behavior features. His conception of "architecture as an event" demonstrates his inclination to cite frequently a historical context of buildings, touching their very essence clarifying their principles for himself and enriching them by a superior identity. While working time spent in Kange’s Laboratory Isoaki had close relations to the Metabolism’s members. Exploring their repertoire the points of contact with Isozaki’s spatial construction can be summarized as follow: - Capsules The basic unit of Metabolism, the capsule, has myriad origins in Japan: national

CONCLUSIONS 181

archetypal images in the form of kago121 “mobile house” and the tea hut. Metabolists, especially Kurakawa, had a modern obsession with mobility in the form of jets and cars. Isozaki adopted the concept of capsules for almost every variant of the “Clusters”. The difference was in the belief that those modules may fulfill in reality. In fact while Metabolists built some exemplars of capsule houses, Isozaki adopted only for few unbuilt project such as the “Clusters” and the “Responsive House”. This last project was made by Isozaki on the mobility trend composed by a car transporting a cube house. - Proliferation/ Colonization Since the precarious ground and its rules cannot be conquered Metabolism sprawls a series of buildings, megastructures, and even cities that instead find ways of adopting to their hostile host. - Floating cities Through an alchemy of ambition and technology, Metabolists, especially Kikutake, plan to overlay artificial ground on water through a combination of piers, platforms, floating megastructures and floating island.

121 Kago (駕籠) is a type of litter used as a means of human transportation by the non-samurai class in feudal Japan and into the Meiji period.

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Isozaki faced two times the concept of designing city on the wate: the first time was together with Kenzo Tange in “New Tokyo City” project and then in his own project for “Haishi, Mirage City” (an artificial island in the South China Sea). In both projects Isozaki, contrariwise Metabolists, focused on the self-generation of the territory. He cited the “flux of development” rather than submarine or floating structure. His attitude was mainly focused on “invisible architecture” and reason for a self growth. - Unicore/ Joint Core As well as land and sea, Metabolism attempts to conquest (“colonization”) the air. The means to do it is through a reinvention of the core: as a stand-alone tower into which living units can be plugged, and in the “join core” model, as one of several trunks supporting the branches of a new urban system, straddling the mess of the existing city beneath it. The theme of the core is surely the closest to Isozaki for whom it’s connected to traditional Japanese ideas of the “sacred pillar”. In fact it’s known the devotion of the architect to Great South Gate of Todaiji, cited as one of the three most important buildings for his ispiration. - Megaforest While the average building height in Tokyo is a paltry one, the Metabolists envision forest-like megastructures that form a benevolent canopy over the squat city

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below. Composed of helixes, brenches, or cones, the megaforests create new categories of spaces: diagonal as well as vertical and horizontal, with the ability to reach across space onto neighboring “trees”. Every variant of Metabolists’ s megaforest prototype (“leaves” or the “tree silhouette” system of Kikutake, “DNA” system of Kurakawa) where designed to be a series of independent buildings standing one close to the other as a repetition of module. Contrariwise Isozaki’s variants were all designed to growth together, creating a second ground horizontal level. 2th Chapter.

Exploring and classifying the influences of Japanese tradition, Russian Avant-Garde and Western culture which A. Isozaki cited in his spatial constructions it is possible to reveal the themes of influences specific for three different cultures.

Deepening in the study of traditional Japanese architecture one inferred that the mains aspects from the ancient Japanese epoch were the sensibilities and dispositions to a certain atmosphere. It may be called as an atmospheres which is the closer word to express the oriental conception of “space”, which is tightly connected with “time”. As it was reported in the foreword this approach can be

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summarized in the concept of “ma”. The tools to afford to it are those of: “darkness”, “mask”, “void”, “catching” natural elements and “dissolving architecture” in the context. Those are the archetypal concepts from former Japanese epochs. After the Second World War it figured out that Japan comparing to other countries, doesn’t have any ancient ideas of architecture. In the past the Japanese had always built spaces that respected the religious and philosophical culture but with no real awareness of the architectural gesture. It was figured out by Kenzo Tange who was the first in charge for a responce to the Modernist Movement.

Hence Isozaki’s citing a traditional architecture refers more to ancestral space/time concepts rather than shapes and plastic forms.

Concerning the Russian Avant-Garde it may be said that Isozaki used it as a creativity prototype. He reproduced some Avangardist compositions understood in a Japanese manner. Malevich’s flat compositions were developed making their surfaces to slide orthogonally between each other, in a typical way used for Japanese sliding paper walls. The Talin’s controrielief was adopted in an enlarged scale of a building transforming the curved material in a big wall-roof. This gesture remembers the concept of traditional

CONCLUSIONS 185

Japanese heavy roof functioning as well as a wall. Isozaki’s vision of the Russian Avant-Garde treated as a Japanese filter which distorted the meaning and leaving only the analogical shapes to the original one.

Isozaki’s position regarding Western architectural culture was in a way “didactic”. His purpose was to show and to teach to Japanese audience the foreign traditions.

3th Chapter.

Through a comparative analysis between one of A. Isozaki’s project and an I.I. Leonidov’s one, I identified characters of influences from Russian Avant-Garde and traditional Japanese architecture. In this summery I divided the conclusions of my analysis in three main features that I deduced from it. Then I proceeded showing points of contact and dissimilarities of Isozaki’s and Leonidov’s project.

The grid

The difference between using of grid of I.I. Leonidov and A. Isozaki consists in their approach with it. While for Leonidov grid is a schematic concept of universal invisible network, Isozaki treats grid in more concrete and formal manner, as a

CONCLUSIONS 186

constructive network in terms of the architectural elements.

For the Japanese architect grid first of all means a geometrical structure. It’s used as a real massive frame that capture and freeze inside it the pure geometrical forms. For Isozaki grid becomes a kind of static mechanism which sustains an architectural structure. His grid system is closely connected with the Japanese housing tradition where the paper sliding modules transform, slide and appear as a quasi-mechanical objects.

Contrariwise for Leonidov the grid is connected to schematic deployment of forms which offer the places for the initial seeds dissemination and growth. These seeds represent the architect’s initial ideas and images. Grid as a more dynamic structure liberates the pure geometrical forms and let them levitate on columns. In such a state the Leonidov’s grid is comparable to Isozaki’s one.

