[01] white screen

Introduction

[02] Nihon to Seiyō – Japan and the West

I have divided my lecture this evening into five parts, five short studies describing how Western

architecture influenced Japan and how, in turn, Japanese architecture influenced the West. These I

have called: Introduction, Adoption and Rejection, Connection, Interaction and Assimilation. And I

end with what I have boldly called a meditation on the future of Western architecture. It is brief.

Don’t worry. This Zen Buddist allusion is not without coincidence because I believe that the

prevailing hegemony of the Western tradition in architecture needs to be questioned and as we in

this country face, once again, a housing crisis, fresh but not necessarily new ways of thinking need

to be adopted.

[03] My five short studies cover a little over one hundred and twenty years of change which began

in 1853 with the sailing into Edo (later Tokyo) bay of Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships. The

manner in which the American ships were differently perceived is telling. [04] The ensuing

Convention of Kanagawa, signed between the United States and the Japanese shōgunate

government in March 1854, forced Japan to open trading ports to American vessels, a move

compounded by the Anglo-Japanese Convention signed six months later, thus effectively ending, for

Japan, two hundred and twenty years of self-imposed seclusion, known as sakoku. [05] Further

Treaties of Amity and Commerce, known as the Ansei Treaties, were signed in 1858 with the United

States, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Russia, opening up treaty ports to foreign merchants

who soon established themselves there — [06] initially Hakadote and Shimoda, but after 1858, [07] Nakasaki, Niigata, Hyogo and Kanagawa. It was another ten years before the bakumatsu or late-

shōgunate government eventually fell and the Emperor reinstated, thus beginning the Meiji era and

Japan’s modernisation. It is extraordinary to think that this was only one hundred and fifty years

ago. Until then Japan was still essentially a medieval feudal state, so to help the country develop

the bakumatsu and Meiji governments hired foreigners known as oyatoi gaikokujin and it is with

these that we start. [08]

5 minutes

© Neil Jackson 2017

1

Part 1. Introduction

Thomas Blake Glover, Thomas James Waters and Josiah Conder

Glover, the first of our three, was sent by the trading company Jardine Matheson to Nagasaki in the

autumn of 1859, a year after the Ansei Treaty had first opened up that port. There he soon set up

his own trading business. He had been living in China [09] and the house which he built in

Nagasaki differed little from what he would have known in Shanghai and other Western settlements.

The style was, in fact, very dated, reflecting the colonial architecture which had been exported in the

early years of the century and was based upon images provided in copy books such as John

Buonarotti Papworth’s Rural Residences, published in 1818.

The Glover house was called Ipponmetsu, after the single pine tree around which its L-shaped plan

turned. The tree has now gone and the house much extended, but the building which the local

carpenter, Hidenoshin Koyama, devised was most probably based on drawings which Glover

supplied. [10] However, this being Nagasaki, Koyama would have known the Dutch trading

settlement of Dejima which, until recently, it had been strictly out of bounds to all Japanese —

except prostitutes. However there is little that is obviously Western about the buildings at Dejima

except for the fireplaces, hinged doors and imported glass windows. [11] These fittings and fixtures

are included at the Glover House, as are lattice-work arcades and wooden keystones. The simple

timber columns have Tuscan capitals but they sit, in the Japanese fashion, on blocks of stone.

Glover went bankrupt in 1870 but it was he who, due to family connections, facilitated Thomas

Waters’ move to Japan in 1865 and, in 1868, recommended him for the job of building the Imperial

Mint in Osaka. [12] Located in a prominent position on the Yodo river it comprised the Coining

Factory, flanked by the Sempūkan, the official residence of the Commissioner, and the Bullion

Office. The Mint advertised not just Western architecture but also the intention of the newly

established Meiji government both to Westernise the country and, by the issuing of a common

currency, the Yen, to unify it. [13] Yet the Mint lacked refinement, the portico of the Coining Factory

appearing broad and somewhat squat and the columns tapering rather than affecting entasis. The

planning, however, was functional: the central axis aligned the portico with the engine and boiler

rooms and terminated with the tall chimney at the rear. The building was demolished in 1927 and

the portico, as seen here, re-erected in 1935, but in a new position on the site.

[14] The building of the Imperial Mint confronted Waters with some constructional problems. These

Western-style buildings needed Western materials and they were simply not available in Japan.

