2002 Master of Architecture
Contemporary Landscapes

Japan is a small country. For a country that lived in self-imposed isolation until 150 years ago, it has become a great economic power and world cultural interest. Among industrialized countries, Japan is in the process of building the densest and most advanced information society. Most of the 6,800 volcanic island archipelago is mountainous and almost all its flatter territories are densely occupied with cities and agriculture. There are 127 million inhabitants in the country, one and a half times the size of Great Britain. It is a place where one of the oldest and richest cultures in the world, of ancient gods and customs, operates next to the cutting edge of cool modernity. Few other countries have, in the space of a few generations, experienced so much and made so much impact.

My interests traveling through Japan are the relationship between nature, culture, the built environment, and the continuous natural/artificial landscape occurring in contemporary Japan. How can a culture that constructs such precision joinery and manicured gardens ignore issues of land planning? My assumption is that it is not neglect but rather something particular about the Japanese culture that favors an unstructured or self-organizing landscape. Furthermore, it is invisible cultural concepts of natural/artificial that get interpreted in phenomenological traditions such as architecture and landscape.

In order to understand the smooth relationship in Japan between building and landscape, city and suburb, urban and rural, historical and contemporary, I created an itinerary of sections rather than places. While city centers and points of interest (I had to see Utagawa Hiroshige’s drawings) will certainly punctuate the journey, walking, slow trains, and automobiles were used to investigate daily culture, context, and the “junk space” in-between. Like an archaeologist, I cut three strategic swaths across the island as lines of investigation.

Conclusion

Extremities of the contemporary metropolis and authenticity of traditional Japanese culture are appreciated widely all over the globe. Those who traveled beyond metropolitan Tokyo know that urbanization takes over almost all flatter territories of the country, creating a continuous blur from metropolis to rice fields. Investigating this continuity became an examination of Japanese landscape—social, cultural, and architectural.

I had a certain image of Japan before visiting the country. Most of it came from knowledge of its history as well as samples of contemporary architecture in magazines. My impression was that of a highly organized culturally rich and deep country, thinking that things are done in a specific way that would physically be expressed in how their world was organized. Which still is partly true, especially if one looks at the historic heritage of the country. For the foreigner, Tokyo seemed to be the most chaotic city in the world in many ways: architecturally, socially, culturally, economically, politically, etc. But once again, one has to look for the answer in the Japanese religion. Philosophies of rebirth, purification, continuity, and openness influence the life of Japanese people at all levels. Japanese society is evolving fast toward Western qualities of life, seemingly abandoning its own historic heritage. But it is another period of transformation based on continuity and openness that allows society to advance, absorbing the best of the world's achievements. In Japan, consideration of space and time is not limited to physical things but rather for the actions of people inhabiting it. Space is always being transformed to serve purpose the best.

Fellow Experience

Looking back to my SOM Foundation fellowship trip, the most transformational experience was seeing and understanding the tremendous complexity of layering of culture, politics, economy, and time. One could see resilience, tension, and growth created by fast development and layered context. Architecture in general reflects society, and the key to a humane rural and urban environment in context of this complexity is not just the quality of the individual buildings, but the quality of the spaces between them.