What distinguishes the two design approaches, is also the scale of grid‘s implementation. According to the traditional Japanese concept it is possible to rescale an object from macro (universal scale) to the micro (single building scale).

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The pure geometrical forms

The origins of pure geometrical forms for Leonidov come from a negation of the previous culture and a desire to search for a new artificial formal language working with pure forms. So Russian architect explores the former epochs and uses the archetypal images to create an ideal environment of forms materialized in his “The City of the Sun”. Hence germination of the new forms respond to the trend of the world evolution.

On the countrary, for Isozaki a personal negation of the previous culture didn’t occurre but an actual negation is happened, because of the Second World War. Isozaki draws from pure forms of Russian Avant-Garde, but they are understated by the architect as a pure composition of universal forms and patterns of forms assembled in some temporary aggregation. While traditional Japanese housing culture, frequently cited by Isozaki, is understood as the principles of transformation, temporary architecture that could be rebuilt from time to time.

And also his referring to Metabolism is understood as the structural principles where the position, aggregation of units is much more important than units themselves. He also gets influenced by the positivism coming from Metabolists and he believes in power of Japanese growth, technical

CONCLUSIONS 188

construction, where everything is possible to fulfill nto reality. Even if Isozaki were far from belongs to Metabolists, their influences on him let him believe that the fantasy ideas of the Russian Avant-Garde were possible to be realized.

Within the differences in architect’s origins, both Isozaki and Leonidov use pure forms in order to get back to the architectural images of former epochs. For both of them is necessary to lay a foundation for the civilization based on the new life principles. They are intending to mention the origins of architecture to symbolize a new world beginning. While Leonidov freed the pure geometrical forms from the grid structure (levitating on pillars) Isozaki froze them in the grid structure.

The Nature.

In his project A. Isozaki relates to the Nature in an artificial way. He raises the natural spaces in the air and made them open for the public, and this is an “intention to relive the increases stress of the workers”. An artificial atmosphere of hanging gardens with their greenery on an upper floor side of the building. This is a traditional Japanese attitude to re-create an artificial composition of greenery evoking a natural settlement.

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Contrariwise, Leonidov deals with nature in an anti-interventional manner. He leaves every natural panorama conformation as they exist, without any thought or destructive intervention.

The process of fertilization of urban ground which generates the new architectural forms is clearly evident in the creative process of Leonidov, as well as in Isozaki’s one treatment of those three layers (Nature, Grid and Pure Forms) manifests itself that is the difference between solutions for Isozaki and Leonidov.

Isozaki pulls together the three layers in a single architectural object. He present a grid as a first compositional layer, than he hangs the gardens and pure geometrical forms (pyramid, sphere, cube) as a second ground layer. The layers are so merged together.

Leonidov on the contrary treats the three layers as separated essences with only few point of contact organized as pillars and columns. The result is a creation of a second artificial layer, which do not disturbs first nature layer of ecosystem.

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RESULTS

1. Kenzo Tange, in the years of collaboration with his student Arata Isozaki, transmits to him the devotion to traditional Japanese architecture. Approach that is not openly shared by the young architect who decides to move away from his master. Few years later Isozki refers to traditional Japanese architecture and it will be visible in his architecture.

2. A. Isozaki’s relationship with Metabolists may be called ambivalent. On the one hand his constant criticism to the Group given by an excessive optimism and confidence in the futuristic technology. On the other hand his utopian projects suggest a common enthusiasm with young Metabolists for technology. Certainly characters of his architecture as the concept of "trunk" and "forest", although developed less optimistically in a technological way, arise from a relationship of mutual influence with the Group. This influence, through Isozaki, affects also Kenzo Tange who builds some of these architectural objects according to the concept of the "trunk".

3. Because Japanese after the Second World War had a lack of traditional architectural awareness, Isozaki referred mostly to ancestral Japanese atmosphere rather than archetypal images.

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4. A. Isozaki’ s vision to the Russian Avant-Garde has been treated as a Japanese filter which distorted the meaning and leaved only the analogical shapes of the original one.

5. A. Isozaki referred to Western architecture in accord to import in Japan foreigner architecture and to teach it to Japanese audience, as a “didactic” manner.

6. The A. Isozaki’ s project New City Hall have some common points with I.I. Leonidov’ s Magnitagorsk as the concept of grid and pure geometrical forms. Those ones are treated in a different way as also the relationship with the Nature. Some characters of Isozaki’ s project can be connected to Imperial Katzura Villa as well.

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INTERVIEWS

4.1.Professor Haijme Yatzuka122, 22th

July, Shinjuku, Tokyo.

1. How was the first approach of Isozaki with ideas of Russian Avant Garde? Arata Isozaki went Moscow in 1990 and in that occasion he visited with Kisho Kurakawa Konstantine Melnikov’s house in Staraia Arbat with Melnikov’s son Victor Melnikov. The relationship between Russian Avant-Garde and Japan begins in 1980. Before that dates Russian artist Valentina Bodunova already visited Japan (1960) and imported Avant-Garde ideas in artistic field. In 1965-1966 Russian architect Anatol Kagan from Leningrad arrived in Japan when the left ideology as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky started to spread among young minds in university. In the article

122 Hajime Yatzuka 1948, Tokyo. Japanese architect, architectural critic and author. Graduated at University of Tokyo. He worked for Arata Isozaki firm for several years and mostly he took part to MOCA Museum in Los Angeles with Professor Makoto Kikuchi. Professor in Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo till 2015. Author of several volumes including: “Russian avant-garde architecture” 1993, “Creative Now 8“ 1993, “Avant-garde architecture of Japan 1960s metabolism” 1997, “Japan modern architecture as a thought” 2005,“Hyper den-City” 2011 and “Metabolism Nexus” 2011.

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Dismantling Architecture Arata Isoaki gave himself appellative of Stalin and his friend and interlocutor, Trotsky. Isozaki at that time thought that city should be entirely rebuilt whereas his friend (in the story) was more radical like Trotsky.

2. Which was the architectural tendency in Japan after Second World War? After war the political and intellectual tendency was closer to Russia and distanced from America. Kenzo Tange was protagonist of this time and he proposed a modern architecture that still maintain links with tradition. It was the time when was re-discovered the formal beauty of Villa Katzura and Ise Shire. In 1960, Tange together with photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto, architect Walter Gropius, and graphic designer Herbert Bayer published a photobook titled ‘Katsura’.