The foundations for the boiler room at the Coining Factory, as well as its chimneys and the walls of

the Sempūkan, were to be of brick, so brick kilns were built at Sakai and Hiroshima. Waters then

had to instruct the Japanese in bricklaying. Forty-eight cast iron columns for the Coining Factory,

which had been sent over from England, were lost when the ship sank so replacement columns had

to be salvaged from the Mint in Hong Kong which was then being demolished. The eventual height

© Neil Jackson 2017

2

of the building was determined by the length of the replacement columns, and that might account for

its rather squat appearance. Glass, too, was unavailable in Japan, and had to be imported. But it

was heavy and fragile so it is not surprising that, soon after, Waters was involved with the building of

Japan’s first glassworks at Shinagawa in Tokyo.

[15] Waters contribution to early Meiji Japan was considerable: in Tokyo he built the Takabashi

Barracks and the Paper Money Factory, designed a large, colonnaded extension for the Emperor’s

palace, and rebuilt the Ginza district following the earthquake and fire of 1872. By now he was

signing himself ‘Surveyor General’ yet, as a hired foreigner, an oyatoi gaikokujin, his days in Japan

were numbered. By the time he left the country in 1875 the Meiji government had established the

Imperial College of Engineering for the training of engineers and architects and in 1877 appointed

the twenty-four Josiah Conder as its first Professor of Architecture.

[16] Conder had trained in the office of Thomas Roger Smith, under whom he had studied

Architecture at University College, London, before moving on to work for William Burges. Thus he

brought with him to Japan both the knowledge of an architectural curriculum and the experience of

one of the top Gothic revival offices. Almost immediately he produced a design for the new Imperial

College. ‘The style,’ The Builder magazine said, ‘is early Gothic, but all the details have, where

possible, without incongruity, been infused with a Japanese spirit …’ That is somewhat hard to see.

[17] Nevertheless, it was clearly based upon Burges’ design for Trinity College in Hertford,

Connecticut, on which Conder had worked when in that office.

As well as being charged with the education of the first generation of Japanese architects, Conder

was also appointed Architect to the Public Works Department of the Imperial Japanese

Government. [18] It was in this capacity that, in 1881, he built a pavilion for the Second National

Industrial Exhibition in what is now Ueno Park in Tokyo. Re-opened the following year as a

museum, it was designed in what Conder called a pseudo-Saracenic style which, he thought, ‘would

impart an eastern character to the building’. [19] This thinking came from Thomas Roger Smith,

whose earlier designs for St George’s Hospital and the Post Office in what was then Bombay

promoted, as he said, ‘European styles which have grown up in sun-shiny regions’ as well as ‘a

leaning towards the peculiarities of the best Oriental styles.’ Burges, of course, had also designed,

in 1866, an Art School for Bombay in what The Ecclesiologist described as ‘a kind of … quasi-

Orientalising Gothic.’

Conder’s Museum was a long, two storey structure containing thirty rooms. [20] Although there is

the suggestion that the plan might have pre-dated Conder’s arrival in Japan, there is similarity to

that of Sir John Soane’s Dulwich College Picture Gallery, which Conder, who was born in Brixton,

would surely have known. Despite being of quite different scales, both buildings are linear, their

galleries arranged en filade, with projecting end wings and a central pavilion enclosing a columned

court. Another point of reference, for its scale and use of red brick, if not its architectural style,

would have been Francis Fowke’s South Kensington Museum, now part of the V&A, where Conder

had attended drawing classes.

© Neil Jackson 2017

3

Although the Museum in Ueno Park might have been thought fashionable in England in 1881, within

fifteen years Conder’s architecture had fallen a long way behind then fashionable taste. [21] The

mansion which Conder built for Hisaya Iwasaki in Yushima, Tokyo, in 1896 was constructed of

timber and noticeably American in appearance. This was due not just to the two-storey ante-bellum

verandah across the rear, but also the rich assembly of American Queen Anne detailing. Perhaps

Iwasaki, who had studied at the University of Pennsylvania, wanted something ostensibly American.

[22] Internally, however, the fluted columns and ornamental strapwork of the Jacobethan panelling

are purely British but of the previous generation, perhaps the great country houses of Anthony

Salvin or William Burn and David Bryce. Even the Saracenic arch was by now, a memory of an

earlier time.

In commissioning a Western-style house from Conder, Hisaya Iwasaki, who had recently become

the third President of Mitsubishi, showed both how modern and how Westernsed he was. [23] There was even a separate billiard room connected to the house by a tunnel. [24] Also connected

to the house was a very large Japanese residence built by the carpenter Kijuro Oakawa. Originally

far exceeding in plan the size of the Western house, the Japanese residence provided

accommodation for Iwasaki’s family and servants. [25] Such disparate and apparently contradictory

arrangements were not unusual.

