Tokyo, as current fashionable opinion would have us believe, is "the world's most exciting city.” Not many years ago, most Westerners regarded the place as a vision of hell: a polluted, overcrowded, unplanned ant heap, an Oriental version of L.A. with the smog but without the space. It has now been taken up by the world of design; Western designers and architects are busy there. Both Philippe Starck and Norman Foster have recently secured Tokyo commissions. The most fashionable bars--and the Japanese are serious drinkers--are designed by an Englishman, Nigel Coates.
For a century and a quarter, Japan has been involved in a tense but often creative dialogue with the West. Its impact in the field of architecture is analyzed in a magnificent--but sometimes maddening--book by the American architectural historian David B. Stewart (The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture, 1868 to the Present, Kodansha, n.p.).
The history of modern Japan begins with the enthronement of the sixteen-year-old Emperor Meiji in 1868. The next few decades saw a ruthless modernization of the country: Feudalism was abolished, railroads built, a banking system established, and industries set up. Japan amazed the world by defeating the Russian Empire in 1904-05.
Emblem of Progress
The Dreadnoughts that were crucial to the humiliation of Russia were built in Britain, and it was to Britain and to the other leading nations of Europe that the Japanese turned initially for architectural expertise. A modern country needed railroad stations, schools, colleges, factories, banks--building types that did not exist in the vernacular architecture of the country. European historicist styles were freely imported as a requisite emblem of progress. Wooden construction disappeared in favor of brick and stone, part of a wholesale casting overboard of traditional ways.
An Englishman, Josiah Conder, a pupil of the great Gothic revivalist William Burges, became the first professor of architecture at the newly founded Imperial Collage of Engineering in 1877. A mediocre designer, Conder was nonetheless a historic figure in the growth of Japanese architecture. (He practiced in Tokyo up to the time of his death in 1920). Among his pupils was Kingo Tatsuno (1854-1919), the "Japanese Inigo Jones.” Tatsuno was sent to London to study, became a pupil of Burges, and returned in 1822 full of English ideas. In particular, he was attracted by the so-called Queen Anne style then fashionable in London, a free ranging mix of varied seventeenth-and eighteenth-century details associated with Norman Shaw, John Belcher, and other English designers. Tatsuno's first work in his native country was the Bankers' Assembly Rooms in Sakamoto-cho (1885). Subsequent works displayed all the eclecticism of the age: the Shibusawa Mansion just outside Tokyo (1888), Venetian in style; the essentially Neoclassical Bank of Japan (1890-96); and Tokyo Station (1911-14), a vast building that is now, it seems, threatened with demolition. One of his best works, the National Sumo Arena (1909), a huge steel-framed auditorium seating thirteen thousand, was destroyed by fire in 1917.
Strikingly Impressive
Tatsuno's sometime classmate, Tokuma Katayama (1853-1917), was not given the advantage of a foreign education
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