3. He mentioned many times Ivan Leonidov in his influences, does we spoke about his in-terest about him? Isozaki wrote an article called:” City of the Sun of Leonidov” issued on Hermes magazine but isn’t translated in English, as majority of his texts.

4. How did Isozaki get familiar with Rus-sian Formalism? During a trip in New York Peter Eisenman presented to Isozaki the book “Prison of languages” a critical account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism” by

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Frederic Jamenson. Getting inspired by formalism Isozaki written an article "About My Method", issued on 1972 in the journal A + U, number 1. He divides his method in seven manners: " to multiciplity", "to pack", "to cut", "to transcript", "to project", "to place", and "response to". But the fact remains that this research work on its process of design is dated.

5. Is it Know his Diploma project? Yes, He made it with Fumihiko Maki and it was a resource about American skyscrapers. At that time they were both working in Kenzo Tange studio and he was interested on American way how to build high structures to use for new generation of architecture in Japan.

6. Isozaki was also very much inspired by European architecture, which were his link with Europe? In 1960 he had many friends in Europe as Cedric Price, intellectually very close to Ivan Leonidov, Peter Cook and Archigram.

7. In which architecture from tradition Isozaki refers more? Every summer on his way to Kyūshū home island Isozaki stops to Todaiji Temple in Nara because he thinks that can get inspired from it very year.

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8. Arata Isozaki mentioned many times Pal-ladio in his architecture, how does his passion for Palladio started? In 1999 there was an exhibition in Tokyo of Palladio and Manfredo Tafuri was invited for this occasion. Tafuri and Isozaki know each other at that time. In 1980 Japanese architect designed many villas using Palladio’s volta and Manfredo Tafuri “No Palladio is similar to Arata Isozaki”.

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4.2. Andrea Maffei123, 16th October, Milan.

1. In una sua conversazione con Arata Isozaki, l’architetto giapponese criticava il continuo cambiamento delle forme dei giovani architetti a confronto dello stile costante di Tadao Ando o di Richard Meier. Isozaki ha passato molte fasi nel suo processo creativo (Metabolismo, Manierismo ,Postmodernismo, Antimodernismo); quali sono secondo Lei gli aspetti che hanno sempre distinto l’architettura di Isozaki?

In questi tempi si tende molto a seguire una moda, un certo stile, invece Isozaki ha sempre cambiato i contenuti non lo stile. La sua è stata una critica dal punto di vista di stile nel senso che molti architetti sfogliano le riviste da Herzog de Meuron a Frank Ghery e mescolano insieme gli stili realizzando progetti modaioli che hanno pero il problema di non avere dei

123 Andrea Maffei. Graduated in Florence, in 1997 he moved to Tokyo to work in the study of Arata Isozaki. Initially working in the ceramics museum team Gifu (Japan), villa At Wabrah in Doha and expansion project of Qatari history museum in Doha. Become Arata Isozaki Associate and Head of the Italian projects. Directsf the hockey stadium project in Turin. Founded the Andrea Maffei Architects. Collaborator of CASABELLA magazine, since 1998.

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contenuti perché non c è l’intenzione di fare una critica verso un tipo di edificio o verso certi contenuti. Semplicemente oggi è bello farli così. Mentre la critica di Isozaki verte sulla questione che si dovrebbe leggere più formalmente da parte dei giovani d’oggi. Viceversa il suo sperimentalismo Postmodernismo, Costruttivismo ecc., deriva dalla sua volontà di interpretare il progetto che gli si pone di fronte in un modo interessante come un’interpretazione critica sul significato, per esempio, di cosa comporta oggi costruire una biblioteca (i.e. Biblioteca Comunale Maranello), in quella determinata città.

Da ciò deriva il suo sperimentalismo che non si basa su una scelta formale come per esempio Tadao Ando le cui architetture si assomigliano tutte, ma lui si pone di volta in volta un desiderio di sperimentare nuove forme. Isozaki ha sempre rifiutato una sua classificazione postmoderna o di qualunque tipo.

2. In un’intervista Isozaki afferma il suo profondo interesse per Malevich e Tatlin e molte delle sue scelte formali ricordano El Lissitzky o la «Future city» di Lazar Kiedekel. Tale affezione alle avanguardie russe può essere interpretata come un spirito, del dopo guerra, di “imitazione e riproduzione” di forme architettoniche e idee di tendenza senza un profondo

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interesse della cultura russa?

Nel concorso che aveva partecipato per il teatro di San Pietroburgo del Marijinski di St. Pietroburgo aveva cercato di riprendere questi piani bianchi rossi blu ispirandosi a Malevich ma anche Zaha Hadid afferma la sua predilezione per Malevich, forse si tratta di una moda.

3. Mentre nella cultura occidentale la geometria consente il controllo astratto delle forme, in quella orientale l’edificio segue le forme dell’area e i dettagli sono la definizione formale. Essendo Isozaki un architetto “ponte” tra Occidente e Orientale, quale pensa sia il suo approccio alla definizione della forma architettonica?

Wright è stato molto influenzato dall’architettura classica giapponese, queste grandi coperture che aggettano delle case giapponesi. Per quanto riguarda l’architettura di Isozaki non penso ci sia una “regola generale”, se si trova in un contesto italiano di centro storico si comporta in una maniera mentre se riferisce ad un contesto americano ancora un altro. Secondo me non c è nessuna regola, è un’interpretazione del luogo, non dico in termini di “genius loci” ma in termini di interpretazione di un architetto che vuole raccontare un’idea. Per quanto riguarda il museo della Ceramica di Gifo decide lui stesso il luogo dove porlo, circondato

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dalla natura e nel rispetto del terreno sul quale poggia e quindi un discorso di contesto organico nel contesto naturale. Viceversa ci sono edifici molto geometrici, basta pensare al MOCA di Los Angeles che invece riprende tutte le geometrie perché si trova in una città come Los Angeles, America

4. Isozaki afferma:” L’architettura deve essere aggressiva, deve difendersi dal contesto” In un contesto giapponese dove ogni elemento vive di vita propria, disegnando lo schema psicologico dell’individualità giapponese, ha riscontrato nella collaborazione con Isozaki una sensibilità per il dialogo tra edificio e spazio urbano come piattaforma sociale?

