Japan: Chikatsu-Asuka Museum by Tadao Ando

[Third in a three-part series]

The Chikatsu-Asuka Museum is located about two hours outside of Osaka, in a national park famous for a particular tomb group known as 'Ichisuka Tumulus Cluster'. The museum itself is dedicated to the tombs in the area and the period they come from, known as the Kofun period (approximately the 5th to the 7th century AD). The keyhole-shaped burial mounds are the main relics of the Kofun period, and are found throughout the Kawachi area in various sizes, the largest being 800m long. The building itself contains exhibition areas, research facilities and a small library.



The museum consists of a very large stepped public area, with the program of the building located underneath, extending far underground. It is located within a valley, and is approached by a carefully choreographed sequence through the landscape. Earth berms block your view until you reach a turning point at this small concrete pavilion, which frames the building as you first notice it.




One of the most striking features of the building itself is a large monolithic volume at the centre of the composition, which is closed to light and users: from the bottom floor of the exhibition area, one can see into the dark, empty volume.

Three things struck me about the building as I walked about it.


1. The overall conscious position of the architecture in stark opposition to nature. This is evident in the clear delineation between the building and the natural environment it sits in, as well as in the choice of such an overtly artificial material as concrete used for the building surface.


2. The overall emptiness of the architecture, both in gesture and in detail. It seems composed of a series of abstract architectural gestures, which could be completely independent of program, and this vacuum of meaning can also be seen in the blankness of the formwork concrete used. The ultimate example of this vacuity is the large central volume which takes the central position in the composition, but has no meaning or function whatsoever within the complex as it stands.


3. At one point, I actually became quite frustrated with the apparent distance between the architect's design and the requirements of the building's users. Like in the Le Corbusier Museum in Tokyo mentioned in the other Japan piece, there seemed to be a lot of curatorial detritus cluttering the experience of the building as an architectural composition. For instance, in the main exhibition space, where the architect apparently wished to have a darker, more atmospheric space, lighting tracks have been introduced by the curator, and at the exterior of the tower, which features a staircase snaking around it to a viewing deck at the top, a steel gate prevents people from using it.

Well I still jumped the gate and took a few photos from the top. This is the surrounding landscape the architect wanted as the culminating point of his composition.


Preparing to leave, I think I figured out what Ando was going for: the emptiness of the program could be an attempt to pre-empt the building's re-use for a different purpose in the future. This explains a few things: the large stepped plaza, which could have multiple social uses, but has no use within the current program; the empty symbolism of the central tower, which could conceivably be reconfigured as a symbol of nearly any institution or organisation; the emptiness of the surface treatment, which could also be reconfigured to suit different purposes; and, finally, it explains the fact that the architect had motivations superior to the mere requirements of the client. Ando understood that a building such as this could be standing for many generations, or even centuries, and wanted to anticipate future societal changes which may mean the building could be re-used for other purposes. In the context of a museum for a forgotten civilisation, about whom little is known, this is incredibly perceptive. Although the building does not rigidly stick to the program required of it at the moment, it instead offers a much more profound insight into the nature of history and time as it relates to humans: it relates our own existence in the now with the contemplation of future generations or centuries in terms of its possible future utility, and in so doing reminds us that the ancient peoples it exhibits also built massive edifices, which were then subsequently forgotten, thus reminding us of the temporal nature of our own civilsation. This sets forth a chain reaction of telescoping time scales, culminating in the stark delineation of artificial and natural, clarifying the ultimate insignificance of man in opposition to the relative eternity of nature. This may be partly shown in a diagram like this:

Vietnam: Ingenuity

1. Coffee in Vietnam comes to you with this little coffee filter thing on top of the cup.
2. Once the water has filtered through, you take off the lid of the filter device.
3. You move the filter onto the upside down lid.
4. They use condensed milk here: you can see it at the bottom of the cup as a white band. If you want black coffee, don't stir it; the milkier you want your coffee, the more you stir.
5. Delicious cah fé.




These ladies are everywhere in Vietnam: they carry their produce around in this double basket and bamboo pole combination.


The ubiquitous conical reed hat is excellent at providing shade but also functioning as a kind of umbrella in the heavy vertical rain common in Vietnam. The silk hat tie keeping the hat in place, whilst also providing a decorative touch (with different patterns and colours used), also doubles as a breath mask against the dust and smog of the cities. The bamboo pole is slightly rounded in profile, with soft edges so that it sits ergonomically on the shoulder, and allows for them to be switched easily from shoulder to shoulder by rolling them across their neck in a swinging motion. The cables holding the baskets are also made from thin strips of bamboo, that have a relative stiffness that stops the baskets bouncing around and allows them to be set down without putting down the pole (see below). The wicker baskets come in different shallow or deep sizes. The balancing mechanism is simple but ingenious: the baskets don't need to have equal weight in them, the differential is accommodated by shifting the pole forwards or backwards on their shoulder (mathematically, [weight of A] x [distance x] = [weight of B] x [distance y] ).


