Modernist Design

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Introduction

European and American modernists who reached Japan in the first half of the twentieth century reported finding a completed version of the thing they had been arguing for. Modular coordination, post and beam structure, movable partitions, standardised components, uninterrupted floor planes and the absence of applied ornament were already ordinary in Japanese domestic building and had been for centuries.

Japan did not supply modernism with its program. It supplied a several hundred year old inhabited demonstration that the programme was liveable, at a moment when the movement in Europe had mostly built prototypes.

This article references Walter Gropius's essay "Architecture in Japan," published in Perspecta in 1955 after three months of travel sponsored by the International House of Japan under a Rockefeller grant.[1]

Gropius in Japan

Gropius arrived in Japan in 1954, near the end of a long period of travel during which he had been comparing how different countries were converting from pre-industrial to industrialized ways of living. He records that the conversion had generally gone badly, and that the disadvantages were usually more visible than the advantages.[2]

His account of Japan is the exception in that survey. He describes a culture in which the standard of form was broad enough to be shared across an entire society without suppressing individual variation, and reports finding this more clearly there than anywhere else he had traveled.[3]

In Architecture in Japan, Gropius writes that the old handmade Japanese house already possessed the essential features being demanded of a modern prefabricated house, namely modular coordination through the standard mat and movable wall panels.[4] He gives the mat as roughly three feet by six.[5]

He extends the observation to the state of the industry in 1954. Standardized component parts for a wooden house could still be bought on the open market in Japan and assembled on site, and the flexibility of those parts was sufficient to deliver both a common form language and unlimited individual variation.[6]

On structure, he describes a simple skeleton of posts and beams in which nearly all interior and exterior walls are removable and non-structural, with wind bracing concealed under the roof and concealed joints giving the frame its resistance to typhoons.[7]

Module

Gropius reserves his strongest claim for the dimensional system. He calls the modular construction of the Katsura period the most subtle then known, placing it above Egyptian and Greek practice, and describes rooms laid out on multiples of the standard tatami with all building parts dimensioned on multiples of the column thickness, which itself varied with the size of the space and its span.[8]

A module that governs floor area, bay spacing, panel size and member section at once produces interchangeable parts without a factory. European modernism spent the 1920s pursuing that condition through industrial standardization. Japan had reached it through a unit of floor covering.

Independent characteristics

Gropius rejects the then common Western assumption that Japanese architecture is a branch of Chinese architecture, arguing that the residential house and the tea house in particular show independent characteristics: absence of symmetry, human scale achieved by breaking the axis and changing direction, effects of surprise, and openness and flexibility of plan.[9] He rates the best examples at the highest cultural order, and says he did not experience an architectural spirit of comparable rank again until he reached the Acropolis on the journey home.[10]

On the garden, he describes Ryōan-ji as a rectangle of about thirty by seventy-nine feet holding fifteen stones in raked gravel, and reports that its scale reads as monumental despite its size because the stones suggest potential forces in balance rather than a finished arrangement.[11]

Groupius does not present Japan as a source of new ideas. He presents it as evidence that a position already taken was correct. He closes a long evening of discussion with Japanese architects by repeating a piece of Zen advice: "Develop an infallible technique, and then place yourself at the mercy of inspiration."[12] He then states that the direction of his own thinking, as worked out in the Bauhaus, had been startlingly confirmed by what he had seen.[13]

Further Reading

  • Japanese objects entered European design circulation through the international expositions of the mid nineteenth century, producing the taste known as japonisme.
  • Frank Lloyd Wright saw the Hō-ō-den, a half-scale Byōdō-in pavilion, at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
  • Bruno Taut arrived in Japan in 1933 and wrote on the Katsura Imperial Villa, published in English as Houses and People of Japan (1937).
  • Charlotte Perriand went to Japan in 1940 as a design adviser to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and her 1941 exhibition Tradition, Selection, Creation reworked her own furniture in local materials.
  • Walter Gropius visited in 1953 and 1954, published the Perspecta essay in 1955, and produced Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (1960) with Tange Kenzō and photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro.

Present Day Reading Notes

  • He asserts that Japan went undisturbed by outside wars for over a thousand years under roughly one form of government. This was a popular sentiment at the time, but inaccurate, as feudal Japan experienced centuries of intensive internal civil wars (such as the Sengoku period) and underwent multiple systemic changes in governance between the imperial court and various military shogunates.[14]
  • His treatment of Zen is a period artifact, framed for a mid-century Western readership and shaped by the same postwar reception that produced the popular Zen literature of the 1950s.
  • His economics are specific to 1954 and should not be read as timeless. He describes a country he calls one of the poorest and most crowded in the world, a construction sector where handwork remained the cheapest method, and a craft workforce that mechanization would have displaced faster than it could be retrained.[15] His warning to Japanese architects, that they should not discard their tradition while adapting to industry, was addressed to that situation.[16]

References

  1. ↑ Walter Gropius, "Architecture in Japan," Perspecta, Vol. 3 (1955), pp. 8–21, 79–80. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566830
  2. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 9.
  3. ↑ Gropius 1955, pp. 9–10.
  4. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 10.
  5. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 10.
  6. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 21.
  7. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 80.
  8. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 80.
  9. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 14.
  10. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 14.
  11. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 79.
  12. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 18.
  13. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 18.
  14. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 9.
  15. ↑ Gropius 1955, pp. 10, 80.
  16. ↑ Gropius 1955, p. 80.

Further Reading

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