In Giappone non esistono le piazze e non ce ne sono mai state nella storia. Non hanno mai avuto il palazzo del potere civile, derivante anche dalla cultura cristiana. I Giapponesi hanno un altro senso di sociale e comunità che non è urbano ma più affettivo. Dei punti di aggregazione che non sono molto urbani quanto sociali. Il lavoro è un po’ una seconda casa. A livello urbano quindi non c è un vero centro, anche Kyoto, per esempio, non ha alcune piazze ma i punti di riferimento sono questi templi sparsi, diversamente da come si riscontra in Cina i cui spazi sociali possono essere paragonati alle nostre piazze italiane.

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I punti di sviluppo urbano giapponese sono le fermate della metro. La stessa azienda che fa la metropolitana compra i terreni e vi costruisce gli edifici e, comunque, è una politica a mio parere molto sensata. Non credo che ci siano veri e propri piani regolatori.

5. Rispetto dei ritmi e degli elementi naturali. Isozaki, come molti altri architetti giapponesi, utilizza luce naturale, elementi atmosferici come vento e acqua integrati nell’architettura per sottoporre l’artificialità dell’edificio allo stagionale e giornaliero decorso della natura. Quali sono i progetti da Lei seguiti che si avvalgono di questo approccio progettuale? (ricordando la biblioteca di Maranello)

Il tema della luce è il più importante ma anche l’acqua come vediamo in Gifu e Tsukuba che è stato molto riproposto. Nel progetto della Biblioteca Maranello gli elementi fondamentali sono il verde la luce e l’acqua ed è un modo per percepire la biblioteca in un modo diverso che è estremamente giapponese: essere circondati dalla natura.

6. Decentralizzazione. Si è spesso parlato di Tokyo come di una città senza centro e dell’attitudine a ogni scala di applicare il modus operandi giapponese di separare gli elementi per conservarne la loro basicità. In architettura questo fenomeno è

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riscontrabile nelle piante della celebre casa Moriyama dello studio Sanaa a Tokyo ma anche nell’International Art Village di Akiyoshidai e nel Museo delle Ceramiche a Gifu di Isozaki. Ritiene che questa sia un’attitudine derivata dalla cultura giapponese sempre presente nel processo creativo di Isozaki?

Il centro Gifu è un discorso di architettura organica con l’intenzione di “spalmarla” sul territorio. Il centro Tsukuba è invece molto monumentale e centralizzato quindi secondo me non c è una regola comune. Parlando del centro artistico Kamioka anche questo è un edificio che si trova in un paesaggio campestre e quindi non c’era l’intenzione di creare un grande volume unico ma voleva spargerlo nel territorio per integrarlo in un modo organico.

7. Isozaki spiega il concetto di ‘oscurità’, così lontano dall’ideale occidentale di bellezza, con le seguenti parole: ”Oscurità come spazio spirituale dell’immaginazione e del mondo dell’illusione. Una riflessione della realtà associata con la profondità psicologica del singolo”. Come approccia a questo concetto in quanto architetto occidentale?

Forse è più un’interpretazione che ne hanno maturato i critici nei confronti della sua architettura. Tanizaki descrive la sensibilità dell’oscurità dei giapponesi

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che preferiscono avere un contatto con la luce sempre non diretto ma sempre più soft. Oscurità non tanto come esplicita indicazione delle cose ma sempre più a un detto non detto e quindi a una percezione più indiretta delle cose. E questo è dunque un rapporto più indiretto con la realtà. Il loro rapporto infatti è un rapporto sempre molto poco aggressivo con le cose e le situazioni.

8. Nel trattamento del materiale di facciata di alcune architetture di Isozaki come per esempio il Gunma Center of Art, l’architetto utilizza una superficie ad alta riflessione per aumentare l’effetto dell’astrazione e della perdita di materialicità del volume. La scelta del materiale della pelle esterna dell’Hockey Center di Torino è dovuto allo stesso intento?

Non è stato un riferimento diretto al Gunma è stato scelto per rendere più interessante la facciata mentre nella parte interne è stato scelto la riflettenza dello specchio per rendere più leggero il volume delle tribune mobili che avevano una certa massa. Lo specchio ha il compito di far svanire la pesantezza. Inoltre l’aspetto più importante del Palaisozaki, su cui Isozaki ha molto insistito, è stato quello di creare un edificio non solo per le Olimpiadi ma un edificio che durasse anche anche dopo le Olimpiadi. Per questo la scelta di avere due tribune fisse e le

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altre mobili. Esperienza derivata dal palazzo di Barcellona che non ha le tribune da una parte proprio perché potesse essere comodamente essere utilizzato nel dopo Olimpiadi.

9. Isozaki è stato il primo architetto giapponese ad aprirsi all’architettura occidentale, dimostrandosi un grande conoscitore ed esperto di entrambi le culture, occidentali ed orientali. Nei suoi ultimi lavori (Citylife a Milano), riconosce un’influenza prevalente sull’altra?

E difficile classificarlo perché il tema è quello della modularità che si ripete all’infinito che è sia occidentale che orientale. Il riferimento è più a Giò Ponti al grattacielo Pirelli. La funzionalità soprattutto è un riferimento a Pirelli con uno spazio molto flessibile per durare nel tempo perché un edificio parte dalla scelta funzionale.

10. Differenza tra Toyo Ito e Isozaki

Ciò che differenzia Isozaki da Toyo Ito è sicuramente la sua grande cultura della storia dell’architettura non tanto in termini formali ma di contenuti, con l’amore per Palladio e per il suo risultato di armonia delle proporzioni e la sua interpretazione degli elementi classici dell’architettura romana oppure di Piranesi. Nei suo dieci libri, Isozaki

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ciascuno era dedicato ad un’opera che riteneva più significativa di quel periodo esempio sul Gotico, poi del Rinascimento con San Lorenzo a Firenze e il Manierismo con Palazzo Tè a Mantova. Quindi lui ha sempre guardato alla storia un po’ alla maniera di Louis Kann e questo è quello che l’ha portato a un maggior utilizzo della pietra e le forme del passato.

