Japanese postmodernism: Ghosts of a future past

Wakabayashi does not need scale for effect – his tiny Maruto 15 and 17 buildings in Kyoto are equally intoxicating in their alien eeriness, and are perfect examples of his total impregnation of form with evocative ornament, absorbing all of one’s attention when walking along the streets on which they sit.

The most internally coherent and intriguing body of work from the period was produced by another Kyoto-based architect, Shin Takamatsu, whose obsessively composed and detailed buildings are best known in the West from the Piranesian, chiaroscuro drawings he produced to illustrate them. The drawings do give a strong impression of his rather dark vision of architectural space, but it is only through visiting his buildings that one can fully absorb their extraordinary richness. His works are psychological journeys made through the act of architecture. He fuses an exceptional range of references, together with newly invented motifs, into designs that rival the most iconographically elaborate of Europe’s fin-de-siècle architecture, only here they create a language of overloaded technology crashing together with subjective poetics, personal angst and history. It is a fusion that only late 20th-century Japan could have produced.

Takamatsu’s Syntax retail centre, also in Kyoto but now demolished

Two of Takamatsu’s Kyoto projects, the Pharaoh Dental Clinic (1984) and Syntax retail building (1988–90, now demolished), express these qualities perfectly. Both relatively small in scale – with Pharaoh being positively minute – they are powerfully expressive forms, verging on being frighteningly so in their intensity. The fierce effect his buildings elicit in visitors was always carefully calibrated by Takamatsu, who has often described the thrilling tensions which pulse in his structures, and which draw passers-by towards them with wary interest. Of Syntax, he said that it was a ‘space that is menacing, the parts menacing the whole, the whole menacing the parts, and even the parts menacing each other, just as the whole menaces itself’. Takamatsu produced an astonishing body of work, and much like his Kyoto counterpart Tadao Ando, the precision and consistency, while constantly inventing and inquiring, is astonishing. 

At the other end of the country, on the northern island of Hokkaido, Kiko Mozuna built an entire oeuvre, mostly around the municipality of Kushiro, based on his own esoteric cosmic principles. Each of his buildings, and his architectural-philosophical ideas about the nature of architecture, were explored through exquisitely complex, colourful and layered drawings, so intricate that they often approach the visual potency of mandalas. The blending of influences explored through these drawings is clearly visible in projects such as the Kushiro Municipal Museum (1984), with its strange recollection of ziggurats, mounds and symbolic Japanese forms, as well as the pre-ruined Nusamai Junior High School (1986), the hyperactive, symbolic overload of Kushiro Fisherman’s Wharf (1989) and the stacked, scaled architectures of his Kushiro Castle Hotel (1987).

In Tokyo, Kengo Kuma produced the bizarre M2 building (1991), a sublimely surreal nightmare of architectural-historical forms blown out of scale and crashed together in aggressive, purposeful abandon. Originally a car showroom for Mitsubishi, it has since been repurposed as a funeral parlour – a supremely appropriate programme for this uncanny intervention into the Tokyo cityscape. 

Toyokazu Watanabe’s monumental concrete or steel-grey buildings seem to come straight out of a film by Studio Ghibli, blending Japanese and Western references with an eye for a kind of fantasy picturesque. His relationship to references evolved from his Standard House 001 in Nakano (1979), which took Adolf Loos’s unbuilt tomb for Max Dvorak, built its general form, but transformed it through the application of a different materiality (his trademark grey) and numerous domestic apertures, leaving it hovering somewhere between Japanese suburbia and fin-de-siècle Vienna.

Kihoku Observatory by Takasaki Masaharu – ‘One almost expects its columns to start rising up and down’

This transformation of precedents rapidly became more complex with his Okamuro House of 1981, merging a suburban house with an observatory and a coffered dome, in a combination that Charles Jencks has described as ‘hallucinatory’. By the time he was building large-scale works such as the Bunka No Sato Cultural Centre on Tsushima Island (1990), the awesome Akita City Gymnasium (1991), the Kamo Culture Centre (1994) and the Kamiyubetsu Folk Museum (1996), each of his projects had become a veritable carnival of incorporated references, blended into fantasy worlds specifically crafted for his built endeavours.

Between 1979 and 1984, Takefumi Aida created a series of houses in Tokyo based on toy blocks. With the intention of rediscovering a sense of playfulness in the act of design and in the associations conjured up by a building, he created structures that in fact come across as rather sinister in the outsize scaling of familiar elements. In their piling-up and profusion, the implied toy blocks start to recall the partially ruined and re-appropriated symbolic ceremonial structures of lost civilisations, as if a monstrously large and melancholic child was attempting to reconstruct Mycenea or Machu Picchu. Aida said that ‘the extent to which a building can be the manifestation of an architect’s sensibility determines the importance of architecture in a given culture’. As is evidenced by his houses and other works highlighted here, this was a moment in architectural time in which a culture gave seemingly unlimited opportunities for the most eccentric and gloriously impractical of sensibilities.

In a full-blown fusion of Lebbeus Woods’s parasitic architecture and Japanese science-fiction series Gundam, Makoto Sei Watanabe’s Aoyama Technical College (1990) in Tokyo barely registers as a building at all, for all the world looking like a giant robot insect that has landed in Tokyo and is feasting on the chaos of its urban condition, tearing things apart under its fragmented limbs.

Even more extraordinary is Takasaki Masaharu’s Kihoku Observatory (1995) outside Kanoya City, a vast concatenation of sculptural forms in concrete that is so dynamically expressive, being somehow both spaceship- and insect-like, that one almost expects its columns to start rising up and down, steaming like pistons, or stomping slowly across the ground like huge legs. Masaharu has said that ‘the future is imagination and the present is a melting point of symbiosis’, and in this project he managed to embody this notion of a complex present suffused with strange visions of an imagined future.

Designed in 1988, Hiroshi Hara’s Umeda Sky Building is a pair of interlinked towers in Osaka that was originally meant to be twice as big, with four interlinked towers. The tops of the buildings are stacked with imagery of clouds, and the profiles of smaller architectures, like literal villages in the sky. Hara calls a giant circular void in the bridge between the two buildings a ‘vestige remaining from where a spaceship had flown away’. Through the centre of this never-to-be-used docking platform rise a pair of outdoor escalators, high above the city. The towers’ fragmented, collage-like curtain walls look like they are made from a collection of varied, flattened buildings. As was Hara’s intention (the original scheme was called ‘Sky City’), the project grows out of the Osaka skyline like an imaginary Calvino-esque extension of the city, levitating over Umeda as an impossibly odd reminder of a time that itself seems impossible if looked back on from the mindset of today.

There were many architects working in this period whose careers have flourished during the intervening years – some, such as Kengo Kuma, reinventing themselves to match changing stylistic sentiments. But the kind of works, and most of the architects, highlighted here were products of an unreproducible moment in time, in a culture that was primed for not just allowing, but actively catalysing the most unlikely forms of architectural brilliance. From the unhinged logic of the 1980s economic bubble, Tokyo, Kyoto and much of Japan has been left with a built legacy of wild originality that rivals any of the great flowerings of architectural creativity in human history.  

This article was first published in Icon 167

His works are psychological journeys made through the act of architecture

The parts menace the whole, the whole menaces the parts

The towers’ fragmented, collage-like curtain walls look like they are made from a collection of varied, flattened buildings

The Umeda Sky Building in Osaka by Hiroshi Hara, complete with escape hole for spaceships