15 minutes

© Neil Jackson 2017

4

[26] Part 2. Adoption and Rejection

If Conder’s architecture became increasingly dated, that of his first cohort of four students at the

Imperial College of Engineering, two of whom — Kingo Tatsuno, Tōkouma Katayama — was right

up to date. Chūta Itō I will come to later.

Foremost amongst these was Kingo Tatsuno who, on graduating top of the class in 1879, was sent

by the Ministry of Public Works to England where, like Conder, he both studied under Thomas

Roger Smith at University College and worked for William Burges until Burges’ death in 1881. [27] It was Tatasuno who five years later, in 1886, opened the first architecture office in Japan to be

staffed wholly by Japanese and who, in 1888, was the first Japanese architect to receive a

commission for a major public building — the Bank of Japan’s head office in Tokyo. [28] The result

was a stone-faced brick building comprising two parallel wings linked by a domed central hall [29] and separated by a forecourt closed off from the street by a screen wall. To research the project,

Tatsuno had travelled to the United States and Europe, visiting banks in search of precedents. [30] Two, I would suggest, are immediately apparent in his finished design. [31] The first would be the

screen wall separating the forecourt from the street, a fairly clear reference to Sir John Soane’s

Bank of England, [32] and the other, the long elevation of the side wings. Here the frontage of

Beyaert and Janssens’ Belgian National Bank in Brussels is recalled, but no more so, perhaps, [33] than in the treatment of the end elevations where paired Corinthian columns, set on a heavily

rusticated base, support a pediment. Although these references would have been lost on most

Japanese when the Bank opened in 1896, the presence of this imposing, Western-style building

would have been a reminder of Japan’s growing importance on the world stage. [34] Japan’s

victory, the year before, in the first Sino-Japanese War was similarly due to the Western influence

— for its navy, whose ships were built in British and French shipyards, was now modelled on the

British Royal Navy and its army, on the German-Prussian military. Note the Western reporters in

the corner of the picture.

[35] Coincident with this and, I think, equally representative of Japan’s emerging position on the

world stage were the two Imperial Museums which Tatsuno’s old classmate, Tōkouma Katayama,

built, first in Kyoto, seen here, and then in Nara. [36] On graduating, Katayama has assisted

Conder with the design of a lavish mansion for Prince Arisugawa Taruhito whom he was to

accompany on an official visit to the court of Alexander III in St Petersburg. Through his good

connections he was appointed to the construction office of the Imperial Household in 1887 and was

to make no less than six visits to the West to study its architecture. What appealed most to him was

French architecture and this is apparent in both museum buildings. [37] At Nara, the paired

Corinthian columns and segmental pediment of the portico recalls Salomon de Brosse’s Saint

Gervais et Saint Protais in Paris while the disposition of the arched entrance and flanking niches

suggest Hector Lefuel’s pavilions at the Louvre. [38] Symmetrical on plan and well detailed, this was

an accomplished piece of work in the French Second Empire style and wholly fitting for the Imperial

© Neil Jackson 2017

5

aspirations of modern Japan. If, by the 1890s this style was becoming slightly dated, [39] the

French fin-de-siecle style which Katayama adopted for the Hyōkeikan in Ueon Park, Tokyo, could

not have been more up to date. Built to commemorate the marriage of the then Meiji Crown Prince,

later the Emperor Taishō, and inaugurated in 1909, the Hyōkeikan shows well Katayama’s grasp of

contemporaneous European architecture [40] whether in Paris or outside here, where Aldwych

meets the Strand.

[41] But let us return to Nara where the local government required that new buildings conformed to

the style of the town’s historic architecture. [42] The building of the Imperial Museum in this

landscape of temples, such as the eighth-century Todai-ji, had caused much local outrage. There

was already developing, in the face of the onslaught of Western architect, an awareness of the

importance of Japan’s own architectural heritage — something which early Western visitors to

Japan, such as Christopher Dresser, had been at pains to point out.

In 1889 the master-carpenter Kogō Kiyoyoshi was appointed to teach traditional building methods at

what was now Tokyo Imperial University where Chūta Itō was a student. [43] Itō graduated in 1892

and following the success of his doctoral dissertation, which was published in the magazine

Kenchiku Zasshi in 1893, was commissioned in 1895, with Kiyoyoshi, to rebuild the Daigoku (the

Great Audience Chamber) at the Emperor’s Palace at Kyoto. Intended for the 1895 Fourth National

Industrial Exhibition this was, rather curiously, built at five-eights of its original size but nevertheless

celebrated the importance of Japan’s architectural heritage. Two years later, the Ancient Temples

and Shrines Preservation Law was passed.