Toyo Ito invece sulla storia ci ha messo una pietra sopra, ha sempre interpretato la città molto contemporaneamente come organismo veloce mutevole. Quindi la grossa differenza tra Isozaki e Toyo Ito risiede nella devozione alla storia.

11. Linguaggio Kanji e architettura. Riscontra un rapporto?

Per tutti i giapponesi e i cinesi, data la calligrafia basata sui kanji, è inevitabile che ci sia un rapporto fra il linguaggio e il segno grafico perché loro sono abituati a disegnare in continuazione. In Himalaya Center a Shangai recentemente Isozaki ha realizzato un terzo della facciata riprendendo degli ideogrammi e inventandone dei nuovi, interpretando la facciata con dei Kanji che non esistono. In tutti gli architetti giapponesi c’è sempre un rapporto froidiano con gli ideogrammi quando disegnano.

ARATA ISOZAKI’S CREATIVE BIOGRAPHY

1931 23 July Borne in Oita Prefecture, Japan. 1941 Roosevelt imposes US trade embargo on Japan. 1945 the Isozaki’s mother was killed in an accident in the confusion of bombs. 1945 40% of industrial plants and infrastructure destroyed by US bombing. Arata’s trip to Italy visiting Palladio.University of Tokyo, B.Arch. Thesis about Skyscraper in America, tutor Kenzo Tange. 1954 Work in Kenzo Tange’s firm with Sachio Otani, Fumihiko Maki and Kisho Kurokawa. Recovered in hospital for a suspicion of cancer to the brain. Rapid economic growth of Tokyo between 1955 and 1961,"Golden Sixties". 1960 Elaborating concept of “darkness”. 1955 Isozaki’s father passed away. Metabolism. 1958 Kikutake’s Marine City. K. Kurakawa visited Moscow and Leningrad 1959-1960 Oita Medical Hall, Oita, Japan. 1960 Project Clusters in the Air, Tokyo, Japan, (unbuilt). 1959 asked to join Metabolism but Isozaki declined. 1960 participates in Plan for New Tokyo ’60 at Tange Laboratoty. 1961 Shinjuku project, Tokyo, Japan, (unbuilt). 1961 Peugeot Building project, Argentina, (unbuilt). 1960 Elaborating concept of “ruins”. 1962 participates in Metabolist exhibition: “This will be your city” in Tokyo. 1962 ‘City Demolition Industry, Inc.’ essay (Isozaki the timid Staliist vs Sin in the Trotskyist Killer. He wrote it to keeo distance from Metabolism. 1962 ‘Incubation process’ exhibition. 1963 Marunouchi project, Marunouchi, Tokyo, Japan, (unbuilt). 1963 Project City in the air (unbuilt). 1962-1966 Oita Prefectural Library,Oita, Japan. 1963 Established Arata Isozaki Atelier (now Arata Isozaki & Associates ,Tokyo). 1964 Part-time lecturer, Urban Engineering Faculty, University of Tokyo. 1963-1964 lwata Girls’ High School, Oita, Japan. 1964 Japanese citizens allowed to freely travel overseas for the first time.1965 Monroe Ruler (a

curve ruler according to the proportion of Monroe that Isozaki incorporated into architecture and furniture design). 1965 Urban Planning, Kenzo Tange Team,Skopje,YugosIavia. 1966 Collaboration for the film director Hiroshi Teshigahara and artist Tomio Miki for“Face of Another”. 1966 Skopje masterplan with Kenzo Tange. 1967-1970 Festival Plaza Expo ’70 Osaka, Japan. Recovered in hospital one year for a breakdown after Expo’70. 1968 The exhibition “Electric Labyrinth” for the 14th Triennale di Milano. “Electric Labyrinth” was completely taken over by these young artists and students protesting against “establishement”. 1970 Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes. 1970 Elaborating concept “tabula rasa”. 1970 Special Prize of EXPO ’70, Architectural Institute of Japan (mechanics and electronics of Festival Plaza). 1970 Responsive House Project as a model for simulate physical forms. 1970 Formalism. 1970-1972 Oita Medical Hall Annex, Oita, Japan. 1971-1974 The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan. 1971 Interview in with James Stirling, affirming his distance with Metabolist group. ‘About My Method’, Japan Architect (August 1972), pp. 22-8. Elaborating concept “Ciber city”. Computer-Aided city project. 1972-1974 The Kitakyushu City Museum of Art, Fukuoka, Japan. 1973 Oil crisis stops Japan’s revoòution in its tracks. 1973 International Committee Member, Milan Triennale, Italy. 1973-1974 Kitakyushu Central Library, Fukuoka, Japan. 1973-1974-Fujimi Country Clubhouse, Oita, Japan. 1974-1975 Shukosha Building, Fukuoka , Japan. Kenchiku no Kaitai (The Dismantling of Modern Architecture) (Tokyo, Bijutsu Shuppon-sho, 1975). 1975 Annual Prize, Architectural Institute of Japan (The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma). 1975-1977 West Japan General Exhibition Centre, Fukuoka, Japan. ‘The Metraphor of the Cube', Japan Architect (March 1976), pp.24-6. ‘Rhetoric of The Cylinder’, Japan Architect (April 1976), pp.66-67. ‘From Manner To Rhetoric’, Japan Architect (April

