23 July 2024
Every year, the RSUA runs the Alan Barnes Scholarship for 3rd Year Undergraduates. The Scholarship offers the opportunity for Architecture students to travel to discover architecture in a destination of their choosing. Find out more about the Alan Barnes Scholarship here.
Fintan Dalton was the winner of the 2023 Alan Barnes Travel Scholarship Award, and chose to travel to Japan. To summarise Fintan’s trip, he created the following short video.
The full video is available to watch on Fintan’s YouTube channel.
He also shared his report in the July issue of Perspective Magazine. You can read the full article below.
Tokyo, the mystical ancient capital of Japan is a metropolis of sound, people, and never-ending movement. The tempo of the commute is set by flickering screens in peripheral vision high in the air advertising products you can’t do without. The street is an accumulation of detail – intersecting seedy backstreets, love hotels and tightly packed ramen joints crammed with insatiable customers – juxtaposed with the traditional, shrines, temples and urban artefacts. The ancient culture and the ultra-modern sit easily together, criss-crossed by high-speed trains, Toyota taxis and overhead electrical wires.
Tokyo was the subject of my research. Focusing on the street scape, the collective architecture of people, I aimed to uncover and learn from the distinctly Japanese qualities that are the product of a continued reference and respect for its culture and tradition.
The approach to my research, alongside sketching and writing, was to create a short documentary styled video that would capture the raw authenticity of Tokyo’s streets and Japanese architecture.
With my pocket-sized Sony camera, the viewfinder defined a zone of focus in a city with an infinite gallery of things to look at. With video I could merge scenes, collect fleeting moments, and show what is difficult and, perhaps, impossible to adequately translate into words. Video allows one to experience, it has the power to completely enthral you in a moment from the past and a place far away. The powerful effect of capturing and framing moments and streets focuses the gaze and awareness on the elements that create these urban landscapes.
Through wandering the streets of Tokyo and observing supposed banality, beauty revealed itself. Streets are incredibly familiar sights in the urban environment. Streets are a shared experience that are involved in all our ideas and images concerning this city. What I find very interesting is the combination of the elements that create streetscapes. Trees that rise behind fences, potted plants simply arranged at a doorstep, the conversation between materials.
It’s very clear that streets aren’t simply for utilitarian needs, but the meditation of these landscapes situate us temporarily and spatially. In many cases the resulting urban form or structure is not a pure expression of intention but the imperfect consequence of cause and happenstance. Streets are the intentions and calculations of many different parties at work in a city. However, this is not a flaw. Instead they create a more interesting, spatially richer city, endowing it with unexpectedness, newness, ambiguity and irony.
In Northern Ireland, and the majority of western culture, we privilege the being over the non-being. What is spoken to what is left unsaid. Shinto traditions infused Japanese culture with respect for the non-being. ‘Kami’ are spirits that inhabit objects, structures and phenomena. They are also sometimes the force within the living or the dead which leads to a deeper cultural appreciation behind the inanimate and invisible. This force of nature and awareness of all objects and their embodied meaning informs a way of living, one of self-awareness, of reverence and of deeper appreciation. Materials, objects and nature have much more spiritual respect. This respect developed ideas of space and atmosphere through Japan’s architectural history.
While in Tokyo I explored the Japanese concept of Oku. Oku, meaning Inwardness, originates from the native religion of Japan, Shintoism. Inwardness is the concept that what is the deepest or most hidden is of the most importance. This idea of inwardness, does not mean the physical centre of things which opposes the western view of the centre or most prominent as the highest order of importance.
It was in Kyoto where I grasped this concept in its origin. I visited the Fushimi Inari Shrine where there are as many Red Torii gates as there are steps up the mountain leading to the shrine. These Torii gates weave through the forest appearing as something so natural yet so divinely otherworldly. The centre – the most inward – of Kyoto is at the top of this mountain, on the outskirt of the city. However, it is not the physical shrine that is the sacred piece, but the journey through the early morning fog, the whistling calls of birds, the moss which grows over a stone, and the tranquillity of the city below. It is a feeling unique to each one of us, carried in our being and forever impressed in our minds.
