Tea in the trees
Mar. 12th, 2007 09:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
The building you see to the right is my current favourite structure, favourite public place, favourite built poem, favourite reproach to the ugliness of our built environments. It's the Ichiya-Tei (One-Night Teahouse), designed and built by Terunobu Fujimori in 2003. Terunobu is a 60 year-old architect and academic (he teaches at Tokyo University) who didn't start building until he was in his 40s. Before that he seems to have spent his time photographing accidental roadside architecture, admiring huts of various kinds, influencing Atelier Bow Wow, teaching and writing.Terunobu took the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale by storm when he turned the Japanese pavilion in the Giardini into a room full of wattle and weave huts with leaves poking out all over them. You may recognize his 2004 Too-High Teahouse, a teahouse which is also a treehouse, from Click Opera's back pages.
I'll let Icon magazine pick up the story:
"Amid the wall-to-wall statistics and urban planning diagrams – the Biennale’s theme was “the city”– the Japanese Pavilion was a delightful relief, albeit one straight out of left field. Here were oddly shaped houses sprouting leeks or dandelions and models of tea rooms carved out of tree stumps
"Fujimori’s more recent buildings embrace more wholeheartedly the imaginative potential of ancient structures for contemporary times. Buildings such as the Akino Fuku Art Museum (1997), the Futo-an pottery workshop (2001) and the Lamune hot spring house (2005) are inspired by an incredibly diverse set of influences: 6th-century Japanese temples, the Neolithic stones of Callanish in Scotland, European thatched cottages and Malian rammed-earth mosques.
“The Japanese tradition is in some ways mature,” says Fujimori, “but I’m interested in the period before this tradition became established. I believe that for humans all over the world the basic gesture was the hut, and this was the same everywhere before distinctive architectural styles emerged.”
"The most interesting aspects of cities and the most compelling buildings are not the product of architects. The smooth surfaces and clinical thinking representative of first modernism and now digital design, as far as Fujimori is concerned, lack essential character."
You can say that again. Let's climb a tree for a cup of tea.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 09:43 am (UTC)I guess the blue 0¥ houses would be at one end of this category.
I just walked by some amazingly well made and homely structures between okubo and takadanobaba.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 11:39 am (UTC)Close to Yoyogi.
fujimori
Date: 2007-03-12 09:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 12:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 12:25 pm (UTC)almost everywhere i guess
Date: 2007-03-12 12:33 pm (UTC)Somehow I think that there is a direct lineage between these farmers buildings (the structures must go back centuries) and buildings by Lloyd Wright or Vanderrohe.
The architect and I have promised to each other to go on tour one day in the U.S. of A to discover how right we are.
In the meantime I will look up at trees, and wonder why Mr Fujimoro can't built tea houses in a few of the so many trees here in Berlin, in stead of having to bring them to a creative man's cemetery like the venice biennale.
greetings from the near east of Berlin,
rinus
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 01:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 01:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 02:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 06:55 pm (UTC)"As long as you have a backlit exit sign and no monkeys blocking the twig ladder, sir..."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 02:12 pm (UTC)Anyway, not that the viewpoint of the artist matters (can we believe what someone says about their beliefs anyway?), I would love to see these in person.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 02:49 pm (UTC)Yes, they're dialectical, and contain the digital even in its absence. In that sense they're examples of the "post-bit atom" (http://imomus.com/thought110600.html) and of "fake folk".
They're also examples of what we were talking about yesterday, the idea that Islam contains postmodernism.
I think they're niche structures, and very much express, by means of texture, a class preference. I think that class is probably Fujimori's own class, a bourgeois bohemian post-materialist group. (Also mine, which is why I like them.) So in a way the simplicity is deceptive. This is the kind of simplicity that only appeals to people who have been rich, then decided poverty is cool as a kind of "other". A downwardly-mobile LOHAS-minded class, affluent enough to travel to Africa to study vernacular architecture -- and affluent enough to be excluded from any comparison with the homeless, or Tuscan farmers, or other people who make structures which, at first glance, might look similar to these. You've got to go over the hill and back down the other side to make this sort of architecture.
But one reason I like it is that I don't feel any contempt here, only admiration. There's admiration for the archittetura povera it's inspired by (ancient as well as poor). There's respect for the otherness of other cultures and ages. And there's respect for the client, who undoubtedly comes from the same class niche the architect does. By never going mainstream, Fujimori never has to learn contempt or compromise.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 03:13 pm (UTC)The physical buildings themselves? The curves and lines and textures and materials? No, they don't.