1976),pp. 64-72. 1976 Collaborating with Hans Hollein “MAN trans FORMS” exhibition “Isozaki’s Body by Hans Hollein”. 1976 Visiting Professor in AA School of London, lesson presented by Peter Cook about “Designing process of early works”. 1976-1978 Kamioka Town Hall, Gifu, Japan. ‘Nine Quotation Sources, Nine Metaphors’, Japan Architect (October/ November, 1977), pp.20-21. 1978 “Ma-Espace/Temps au Japon”(MA:Space-Time in Japan), Paris. 1978-1983 Fukuoka Mutual Bank, Head Office Expansion, Fukuoka, Japan. Ma Space/Time in Japan (exhibition catalogue) (NY, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979). ‘Formalism’, Japan Architect (January 1979),pp.9-11. Shuhò-ga: Arata Isozaki Chosakushu 3 (Manner: Collected Writings 3) (Tokyo, Bijutsu Shuppon-sho, 1979). Two years of studying Japanese calligraphy. 1980 Postmodernism. 1979-1983 Tsukuba Centre Building, lbaragi, Japan. 1980 Memphis movement Milano. 1980 Collaboration for the movie: “Ki (Breathing)” Toshio Matsumoto. 1980-1982 Toga Sanbo Theater, Toyama, Japan. ‘A Rethinking of Spaces of Darkness’, Japan Architect(February 1981), pp.9-20. 1981-1986 Bjornson Studio and House, California, USA. 1981-1986 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, USA. 1982 Togamura Amphitheatre, Toyama, Japan. ‘The Ledoux Connection’, Architectural Design (January-February 1982), pp.28-9. 1982-1984 Okanoyama Graphic Art Museum, Hyogo, Japan. 1982-1986 Housing Block 4, House 2, IBA, Berlin, Germany. 1983-1985 Palladium Club, New York, USA. 1983-1990 Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games Main Sports Hall Sant Jordi Sports Hall, Barcelona, Spain. 1984-1987 Ochanomizu Square Building, Casals Hall, Tokyo, Japan. Ima, Mienai Tashi (Now, the City Invisible) (Tokyo, Yomoto Shobò, 1985). 1985 “Tokyo is Photography” exhibition in collaboration with Kishin Shinoyama. Post-Modern no Jidai to Kenchiku ( The Post-modern Era and Architecture) (diologues) (Tokyo, Kojimo Shuppon-koi,1985). 1986 Visiting Professor AA

School of London, lessosn about ”New Tokyo City Hall”. 1986-1987 Clubhouse, Musashi-kyuryo Country Club, Saitama, Japan. 1986-1993 Tokyo University of Art and Design, Tokyo, Japan. 1986 Golden Medal, Royal institute of British Architects (RIBA). 1986-1990 Art Tower Mito, Ibaragi, Japan. 1987-1988 Hara Museum ARC, Gunma, Japan. 1987-1989 Clubhouse, Lake Sagami Country Club, Yamanashi, Japan. 1987-1989 Bond University Library, Administration Building, Faculty of Humanities Building, Queensland Australia. 1987-1990 Kitakyushu International Conference Centre, Fukuoka, Japan. 1987-1990 Team Disney building, Florida, USA. 1987-1990 Pabellon Polideportivo, Palafolls, Spain. ‘Ruins’, in Ryu/i Miyamoto: Architectural Apocalypse (Tokyo, Heibon-sha, 1988), pp. 1 1-19. 1988-1992 The Brooklyn Museum Expansion, Brooklyn, NY, U.S.A. in partnership with James Stewart Polshek. 1988-1989 Tokyo Christian College, Chapel, Chiba, Japan. 1989 Collaboration for the movie: “Ma:Space/Time in The Garden of Ryoan-Ji” Takahiko Iimura. 1989-1990 J R Kyushu Yufuin Railway Station, Oita, Japan. 1989-1991 Tateyama Museum of Toyama and Youboh-kan Hall, Toyama, Japan. 1990 visit of Konstantin Melnikov’s House located in Staraya Arbat, Moscow with Victor Melnikov and Kisho Kurokowa. 1990 Collaboration with Kiju Yoshida for Opera “Madame Butterfly” (Opera de Lyon). 1989-90 New Tokyo city Hall project. Deconstructivism. 1990-1992-Uii-An Tea Ceremony House, Tokyo, Japan. 1990-1994 Museum of Japanese Art and Technology, Krakow, Poland. Arata Isozaki 1960-1990 Architecture (NY, Rizzoli, 1991). 1991 The FAD Prize of Architecture, Spain (Sant Jordi Sports Hall). 1996 Commissioner Japanese Pavilion (‘Fractures' won the Golden Lion Prize) at the 6th international Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale. Commissioner Japanese Pavilion (‘City of Girls’) at the 7th international Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale. 1991-1994-Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art, Okayama,

Japan. 1991-1995 Toyonokuni Library for Cultural Resources, Oita, Japan. 1991-1995 Kyoto Concert Hall, Kyoto, Japan. 1991-1995 B-con Plaza-International Convention Hall, Oita, Japan. Arata Isozaki Works 30: Architectural Models, Prints, Drawings (Tokyo, Riyuko-sho ,1992). 1992-1994 Nakaya Ukichiro Museum of Snow and Ice, lshikawa, Japan.1992-1998-Nara Centennial Hall, Nara, Japan. 1992-1998 Daimler Benz AG, Project Potsdamer Platz Block C2+C3, Berlin, Germany. 1993-1994 Luigi Nono’s Tomb, Venice, ltaly. 1993-1995 Domus House for Humankind, La Coruna, Spain. 1993-1999 Okayama West Police Station, Okayama, Japan. 1993-1997 Shizuoka Performing Arts Centre, Shizuoka, Japan. 1993-1998 Shizuoka Convention & Arts Centre, Shizuoka, Japan. 1993-2000 Bass Museum Extension, Florida, U.S.A.. Arata Isozaki Opere e progetti (italiano) (Milan, Electa,1994). 1994 Royal Academy of Arts Honorary Academician, London, England. ‘Mask and folding screen’, GA Document39 (1994): pp. 48-9. 1994-1999 Ohio Centre of Science & Industry, Ohio, U.S.A.. 1995 Design Competition, Japan Juror, Yokohama International Port Terminal Design. 1995-1998 Akiyoshidai International Art Village, Yamaguchi, Japan. 1995-1999 Gunma Astronomical Observatory, Gunma, Japan. Shigen no Modoki: Japanesque-ization (Psuedo-origins: Japanesque-izotion) (Tokyo, Kojimo Shuppon-koi.1996). 1996-2002 Ceramic Park Mino, Gifu, Japan. 1997 Andrea Maffei joined Arta Isozaki’s working team. 1997-2003 Yamaguchi Centre for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi, Japan. 1998-2005 Kitagata Town Community Centre, Gifu. Isozaki Arata no Hossò-hò (Isozaki’s Ideas: the secrets to the creation of his architecture) (Motsudo, Okoku-sho, 1998). 1998-2008 Shenzhen Cultural Centre, Shenzhen, China. 1999 The Millenium House Sheikh Saud AI-Thani Villa, Doha Qatar. Kaishi-Mou Hitotsuno Utopia (The Mirage City: Another Utopia) (Tokyo. NTT Publishing. 1998). 1999-2002 La Caixa Forum, Entrance Court, Barcelona, Spain. Jintai no