[44] Chūta Itō’s doctoral dissertation was a study of the Hōryū-ji, one of the oldest temples in Japan

and, by demonstrating that the columns and proportions of the elevation were the same as those in

Etruscan architecture, as drawn by Gottfried Semper, sought to prove that there was a trans-Asiatic

connection between Japanese and Western architecture and a common source for both traditions.

The link, of course, was along the silk road through China. [45] This idea he developed into an

architectural history which was not Eurocentric but one which had a common base in what was

Persia and Mesopotamia, from which developed what he called the Eastern System and the

Western System. ‘Japan should not worship the West as the absolute ideal,’ he wrote in Kenchiku

Zasshi in 1909, adding, ‘Aubergine vines do not bear marrows. It is natural to develop aubergine as

aubergine’. [46] It is in this context that we must understand his choice of Romanesque, circled

here, as appropriate for the Kanematsu Auditorium which he built at the Hitotsubashi University in

Tokyo in 1927. [47] Yet, as a university building it was not alone or even first in its adoption of the

Romanesque, for John and Donald Parkinson had been using this style, since 1920, at the

University of Southern California in Los Angeles. [48] In designing the Tsukiji Hongang-ji in Tokyo

in 1934, Itō moved his terms of reference much further eastward, to India. Despite its raised chaitya

hall roof and the stupa at either end, not visible in this picture, this temple presented a long

balanced Palladian elevation dressed in early Buddhist columns and Mughal arches upon a

© Neil Jackson 2017

6

rusticated base. Although Itō never fully strayed into the Western architectural language, using

traditional Asian forms as a rebuff to the perceived dominance of Western architecture, it would

seem that he could never quite let it go. [49] Nevertheless, by this time, the mid-1930s, Japanese

politics had swung to the right, the country was at war with China once again and the traditionalist,

Teikan Yōshiki or Imperial Crown style, best exemplified here at the Imperial Household Museum,

had taken over.

24 minutes

© Neil Jackson 2017

7

[50] Part 3: Connection

Hermann Muthesius, Charles Rennie Mavkintosh, Margaret Macdonald and Mortimer Menpes.

[51] With the adoption, in Japan, of the German legal system, so too came the adoption of German

architecture. The Ministry of Justice was designed by the Berlin firm of Hermann Ende and Wilhelm

Böckmann whose job architect in Tokyo [52] was Hermann Muthesius, later to become famous for

the book, Das Englische Haus. Muthesius had gone out to Japan in 1887 and remained there until

1891, during which time, as well as working for Ende and Böckmann, [53] had designed the

Theological School and the German Protestant church, although that was not built until 1896, and

then to a less expensive design. Once back in Germany Muthesius worked for the Ministry of Public

Works before coming to London, in 1896, as the technischer attaché at the German Embassy. It

was in the spring of 1898 that the magazine Dekorative Kunst asked Muthesius to go to Glasgow to

write an article on the Glasgow Four — Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Macdonald sisters,

Margaret and Frances, and Herbert McNair — who were just beginning to be noticed. A close and

lasting friendship developed between the Glaswegians and Muthesius and his wife Anna, so much

so that when their son Eckart was born in 1904, Mackintosh was asked to be his godfather. It was

Eckart who later commented on the great extent to which his father was a pillar of moral support to

Mackintosh.

[54] Glasgow, at the turn of the century, was the home to more Japanese than any other British city

except London. The association went back to 1866 when Yamao Yōzō, one of the famous Chōshū

Five who had escaped to the West from Shōgunate Japan, had come to study in Glasgow and work

in the Napier shipyards. It was he who was later responsible, as Acting Vice Minister of Public

Works, for setting up the Imperial College of Engineering and staffing it with Glaswegians. Soon

trams were being built for the Japanese National Railway at Coplawhill, and steam locomotives at

Springburn and Polmadie, while along the Clyde ships were being constructed for the Japanese

Imperial Navy. [55] In such a Japanophile context, Mackintosh’s mural decoration for Miss

Catherine Cranston’s Buchanan Street Tea Room, painted in 1897, would not have appeared out of

place. The figures, based upon his earlier love-portrait of Margaret Macdonald called provocatively

Part Seen, Part Imagined, are clearly Japanese — look at the hair and the kimono. [56] When

Toshie, as he was known, and Margaret married in 1900 and moved into their newly decorated flat

at 120 Mains Street, Anna and Herman Muthesius sent them two Surimono woodblock prints, one

by Kunisada Utagawa and the other by Shingenobu Utagawa. [57] ‘We now have the prints

framed,’ Mackintosh wrote in thanks that December, ‘and we count them among the most valuable

and beautiful things we possess.’

