著者

江本 弘

出版者

建築史学会

雑誌

建築史学 (ISSN:02892839)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.63, pp.2-29, 2014 (Released:2018-07-05)

著者

江本 弘

出版者

建築史学会

雑誌

建築史学 = Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Japan (ISSN:02892839)

巻号頁・発行日

no.71, pp.107-133, 2018-09

著者

江本 弘

出版者

日本建築学会

雑誌

日本建築学会計画系論文集 (ISSN:13404210)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.86, no.781, pp.1115-1122, 2021 (Released:2021-03-30)

参考文献数

3

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The start of the myth-making of the Katsura Imperial Villa as the acme of architectural aesthetics dates back to the early 1920s when the German-speaking world was beginning to be concerned about the pioneering nature of Japanese traditional dwelling’s wooden frame structure for its flexibility, openness, and close relationship of building and nature that preceded Western modernism. Manifestations of this line of interest involve Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst’s earliest attention (1921/22) to a Japanese house being “full of inspiration for European architects,” and Bruno Taut’s reference in his Die Neue Wohnung in 1924. As those attempts were almost autonomous within the German-reading continent without sufficient reach to visual materials, ensuing interaction with the Japanese architectural world from the latter half of the 1920s greatly enhanced their knowledge production. The visit of the members of Bund Deutcher Architekten in Japan would result in the first introduction of Katsura as an intrinsically modern antiquity in the special issue of Die Form in July 1933. It was that the domestic modernist reevaluation of Katsura from Hideto Kishida’s mention in the end of the 1920s surreptitiously crossed an ocean to meet similar, but an even earlier search for a Japanese icon of the German-reading world of architecture. Bruno Taut emigrated to Japan simultaneously, and his literary propagations of Katsura’s modernity would be made from 1934 in Japanese, German, French, and English. But his words appeared to have told little to the indifferent French-reading world, and much less to German-reading world than Tetsuro Yoshida’s elaborate Das japanische Wohnhaus (1935); an influential work that met the exact demands by native professionals to a prompt number of reviews. Taut, in short, had an ephemeral effect just within Japanese audiences, however enormous it was. Given this circumstance, Japanese admiration of Katsura would become somewhat religiose in its reconstruction period after WWII, for it was naturally chosen as the appealing international symbol to promote Japanese modernity in line with the modern history of Euro-American architecture. The promotion, of course, firstly made towards American audiences: Ryuichi Hamaguchi in Architectural Forum (January 1953), Yoshinobu Ashihara in House+Home (June 1954), respectively stressed upon the significance of Katsura in the Western history of modern architecture; bibliographical pursuits from the Japanese architectural profession almost all followed this line at that time. While the postwar global Japonism starting from the U.S.-oriented, U.S-centric knowledge production would have something to tell centrifugally, the German-speaking world’s lasting interest in Japanese traditional architecture led Werner Blaser to come to Japan through Mies’s IIT, after which Blaser would publish Tempel und Teehaus in Japan (1955) that heavily relied upon Katsura and Mies that would soon be published in English and French (1956). Max Bill’s Italian Ludwig Miës van der Rohe (1955) was another witness to visually explain Mies’s aesthetic through Katsura. The myth of Katsura’s modernity had been thus formed well before Italian Architettura Cantiere (1960) featured Walter Gropius’s praise of Japanese architecture just before he and Kenzo Tange would publish Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture in the same year. And those modernists’ interpretation of Katsura was contemporaneously rivaled by House Beautiful’s special issue on “Discover Shibui” (August 1960); Elizabeth Gordon, the anti-Miesian editor, set Katsura on the cover of the issue to deduce and trumpet yet another aesthetic from the same source as her enemy’s sympathizers.