Kage Anthropomorphism (Traces of the Human Body: Anthropomorphism) (Tokyo, Kojima Shuppon-koi.2000). Fluxism. 2001 Qatar Education City masterplan, Doha, Qatar. 2001-2005 Isozaki Atea-Urbitarite Project, Bilbao, Spain. Kami no Nisugata (The illusory Forms of the Gods) (Tokyo, Kojimo Shuppon-koi, 2001). Kenchiku to Jikan (Architecture and Time) (co-writer) (Tokyo, Iwonomi Shoten 2001). UNBUILT/ Hon-kenchiku-sha Shi (UNBUILT/Anti-Architectural History) (Tokyo,To10 publishing, 2001).2002 Qatar National Library, Doha, Qatar. 2000-2006 Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games Ice Hockey Stadium, Turin, Italy in collaboration with Andrea Maffei. 2003-2008 Central Academy of Fine Arts, Museum of Art, Beijing, China. Isozaki Arata no Kenchiku Dangi (Arata Isozaki’s Architecture Discourse) (Tokyo, Rikuyo-sho):1 Kornok Temple (2001 ); 2 Acropolis (2001 ); 3 Villa Adriano (2002); 4 San Vitale (2004); 5 Le Thoronet Abbey (2004); # 6 Notre Dome Cathedral (2002); 7 San Lorenzo (2003); 8 Palazzo Del Te (2001 ); 9 San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (2003); 10 Choux Soil Factory (2001 ); 11 Sir John Soane Museum (2004); 12 Chrysler Building (2001). 2003-2009 China International Practical Exhibition of Architecture Conference Centre, Nanjing, China. 2003-2009 Megaron Concert Hall, Thessaloniki, Greece. 2003-2009 Qingdao Guiyuan Garden, Qingdaa China. 2003-2010 Shanghai Zendai Himalaya Art Centre, Shanghai ,China. 2003 Milano Fiera Redevelopment, Milan, ltaly in collaboration with Andrea Maffei. Kukon no Gyokan (Spacing Among Space: Dialogue with Kazuya Fukuda) (Tokyo,Chikumo-shobò, 2004. ‘Mariinsky II International design Competition St. Petersburg Russia’, GA Document 77 (2004), pp.4-7. ‘Suprematism, zero degree, GA Document 77 (2004),pp. 58-59. 2004 TEDA Two Decade Anniversary Urban Memorial Monument Tianjin, China. ‘Futurism-flux’ , GA Document 77 (2004), pp.28-9. 2004 Jianchua

n Museum Complex, Japanese Army Museum, Jianchuan, China. 2004 University of Central Asia masterplan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan. ‘City In the Air’, GA Document 77 (2004), pp.144-5. 2004-2005 Hotel Puerta America, Madrid, Spain. 2004-2010 Qatar Convention Center, Doha, Qatar. 2005 Kenzo Kange’s death. ‘The Diagonal Strategy, Katsura as Envisioned by “Enshu’s Taste“ in Katsura Imperial Villa, Virginia Ponciroli ed. (Milan, EIecta,2005),pp. 9-41. Japan-ness in Architecture (Cambridge MA. MIT Press, 2006). ‘An Interview with Peter Cook by Arata lsozaki’ in Archigram- ExperimentalArchitecture 1961-74 (Tokyo2005), pp98-1 05. 2006 Diamond Island New Urban Quarter, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. 2006 Xixi Wetland Museum, Hangzhou, China. 2006-2008 Hara Museum ARC, Expansion, Gunma, Japan. 2007 Hanoi Municipal Office Complex, Hanoi, Vietnam. 2007 City Conference Center in Krakow, Krakow, Poland. 2008 New Bologna Station, Bologna, Italy in collaboration with Andrea Maffei. 2008 Shanghai Symphony Hall, Shanghai, China. 2008 CulturaI-Art and Museum Complex, Kyiv, Ukraine. 2008 Hezheng Museum of Natural History, Hezheng, China. 2009 Visiting Professor at Royal Academy of Arts, London, lecture about “Andrea Palladio through the eyes of contemporary architects. 2009 Library Maranello, Italy, in collaboration with Andrea Maffei. 2012 New National Stadium Tokyo in collaborating with Andrea Maffei. 2013 Death Isozaki’s wife and sculptor Aiko Miyawaki. 2013 Artistic Collaboration with Anish Kapoor and the Lucerne Festival (“Ark Nova”). 2013 Visiting professor Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, lesson about “Japanese artistic features”. 2014 Visiting professor Politecnico di Milano, Italy for “Mi/Arch”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 212

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books of Arata Isozaki:

- Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1964-76 First – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1980. 191 p.

- Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1976-84 Second – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1986. 203 p.

- Isozaki, A. Katsura Villa. – Milan: Rizzoli, - 1987. 267 p.

- Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki Works 30: Architectural Models, Prints, Drawings./ A. Isozaki, Y. Ishimoto – Tokyo: Gingko Pr Inc, - 1992. 385 p.

- Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1985-91 Third, PART1 – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1993. 152 p.

- Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki 1985-91 Third, PART2 – Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing, Co., Ltd, - 1993. 115 p.

- Isozaki, A. Unbuilt. - .Tokyo: Toto, – 2001. 272 p.

- Isozaki, A. Arata Isozaki./ A. Isozaki, K. Tadashi Oshima – London: Phaidon Press, - 2009. 272 p.

- Isozaki, A. Japan-ness in Architecture. – Massachusetts: The MIT Press, – 2011. 376 p.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 213

Books about Arata Isozaki:

- Drew, P. Architecture of Arata Isozaki. – London: Granada, 1982. 206 p.

- Nannerini, G. Arata Isozaki, Opere e Progetti/ G. Nannerini, M. Faiferri, D. Mandolesi. – Roma: Cdp editrice, 1996. 230 p.

- Leone Spinta, Saper credere in architettura : trentadue domande a Arata Isozaki. – Napoli: Clean Edizioni, - 2003. 63 p.

- Koshalek, R. Arata Isozaki, Quattro Decenni di Architettura. - Milano: Rizzoli, 2005. 235 p.

- Koolhaas, R. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks…./ R. Koolhaas, H. U. Obrist – Koln: Taschen, - 2011. 684 p.