It was three years earlier, in 1897, that Mackintosh, under the name of his firm of Honeyman and

Keppie, had won the competition for the Glasgow School of Art. That building can be read in many

ways but I need you to see it as does the Japanese architect, Arato Isozaki, who commented, ‘The

© Neil Jackson 2017

8

simplicity needs no explanation. It is amazing how [Mackintosh] grasped the essence of Japanese

architecture.’

[58] This is the competition design. What I would like you to look at here is the south elevation, the

second drawing from the top, which shows an almost windowless façade stepping back and forth on

the tight site, its eavesline moving up and down. [59] Now please compare this with this drawing of

kura or storehouses in Tokyo, from Edward Morse’s book, Japanese Homes and Their

Surroundings. Thick walled and almost windowless, these kura were intended to be fire-proof, the

heavy shutters sealing the interior against fire. Then please look at the projecting window boxes in

the street in the Kanda district of Tokyo, [60] and see the projecting conservatory high up on the

wall of the School of Art. I have no evidence to suggest that Mackintosh copied these details in his

competition design, or even that he had or knew of Morse’s book, but it does not seem to me to be

improbable.

[61] The School of Art was built in two phases, the left hand or eastern half in 1897-99 and the

western half, containing the famous library, shown here, ten years later, in 1907-09. Although in the

first phase we might notice [62] the Japanese-style timber construction of the main stairs, it is in the

second phase that the Japanese references are most frequent: consider the grey-brown sand

render of the west stair-well and the pattern of the inset tiles suggestive of the Japanese insignia

called mon; look at the elaborate roof construction of Studio 58, the Composition Room, which so

resembles a chumōn, a temple gateway; and also the shoji-like glazing pattern of the elevated

pavilion, known as the hen-run, which links both parts of the building across the south elevation.

Mackintosh, you will remember, did not meet Hermann Muthesius until after the first phase of the

School of Art was well under way but the second phase, where the design differs from the

competition drawings, was conceived and built much later. It is my contention that it was

Muthesius’s familiarity with Japan which led indirectly to these distinctly Japanese references.

[63] And so, as you will expect, to the library — or what was the library before it was gutted by fire.

In terms of my argument, this is somewhat ironic because I am going to suggest that this space was

conceived as a response to the manner in which the Japanese inhabited their fire-resistant store-

houses, the kura. [64] Kura were traditionally used for the safe-keeping of valuable items such as

kimono, or by merchants for storage of their wares. But, with the modernisation of the country

during the Meiji era, kura were used increasingly as living space and, as Edward Morse here shows,

fitted out with an internal framework from which drapes could be hung to cover the cold and damp

walls. [65] Within the tall stone structure at the west end of the School of Art, Mackintosh draped

the interior with book-shelves and hung a suspended ceiling on wrought iron straps to provide a

storage space above. Although this could equally well be an idea derived from the internal

treatment of Scottish tower houses which Mackintosh knew well, I will continue with my Japanese

argument.

© Neil Jackson 2017

9

[66] Look at the library windows — 25 feet (7.26 m) high and glazed with 9 inch (75 mm) squares of

glass. From where do they come? Tall and thin and protruding, I would suggest that they come

from this house, [67] 25 Cadogan Gardens, London, built by Arthur Heygate Macmurdo in 1893. It

is now the administrative offices for Peter Jones on Sloan Square, which you can see rising behind.

It is not that these windows are Japanese, far from it, but what lay behind them was. The house

was commissioned by the painter Mortimer Menpes, a follower of James McNeill Whistler — until

Whistler fell out with him, as he seemed to do with everyone. [68] Menpes, like Whistler, was a

Japanophile and in 1896 he actually travelled to Japan, with a set of drawings for the house, to have

the interior designed and made by Japanese craftsmen in Japan and shipped back to England

where, as you see here, it was installed. Published in The Studio magazine in 1899, Menpes’

Japanese interior would have sat behind the tall, oriel windows, within the masonry carcass of the

building, much as Mackintosh’s library was to do a decade later. [69] Looking at the similarity

between the two sets of windows, it is highly likely, I would contend, that Mackintosh, whose own

work was frequently published in The Studio, would have known of both Menpes’ Japanese interiors

and the tall-windowed brick house which contained them. Although Macmurdo is mentioned in

Muthesius’s Das Englische Haus, his building in Cadogan Gardens is not. But who is to say that

Muthesius and Mackintosh did not go there during one of Toshie and Margaret’s trips to London?