著者

江本 弘

出版者

日本建築学会

雑誌

日本建築学会計画系論文集 (ISSN:13404210)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.86, no.781, pp.1115-1122, 2021-03

著者

江本 弘

出版者

日本建築学会

雑誌

日本建築学会計画系論文集 (ISSN:13404210)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.85, no.769, pp.753-759, 2020 (Released:2020-03-30)

参考文献数

4

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Japanese professionals tend to harbor ambiguous feelings toward the overseas usage of the term Shibui in architecture, since despite being colloquially uttered in their language, they themselves have rarely used it as an actual architectural term. This divide in understanding seems to be a serious one, suggesting a potential miscommunication throughout the global sphere of architectural discussion. Based on materials mainly written in Japanese, English, and German since the 1920’s, this paper investigates the global reality of intercultural exchanges about this term, and how Japanese architects largely chose to sidestep them. The propagation of the notion of Shibui started within the Anglosphere around the late 1920’s. It was introduced as something untranslatable, but which represented the ultimate aesthetics of the Japanese, tending towards that which is simple, austere but meaningful. In the mid-thirties, a group of mainly foreign American readers got a hold of such influential works as Soetsu Yanagi’s The Folk-Craft of Japan and Harada’s The Lesson of Japanese Architecture. Non-Japanese-readers gradually came to know the word through these publications as well as daily conversations with speakers of the language. The German architect Bruno Taut [1880-1938] was one of those who experienced these circumstances while staying in Japan from 1933-36, and interpreted the ideal beauty of Japanese architecture as Shibui, or the “unobtrusive, quiet and harsh.” Besides Japan and the U.S., the German sphere in Europe was potentially another center for the production of knowledge about Shibui and Japanese architecture. While there was no German introduction of the word during the twenties, they had nourished their interest in the intrinsic modernity of Japanese traditional wooden construction as early as immediately after the end of WWI. A number of influencers would soon emigrate to the U.S., where Japanese promotion of Shibui to the American public was at the forefront, and the aesthetic of Shibui was in the process of making itself known to a German-reading public. Walter Gropius [1883-1969], for example, started to combine his idea of a “Japanese” modular, flexible, and nature-loving architecture with the word Shibui. In this early stage of outbound knowledge production, Japanese architects were pretty much uncommitted to it, as the word was too colloquial to be aesthetically defined in their own language, and they did not share the goal of propagating Japanese aesthetics, for which Shibui had become a buzzword. In the postwar craze of all things Japanese, the word gradually got popular among the Pacific-American public from the early fifties, before being further popularized by Elizabeth Gordon’s special issues in 1960 for “Discover Shibui” in the influential American magazine House Beautiful. However, due to her notoriously offensive attitude toward contemporary efforts in architecture, this prompted a string of critical backlashes. Japanese architectural historian Yuichiro Kojiro [1922-2000] spoke in The Japan Architect against Gordon’s “oh-so-wonderful romanticism,” and his criticisms would attract overseas followers like Bruno Zevi [1918-2000] in Italy. Thus was formed a global space of dispute over the modernity (and anti-modernity) of the naturalized and de-nationalized Shibui. In fact, most Japan architects did not have the means to know about this external phenomenon, and those who did had no avid motivation to join, since its contents kept changing and diversifying according to each player’s ambitions and local contexts, making the whole scene appear as a quite chaotic one to their eyes.

著者

江本 弘

出版者

日本建築学会

雑誌

日本建築学会計画系論文集 (ISSN:13404210)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.82, no.735, pp.1277-1283, 2017 (Released:2017-05-30)

参考文献数

9

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Having remained in oblivion for three quarters of a century, the reevaluation of Horatio Greenough’s “functionalist” theory during the mid-20th century had its due start in the 1910’s, when literary men like Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford became alarmed by the increasingly broken pace of a materialistic world, and encouraged the revival of the mid-19th century American spirit, when the harmony of spiritual and material life had been successfully achieved. Through this academic line of inquiry, Greenough’s critical efforts were thus gradually salvaged during the following two decades. Mumford would then function as a central node, spreading information that enhanced Greenough’s popularity and significance not only among foreign architects, but also among domestic scholars from other disciplines.

著者

江本弘志 [著]

出版者

文芸社

巻号頁・発行日

2005

著者

江本 弘

出版者

東京大学出版会

雑誌

UP (ISSN:09133291)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.48, no.7, pp.22-27, 2019-07