Oku aligns with a phenomenological approach to design. Interacting with our senses, understanding something that speaks to our being rather than satisfying our eyes. Oku is the process of approach, the in-between and the movement to subsequent spaces, a non-directional wandering like approach endowed with mystery, ambiguity and surprise unfolding as we take our next step. In Tokyo, this inwardness revealed itself in the developing feeling of place, awareness and understanding. It is not the first time we walk through the non-centric street patterns, gaps and intersecting streets, but the many times, that it constantly reveals itself – its problems, personality, desires and optimism. The journey to the inwardness is non-directional, to a probably infinite end.
I aimed to understand how the architecture of Japan developed through its continued appreciation of its culture and tradition. I wanted to gain insight on how a nations identity can thrive or be conserved in contemporary methods. There was no better place to explore this concept than in Japan, a nation with a prolonged history of a strong identity.
The realisation of the Japan-ness problematic began in the 20th century, most intensely at the beginning of the 1930’s. Modernisation in architecture intersected with the insular Japan. Then, Japanese architects began to synthesise the Modern and the Japanese while modernist architecture was oppressed. The state favoured imperialistic nationalist architecture that would also establish a presence in their invasions of Asia.
It was after WW2 when the Japan-ness problematic was at the forefront of Japanese architectural discussion.
Kenzo Tange, a polemicist, led the debate. In Hiroshima, out of the ruins of an apocalypse, Tange conjured a nationalist image.
I took the bullet train from Kyoto to Hiroshima to observe for myself this fundamental piece of modernist Japanese architecture. There was a subtle integration of modernist, nationalistic and Shintoist ideas expressed in his building. The architectural language of the International Style was reordered in a Japanese context. The modernist elements were integrated with plans, ratios and references of important historical Japanese works.
While in Hiroshima I also visited the Mitaki-dera Temple. Originally built in 1526 in the Wakayama prefecture, the pagoda was moved to Hiroshima in 1951 to console the souls of victims who died in the atomic bombing.
On the slopes of Mt Mitaki was a succession of buildings, although calling them buildings is misguided. They were of the landscape, perched over a stream of water or underneath the red autumn leaves. These were spaces endowed by nature – not wrested from – and in complete harmony with the surrounding landscape. Screens, openings and framed structure – a spatial act of construction, delicately defined edges. Here, architecture is not the protagonist, it does not declare its presence or dominates over the environment. It is one with ritual and nature.
I returned to Tokyo to explore more works by Kenzo Tange, Kunio Maekawa, Le Corbusier and other architects who built in this post war period. It was Kenzo Tange’s Yoyogi Olympic Complex that struck me as a masterpiece of this era. In the destruction of tradition Tange rehabilitated the traditional. The colossal suspended roof is reminiscent of the great halls of Japans wonderful heritage. The complex was a landmark creation of substantial uniqueness that no longer relied on exoticism or identifiable brutalist themes. This dynamic Dionysian space of competition was the resolution to the problematic of Japan-ness.
But in the busy districts of Tokyo, Architecture has begun to dissolve and become the foundations of a media-space, the structure for signs to be displayed, a framework for experiential marketing and advertising real estate. This in itself has defined a contemporary identity of Japan, a collection of images rather than a singular declaration of what it is.
Since the rapid growth of technology, the world has become a series of archipelagos, with multiple dispersed and disconnected centres. Inevitably, the insular Japan has become one of these mutually heterogeneous configurations. That is to say that the very border that once gave substance to Japan-ness has become porous and penetrable by outer influences.
The persistent self-reflection in Japanese architecture has revealed sensibilities and qualities moving beyond a singular declaration of Japan’s identity. It has freed itself from the obligation of paying homage to traditional forms and from the gravitational pull of American and European thought. Contemporary Japanese architecture embodies a wide variety of design intentions, sensibilities, confidence, and purposes that could appear as different as the buildings themselves.
The most celebrated contemporary architecture of Japan make a critical commentary on the present day urban and cultural conditions. And often they manifest a special fragmentary quality. In this architecture, as in the cultural and urban landscape in which these works have been conceived, scattered elements, incongruous motifs and materials, fractional and membranous surfaces are liberated, neither in opposition or reconciliation. Japan may have finally found its true Oku.
I want to sincerely thank the RSUA and the Alan Barnes travel scholarship for granting me this opportunity to explore Japan, enrich my knowledge and understanding. This trip has had a significant impact on my architectural thinking and will continue to shape my future as an architect and designer.
I hope my report and documentary will spur curiosity, discussion, and provide insight of Japanese architecture and philosophies to architects and students.