33 minutes

© Neil Jackson 2017

10

[70] Part 4: Interaction

In April 1928, Kunio Maekawa became the first Japanese to work for Le Corbusier in Paris. Here

you see him with Charlotte Perriand. In the centre is Corbusier himself and to the right, his cousin

and collaborator Pierre Jeanneret. It was through these three Japanese architects, and Charlotte

Perriand who in 1940 went to work in Japan with Junzo Sakakura, that one of the most intriguing,

reciprocal relationships developed.

[71] On his very first day in the atelier Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret took Maekawa to

Garches, on the outskirts of Paris, to see the Villa Stein which had been completed a few months

before. ‘The fresh sensation I felt,’ he later recalled, ‘when I walked to the back of the house [shown

here] and looked at it from a stand of trees in the garden will always be with me.’ [72] Once back in

Japan, it was the Villa Stein which most influenced his first private commission, the Kimura

Industrial Laboratory at Hirosaki. [73] Although the roof parapet might now have gone, the balcony

been reduced and the opening obscured, the suggestion of the ribbon windows is still there as are a

number of other Corbusian references. [74] If you look at the left hand photograph you will see, just

visible beyond the puddles and the trees, there is a drive-through to the rear, [75] where the building

above is supported on a row of circular columns or piloti. [76] This is a move which I would say is

straight from the design for the Maison Canneel, which Maekawa himself had drawn up while in the

atelier. [77] Just beyond the drive-through, a semi-circular bay projects, its roof held by a single

circular column. [78] When viewed from the inside, the relationship between the curve, the column

and the ceiling is just the same as at Corbusier’s double house, the Maison La Riche/Jeanneret, of

1923. Here a single circular column supports the bow-fronted picture gallery above.

It is easy enough to accept that Maekawa, as the pupil, would adopt the mannerisms of Le

Corbusier, the master. But I would like to suggest that the influence was two-way. [79] Maekawa’s

drawing of the paired Maisons Loucheur show open-plan, flexible living spaces clustered around a

central bathroom core. Designed as modular units with sliding screens and fold-down beds to allow

for their easy conversion to night-time use, [81] they were the Western equivalent of the modular

Japanese house, as shown here, with its tatami, fusuma and futons — which are put away out of

sight. It is not too much to think that Maekawa might have had an input in this design.

[80] Almost thirty years later, at the Harumi Apartments in Tokyo, Maekawa included traditional

Japanese interiors within the framework of a large concrete apartment building. [82] It is not as

incongruous as might be thought for these interiors provided familiar domestic living spaces for the

resettled inhabitants in an otherwise unfamiliar environment. Although the plan and section are

different, [83] the model was, of course, Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseilles which

Maekawa had seen under construction in 1951. But this is where it becomes interesting, for if we

go inside the Unité, [84] we find sliding walls or fusuma and flexible spaces, [85] which take us

straight back to the Harumi Apartments. There is a delicacy here at the Unité which is not seen in

Le Corbusier’s earlier use of sliding walls, such as at the Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition is Stuttgart

in 1927. It is something new and corresponds much more to Maekawa’s Harumi apartments

© Neil Jackson 2017

11

How much did Le Corbusier take from his Japanese assistants? I would say more than is generally

thought. Takamasha Yoshizaka, who had spent his childhood in Geneva and was fluent in French,

came to the atelier in 1950. [86] In 1951, while Yoshizaka was in the office, Corbusier began

designing his little Cabanon at Cap Martin on the French Riviera using his proportioning system

published the previous year as Le Modulor. [87] The Le Cobusier scholar, Jean Louis Cohen, who

gave this Annual Lecture in 2003, has written that the square plan, outlined here in red, [88] was

‘based on a composition involving a centripetal spiral, a system so complex that it is virtually

unrecognisable owing to the apparent simplicity of the structure.’ Although such a spiral can

conceivably be overlaid on the plan, I nevertheless disagree. [89] I think it is as likely that the plan of

the cabanon is based on a four-and-a-half mat tatami pattern. The only difference is that the

cabanon, designed using the modulor proportions, is consequently larger, measuring 3.66 metres

square compared with the four-and-a-half mat tatami room which is 2.73 metres or 9 shaku square.

[90] Is it no more than a coincidence that when the first foreign language edition of Le Modulor was

published the following year, it was in Japanese? It was translated, of course, by Yoshizaka.

The longest serving of Le Corbusier’s Japanese assistants was Junzo Sakakura, who came to the

altelier in 1931 and remained there five years, only to return to France almost immediately to see

through the construction of his design for [91] the Japanese Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition.