The buildings came to be built perhaps because of a response to the digital in the mind of the architect. But if they themselves 'contain' the digital at all it is in a purely transcendent sense.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 03:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 03:40 pm (UTC)Thesis
Antithesis
Synthesis
Materialist dialectics, not the idealist kind! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 04:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 07:19 pm (UTC)Your recent ‘dialectics’ still seem distinctly transcendent to me: the digital isn’t a physical part of the buildings photographed above, and the postmodern – to quote myself:...the lack of a common denominator - truth, God, progress, whatever - leading to self-reflexive finite systems, constructing and refining their own meaning and value – plainly isn’t an element of the Qu’ran, the Five Pillars, or Sharia etc. And if Hegel wishes to take his cues from Heraclitus (‘The Obscure’ to his friends), good luck to him. But in following them (‘contains’, ‘is’) you similarly deny the logical law of non-contradiction without a convincing explanation; just jargon. Forgive me, but it comes across like ossified dogmatism, useful for Marx in challenging traditional religious and political authority and exalting qualitative novelty and ‘progressive’ development, but now just the mechanical repetition of empty phrases. I see that the essences of things can include differing and opposed elements and processes, but Islam and postmodernism? Postmodernism can’t time travel, as much as it would like to. We need to differentiate contradictions that can harmonise and reinforce one another from those which don’t; those that perhaps even tend towards the destruction of the complex they constitute. God forbid.
Can we content ourselves with saying postmodernism influences Muslims and shake hands like good fellows? Or will you persist in following a sixth century BC mystic?
(I know you will respond well and engagingly: unfortunately I have quite a bit of work to do, and won’t be able to respond in kind.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 08:55 pm (UTC)It made things clearer for me too! For instance, Engels' idea of "the negation of the negation" is what I was stumbling towards here (http://imomus.livejournal.com/256533.html), but not expressing so well. Except that there I called it "coming full circle", but the idea of a spiral is much better. You come 360 degrees back to property being property after declaring that property is theft, but you're in a new place, higher up, perhaps.
Far from being stuck on Heraclitus, though, my way of thinking about this stuff involves Saussure, Derrida and Lefebvre. The idea that semantic oppositions produce each other's meaning. Semantic opposition is a productive force, perhaps the only one.
I see that the essences of things can include differing and opposed elements and processes, but Islam and postmodernism? Postmodernism can’t time travel, as much as it would like to.
That's exactly my point. That's why I'm saying that it makes no sense to call Islamic societies of today "medieval". Today's Postmodernism and today's Islam exist at the same historical moment. Neither of them needs to time travel to encounter the other. The version of Islam we have now is one which has had a qualitative change effected on it ("radicalization") by the postmodern West. It is "produced" by its opposition to this West. And the West is "produced" by its self-conception in relation to Islam. That's what the War on Terror is all about -- producing a new version of the West. The removal of our civil liberties, for instance, or the revival of torture -- this is the very process of an introjection into the West of the conditions of Islamic society, and therefore, of the Islamic world's introjection of the West into itself, and so on.
The postmodern West produces postmodern Muslims! And postmodern Muslims produce the postmodern West!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 11:16 pm (UTC)I remain unanswered on many points, and certainly unconvinced for the moment.
Talk of time travel certainly wasn't to imply Islam is medieval, but that its essence (the Qu'ran, the Five Pillars, Sharia etc.) was set before postmodernism, and that in nature and precedence it doesn't admit of influence, co-mixture or maculation. But this was perhaps only necessary while you were being Heraclitian in your illogicism.
Swinging between 'Islam' and 'Muslims', and 'the West' and 'Westerners' remains a massive problem in this discussion.
Also,
The version of Islam we have now is one which has had a qualitative change effected on it ("radicalization") by the postmodern West. It is "produced" by its opposition to this West.
...really unsettles me: it's representative of the pernicious picture of Islam (that's Muslims; people) that Blair, Bush, and the Sun like to paint. 1.3 billion radicalised - read 'hostile' - Islamicists? No; most of them are kind, peaceful people. Or maybe I'm a naive schlep.
I could keep going on and on... So could you... And I think we both need to be more rigorous and precise...
Good night, and thank you for such great writing.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-13 02:39 am (UTC)Following the holy Fathers, we unanimously teach and confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity; "like us in all things but sin." He was begotten from the Father before all ages as to his divinity and in these last days, for us and for our salvation, was born as to his humanity of the virgin Mary, the Mother of God.
We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division, or separation. The distinction between natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis.
Seems we've found a religion tailor-made for you!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-13 03:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-13 03:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 06:39 pm (UTC)but i thought Weber was your hero!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 06:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 07:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 02:14 pm (UTC)dream house
Date: 2007-03-12 02:42 pm (UTC)I went to a river near my house, and made a flat bubble like nest that
I could stay inside easily. after I left, I was hoping that beavers will
come and start to live there. there were no beavers in the river
but I thought there were.
when I saw acconci's river float structure, I remembered about
my dream beaver house.
now my dream is to have a tree house for nap room, and riverhouse
for sorking my feet in the summer time. it will be nice, if house can be
like little cell bubbles connected and spread in the forest near river.
I would plant some mugwort near treehouse so I can have good dreams!
Re: dream house
Date: 2007-03-12 02:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 02:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 02:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 03:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 06:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 07:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-13 03:27 am (UTC)I suppose if you have to be addicted to something then being reliant on beauty isn't that bad.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-13 03:30 am (UTC)Re:Re: dream house
Date: 2007-03-12 04:23 pm (UTC)here is a tree house toy.
Re: dream house
Date: 2007-03-12 07:01 pm (UTC)Re: dream house
Date: 2007-03-12 07:33 pm (UTC)Re: dream house
Date: 2007-03-13 12:24 am (UTC)You sound fun... why stay anonymous? It's like I always say, "Don't be a Vito in the floorboards, baby!"