Books mentioned by Arata Isozaki:

- Tanizaki, J. In praise of shadows. – Tokyo: Leete'S Island Books, - 1977. 56 p.

- Chuang, T. Zhuangzi. – Milano: Feltrinelli, - 1994. 416 p.

- Di Felice, P. Sakuteiki, annotazioni sulla composizione dei giardini. – Firenze: Le Lettere, - 2001. 218 p.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 214

Other books:

- Teiji, I. L’Architettura Giapponese. – Milano: Silva Editoriale d’arte. – 1963. 154 p.

- Okakura, k. The book of tea. – USA: Dover Publications. - 1964. 76 p.

- Quilici, v. L’architettura del costruttivismo. – Bari: Laterza, - 1969. 585 p.

- Eisentein, S. The Film sense. – London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. – 1969. 288 p.

- Jamenson, F. The Prison House of Language. A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. – Princeton: Princeton University Press. – 1974. 302 p.

- Bruschi, A. Bramante. – London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, - 1977. 208 p.

- Erlich, V. Russian Formalism, History-Doctrine. – Yale: Yale University Press. - 1981.195 p.

- Quilici, V. Ivan Leonidov./ V. Quieri, Chan- Magomedov, S. Omarovic. – New York: Institute for Architecture and Urbanism Studies: Rizzoli International. – 1981. 98 p.

- Barthes, R. L’impero dei segni. – Torino: Einaudi, - 1984. 140 p.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 215

- Kurakawa, K. Rediscovering Japanese space. – Trumbull: Weatherhill. - 1988. 217p.

- Zadova, L. A. Tatlin. – London: Thames and Hudson. – 1988. 533 p.

- Schwarz, H. Ivan Ilich Leonidov: la città del sole. – Stuttgart: Oktogon. – 1989. 80 p.

- De Magistris, A. La casa cilindrica di Konstantin Melʹnikov, 1927-1929. – Torino: Celid. – 1998. 71 p.

- Ray, M. Tatlin e la cultura del Vchutemas: 1885-1953, 1920-1930. – Roma: Officina. – 1992. – 121 p.

- Wright , F. L. Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan: The Role of Traditional Japanese Art and Architecture in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. – London: Routledge. – 2000.245 p.

- Maffei, A. Le opere, i progetti e gli scritti Toyo Ito. – Milano: Electa. - 2001. 209 p.

- Calza, G. C. Stile Giappone. – Torino: Einaudi, - 2002. 213 p.

- Calza, G. C. Stile Giappone. - Torino: Einaudi. – 2002. 210 p.

- Maraini, F. Mandala: Giappone, - Milano: Electa, - 2006. 285 p.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 216

- Meriggi, M. Una città Possibile Progetti di Leonidov 1926-1934./ M. Meriggi, O. Macel, D. Schmidt, Ju. Volcok. - Milano: Mondadori Electa. - 2007. 80 p.

- Beltrami, G. Palladio./ G. Beltrami, H. Burns. – Venezia: Marsilio. – 2008. 427 p.

- De Magistris, A. Ivan Leonidov, 1902-1959./ A. De MagistrisI. Korob’ina - Milano: Electa. – 2009. 321 p.

- Fujimoto, S. Sou Fujimoto Recent Project. – Tokyo: GA International ADA Edita. – 2013. 192 p.

- Lissitzky, E. El Lissitzky: L’esperienza della totalità. – Rovereto: Mart; Milano: ELecta. – 2014. – 199 p.

Magazine:

- Hans Hollein. Global Architect // GA Architect. - 1959-1978. – 6

- K. Shinohara. The Japanese Conception of Space// The Japan Architect A+U. – 1972. - 32

- Hans Allen. Frank Lloyd Wright and the Destruction of the Box// Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. – 1979. - 38

BIBLIOGRAPHY 217

- Chang Ching Yu. Japanese Spatial Conception// Japan Architect. – 1984. - 6

- Ando Tadao. Thinking in Ma// El Croquis. – 1993. - 15

- Arata Isozaki. Futurism Flux// GA Architect Special Iusse. - 2004. – 77

- Arata Isozaki. Suprematism, Zero Degree// GA Architect Special Iusse. - 2004. – 77

- Arata Isozaki. Mariiski II International Design Competition// GA Architect Special Iusse. - 2004. - 77

- Arata Isozaki, Mask 1995// GA Architect. - 1991-2000. - 15

- Arata Isozaki. Una Loggia per gli Uffizi// Casabella. - 1999. - 664

- Arata Isozaki. International Art Village Akiyoshidai// Casabella. - 1998. – 669

- Arata Isozaki. International Art Village Akiyoshidai// Casabella. - 1998. - 669

- Arata Isozaki. International Performing Arts Park Shizuoka// Casabella. - 2000. – 676

- Andrea Maffei. Japan Today, una conversazione con Arata Isozaki// Casabella. - 2000. – 676

BIBLIOGRAPHY 218

- Andrea Maffei. Civic Center, Taisha// Casabella. - 2000. - 682

- Arata Isozaki. Centro Culturale Shenzhen, Cina// Casabella. - 2001. – 690

- Yasushiro Ishimoto. La Villa Imperiale di Katzura// Casabella. - 2002. – 702

- Arata Isozaki. Centro Culturale Kitagata, Gifu, Giappone// Casabella. - 2007. – 752

Thesis:

- Konovalova Nina Anatolieva, Preservation and Development of historical traditions in modern architecture of Japan: on a material of World exhibitions. 3th chapter: Russian Avantgarde and Japanese metabolism.

Filmography:

- “The face of Another”, 1966, Hiroshi Teshigahara, set architect Arata Isozaki.

- “Harakiri”, 1962 Masaki Kobayashi.

THANKS

I’m deeply grateful to:

Politecnico di Milano, MArxI Institute of Moscow, Shibaura Technology Tokyo University …without whose this research and my personal

experience would not exist.

Professor Oleg Igorevich Adamov, Professor Alesandro De Magistris, Professor Makoto Kikuchi …for their invaluable support and

advices.

Professor Hajime Yatzuka and Andrea Maffei …who shared their professional and academic

expertise.

Pavel Andreivich Sipkin …for inspiration and insight.

Professor Valeiry Nicolaevich Bgashev …for his generous support in my way to Shibaura

Technology Tokyo University.