This was the first modern building designed by a Japanese architect in Europe. Writing about the

Exposition in The Architectural Review, the architect Serge Chermayeff noted that ‘In the Japanese

case the national characteristics prevail, although they suggest a curious Japan-via-Europe-via-

Japan origin,’ adding, ‘Japanese elegance in wood construction is expressed through steel.’ Talbot

Hamlin, the American critic, thought that ‘it translates the jewel-like elegance of the Orient into

candid terms of steel and glass’ while the RIBA Journal thought it to be ‘intimately Japanese and

palpably international.’

[92] The finished building offers an interesting comparison with Le Corbusier’s Pavillon des Temps

Nouveau which had been erected as a tent structure outside the official exposition grounds. Apart

from both architect’s use or ramps, for Le Corbusier regarded stairs as ‘the enemy of the public’,

there is little to relate them. As José-Lluis Sert, who had worked with Sakakura in Le Corbusier’s

atelier remarked many years later, this was a building which was designed ‘by a mind that had

enjoyed and understood Europe without losing its attachment to the best in Japanese tradition.’

Here then, for the first time, was a truly modern Japanese building. But it was to be almost fifteen

years before Sakakura could bring that sort of architecture home.

[93] The Museum of Modern Art at Kamakura, south of Yokohama, was as much a traditional

Japanese building as it was a modern one. Lightweight and modular, it ticked all the boxes. Yet

Sakakura could not, or did not, throw off the influence of Le Corbusier. [94] For this building, with its

thin steel columns and its paneled façade, clearly derives from the Ferme Radieuse of 1938. This

was part of the Village Cooperatif exhibited by Le Corbusier at the Pavillon des Temps Nouveau in

the 1937 Paris Exposition, and therefore was surely known to Sakakura. The idea was for factory-

made mass-produced modular buildings raised off the ground above a reinforced concrete base.

© Neil Jackson 2017

12

The same idea is adopted at Kamakura where the base, rather than being of concrete, is of volcanic

oya stone.

[95] If the Museum of Modern Art at Kamakura also recalled the Villa Savoye at Poissy, so in a

generic way did Le Corbusier’s one building in Japan, [96] the Museum of Western Art, built in 1959

alongside all the other museums in Ueno Park. Le Corbusier came to Japan just once, in 1955, and

on his arrival at Haneda Airport said this to the assembled press:

Since my youth, I have been particularly attracted by the scenery and architecture of Japan.

I am hoping to gain something besides design work. At present the page is completely

blank, for the museum design concept will emerge by first assimilating the ambience of the

site and requests from the Japan side, and then adding my own ideas.

[97] What emerged, in the end, on that completely blank page was something he had prepared

earlier — an elevated, square spiral design first produced in 1939 for the Museum of Unlimited

Growth at Philippeville, Algeria. After only one week Le Corbusier left Japan, entrusting the building

of his museum to his former assistants, Maekawa, Yoshizaka and Sakakura.

45 minutes

© Neil Jackson 2017

13

[98] Part 5: Assimilation

What I have shown you already was fairly easy to follow, but now comes the difficult bit.

I am now going to show you buildings by the British architects, Alison and Peter Smithson, and the

Italian architect, Carlo Sacrpa, but the subject I want to discuss is Japanese. [99] It is what the

Japanese call ma. In the West we have neither a word nor a term for it but it can be understood

[100] as gap or space or pause. In English we use the expressions ‘awkward silence’ and ‘pregnant

pause’. The composer John Cage’s famous piece, Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds, during

which the musical instruments do not play, is not about silence but about the ambient noise one

hears when there is no music. Thus it is with architecture. It is not about what is there but rather,

what is not there. What happens in the space in between.

[101] The kanji for ma can perhaps help us better understand it. It comprises two parts, [102] the

larger means door or gateway [103] and the smaller means the sun. [105] Brought together they

suggest the spatial, architectural experience conveyed through this illustration from Edward Morse’s

book. The lady who is taking some water from the barrel is neither inside the building nor outside it.

She is standing on the edge of the engawa, the narrow veranda which surrounds the building,

beneath the overhanging roof and within the line of columns. Yet she is also outside the building’s

envelope. Behind her the shoji is slid back to make a doorway; in front of her the sun shines,

casting her shadow across the engawa. She is in neither the house nor the garden but in that gap,

space or pause between them. That is ma. [101]

Alison and Peter Smithson had a term for it. [106] They called it ‘the charged void’. This was, in

their words, ‘architecture’s capacity to charge the space around it with an energy which can join up

other energies, influence the nature of things that might come … a capacity we can feel and act

upon, but not necessarily describe or record.’

Pause …

[107] I think you can see it here in their 1953 entry for the Sheffield University competition where the

raised walkways are squeezed between the buildings which in a series of abrupt, uneven moves

enclose the space, making it consciously uncomfortable. The void here is certainly charged.

