Learning from Japan

[imomus]

"Learning from Japan" is a theme I keep coming back to, a sermon I keep preaching. Opposed to the crude view I call "Japan Original Sin" (people who harp on about research whaling, war criminal shrines and textbook lacunae, and with whom one eventually, inevitably, ends up playing a futile game of Atrocity Snap), the "Learning from Japan" meme simply suggests that Japan's difference from Western practice is valuable, precisely, to the West. We can't learn anything from people who think as we do. For the same reason, men can learn more from women than they can from other men.



The architecture world will get a chance to learn from Japan -- and from a woman -- in 2010; SANAA's Kazuo Sejima has been chosen as the curator of The Venice Architecture Biennial. I'm pretty sure she's the first Japanese to get this job; she's certainly the first woman to do so. A clue to her focus comes in a brief statement she's released saying that "a significant point of departure could be the concept of boundaries and the adaptation of space... it could be argued that contemporary architecture is an afterthought and perhaps an easing of borders themselves." That's a fresh thought already; architecture as an easing of borders in a time when they're generally stiffening.



I blogged last week about a new book from Lars Müller, The SANAA Studios 2006-2008. Learning from Japan: Single-Story Urbanism. My title today comes from there. The blurb explains: "During three spring seasons between 2006 and 2008, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa taught at the School of Architecture at Princeton. The SANAA Studios explored Japan's contemporary society as a context for architecture and considered its particular perspective on space, the personal and the public realm. Design exercises were situated within the specific demographics and social variables of three distinct sites in Japan...

"As an overall thematic it asks: What can we learn from SANAA?" Browsing the book at Pro-qm, I got the strong impression that what we can learn from SANAA is something to do with a relaxing, elegant lightness and understatement, something to do with minimalism and gentleness, and something to do with a feeling of calm that permeates Japan very noticeably whenever you spend time there. Iwan Baan's photographs of SANAA buildings filled with schoolchildren or middle-aged culture tourists made me think of Alasdair Gray's excellent maxim: "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

And most important of all

Well, you raise some good points, but they're all likely to become tail-chasingly paradoxical when examined a little more closely. I'm reminded of the Howard Devoto maxim: "My mind ain't so open that anything could crawl right in". Which he followed, incidentally, with another one: "The last place to loose yourself is in the world where we all... swim, swim, swim, swim..."

If absolutely anything can crawl right into my mind, is it still "my mind", or is it just a swamp and a sponge? I think the next line provides guidance: loose yourself rather than "lose" yourself, but don't do it in the crowd, the place where everyone else is doing it. Choose somewhere somewhat marginal. But didn't I choose this giver-of-advice carefully so that he would give me the advice I was already inclined to take? Certainly! And that's exactly how I would expect my own maxims to be received: by people who basically agree already, but hadn't quite formulated their beliefs as neatly as that. I long ago gave up trying to battle and bully people (on bully-tin boards, for instance) around to beliefs they find toxic.

Nevertheless, and with all that said, the Japanese do think differently from me. My respect for them is based on a mutual complementarity, not on overlap. I really do "like how I don't like how their minds work". And I'm quite proud of formulating it that way. It was useful to me to encapsulate quite a complicated relationship in nine words. It might even be useful to you, who knows? You might end up liking how I don't think the way you do, rather than being irritated by it, or trotting out the umpteen billionth charge of HYPOCRISY.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

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On re-listening I see that it actually says:

The last place to lose yourself is in the world where we all cling

So I heard what I wanted to hear, basically.

[st-ranger.livejournal.com]

Problem is, our minds aren't so much "mine and yours" as "ours" as mirror neurons and text and pictures and sensory information project our thought from person to person in a global web. It's not so easy to tell where your mind ends and mine begins despite the ocean and the continent between our bodies and the two very different brains we do not share.