That scheme was never built but their design for what is called the Economist group in St James’s,

London, was. [108] Set on a small, sloping site beside and behind Boodles Club, the three

buildings crowd in upon a raised podium which pushes them apart. The buildings have been altered

over the last fifty years and much of the spatial quality of the original design has been lost. [109] So

I am using old and rather grainy photos to express the grittiness of the compact space where the

concrete columns are clad in fossil-rich Portland stone and the sight-lines are both contained by and

© Neil Jackson 2017

14

pass through the structures. [110] Notice how, above the bowler-hatted gentleman, the transparent

first floor of the polygonal bank building reveals the architecture on the other side of St James’s

Street. The plan, where the ground floor walls of the two taller towers are pulled back within the

structural frame creates the ambiguity of the engawa and [111] the manner in which both sight-lines

and pathways, suggested here with red lines, move through the buildings emphasises, as the

Smithsons would have it, the ‘charged void’. The building was listed Grade II* in 1988, the first

building from the ‘60s to be listed.

[112] Carlo Sacrpa was already sixty three and had just started work on the Brion Family Cemetery

at San Vito d’Altivole when, in 1969, he went to Japan for the first time. ‘I am very much influenced

by Japan,’ he later said in an interview, ‘and not just because I visited it, but because even before I

went there, I admired their essentiality and above all their supreme good taste.’ The he added,

‘What we call good taste is present everywhere in Japan.’

Scarpa had done his homework before going to Japan and I would suggest that it is likely that he

knew of the work of Katsushike Hokusai, [113] whose wonderful ukiyo-e or woodblock prints were

shown at the British Museum earlier this year. What influence these might have had on him one

can only speculate, but let me show you something:

[113a] If you inscribe circles around the hoops of the cooper’s barrel …

[114] Then remove the print to reveal the two interlocking circles …

[115] Which you then pull apart …

[116] You will have the form of the entrance screen at the Brion Cemetery

[117] This might be fanciful but design processes often are.

[118] The Brion Cemetery comprises two burial chambers, a chapel and a water pavilion, yet it is in

the spaces between and beneath these buildings where the greatest tension is felt. [119]

At one end of the L-shaped cemetery is the chapel, where the concrete walls, board-marked and

serrated, converge while the ground level between them breaks and changes. [120] Scarpa was

from Venice and here water, as so often in Japan, plays an integral part of the composition,

bouncing the bright light through the buildings [121] while simultaneously increasing the depth of the

shadows — another important element in traditional Japanese design. [122] At the other end of the

cemetery is the water pavilion, a steel and timber meditation platform set in a large, rectangular

pond. [123] Here one might recall Sakakura’s Museum of Modern Art at Kamakura which Scarpa

© Neil Jackson 2017

15

visited. Although the scale is quite different, the sense of ma, as the building hangs over the water,

is the same. To misquote Serge Chermayeff, is this a case of Europe-via-Japan-via-Europe?

54 minutes

© Neil Jackson 2017

16

[124] Meditation

Let’s look at some more kanji.

[126] It is significant, I think, that the kanji for home, in the familial, conceptual sense, is made up of

the kanji for house and garden. In other words, without both a house and a garden, you cannot

have a home.

Although I have not spoken of gardens, they are, of course, very important in Japan. They are

important in this country too but whereas we have traditionally looked at our garden through a

cottage window or a Doric portico, in Japan, the house and the garden become one. [126] If you

visited the exhibition, The Japanese House, at the Barbican earlier this year, you would have seen

how Ryue Nishizawa’s extraordinary installation offered no separation between the two. [127] At

the Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, the famous Zen Garden is part of the hōjō, the residence of the abbot, and is

designed to be contemplated from a seated position on the engawa, the veranda. [128] At the

Imperial Family’s summer retreat, the Tamozawa Villa in Nikko, a bench is placed on the engawa

and the shoji are slid back [129] to fully expose the interior of the house to the garden.

It was not a coincidence that, in 1980, the Japanese architectural press took such an interest in the

London Borough of Camden’s innovative urban housing programme, [130] the flagship scheme of

which was the recently completed Alexandra Road Estate, designed by the RIBA Royal Gold

Medallist for 2018, Neave Brown. Here was an approach to dense, low-rise urban housing that was

not only modular in its construction but which also combined house and garden to make home.

[131] The glass doors, like shoji in Japan, would slide back to open the house into the garden and

bring the garden into the house. Is this another instance of ‘Japan-via-Europe-via-Japan’? I don’t

know. But in the present housing crisis it is a model at which would be worth looking again. [132]

Arigatō goza imashita

Thank you very much.

© Neil Jackson 2017

17