The device also has implications for economic activity and public space. The space created between the set down baskets forms a service zone where food is prepared etc. The little plastic stools this lady carries around with her are used by customers to sit on whie the eat the food she prepares, effectively turning public space into a very fluid and dynamic economically productive space. I can't really think of examples of such fluid street functions in Western countries (except for maybe the guys selling stolen videos in London who disappear when they see the cops approaching), but this temporary appropriation of public space is everywhere in South East Asia.


This is a poster from a Dutch campaign to bring an end to the American bombing in South East Asia: from 1970 until 1975, the US heavily bombed Northern Vietnam, as well as Cambodia and Laos.


This is called the Hospital Cave, on Kat Ba island, in Halong Bay, in the northern coastal reaches of Vietnam. It was constructed in 1965 by the North Vietnamese as a secret hospital. Because it was so secure and hidden, only the highest level wounded officers were treated there: it was never discovered by the americans.


This was our guide: he was a soldier during the Vietnam war, or as it's called here (more logically) the American War. He showed us around the various concrete rooms, a special meeting room, a large cave which was used to show movies, and a small swimming pool. None of the spaces had any natural daylight; the movie area had small holes drilled from the surface to allow for air. he sang us song,which we didn't understand, and then made us sing the chorus, which we could understand: "Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh... Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh".





As well as bombing, the americans made extensive use of defoliants to remove the jungle cover which the Viet Cong used to launch attacks on US targets. The white in this diagram indicates the areas around Saigon (the US base of operations) that were sprayed with Agent Orange. The striated pattern comes from the way the defoliant is sprayed, the same way as crop dusting. It's estimated the US defoliated approximately 60% of the jungles in Vietnam.





To combat this mammoth effort to restructure the natural environment to make it impossible for the enemy to dictate the terms of engagement, the Viet Cong ingeniously changed the environment they operated in. They physically went underground, where bombing and chemical weapons couldn't reach them. In the area of Ku Chi, an elaborate network of underground tunnels allowed an army to get within 65km of Saigon, even though the americans theoretically controlled all of South Vietnam. This was a major factor in US withdrawal in 1975, and the fall of Saigon. From as early as 1965, the US knew about this tunnel network, but were powerless to break it up, as it was very difficult to detect, and was heavily guarded with booby traps. The collision of massive technological and military resources on the american side was not enough to combat the shear ingenuity and perseverance of the vietnamese.

Hong Kong: Reflections

I normally hate mirror glass, but when it's used on nearly every building the way it is in central Hong Kong, you start seeing really interesting effects, with reflections of reflections, and buildings abstracted in weird craquelure, mosaic textures.

Japan 2: Sendai Mediatheque by Toyo Ito

[second in a three-part series]


The sleepy city of Sendai in northern Japan is relatively far from the major economic and technological centers of Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto. In the mid-nineties, the authorities decided a tech boost for the city was required, and launched an international competition for the Sendai Mediatheque. The winning design by Toyo Ito was completed in 1998 - it contains a performance area, public library with high-end technology facilities, two galleries and artist's studios.


Functional and structural organization of the building is through a series of steel-and-glass tubes of various sizes running vertically through the building. In addition to holding the flat plate floors, they house elevators, stairs, service ducts, and permit light into the centre of the building. They twist like the branches of a tree as they move up through the building, generating spaces and zones between them on each level.



This drawing (sorry it's so crappy) illustrates what I found most interesting about the building - if looked at purely in terms of structural efficiency, this drawing showing the steel members in the floor plates looks illogical, with redundant elements: the most efficient way to span the space is of course to use a column-grid system. Ito, however does not place structural efficiency at the top of his list of design prerogatives - structure is seen as something more pliable, with the goal of maximum functional efficiency superseding concerns such as structural legibility. This decision expresses a break with the design's chief historical Modernist predecessors - such as Le Corbusier's Dom-ino system of post and floorplate construction, or Mies Van Der Rohe's absolute space of supreme structural perspicuity. Both of these were direct, architectural manifestations of the prevailing early-twentieth century zeitgeist of mass-production. Ito, in a short essay about the building, railed against mass-production for ultimately producing uniform spaces and uniform architecture, a uniformity which could not accommodate the functional complexity required by architecture. To that end, he attempted, with unconventional structural systems and advanced construction techniques borrowed from the ship-building industry, to avoid the uniformity dictated by mass-production, while still making full use of technological advances.


We also visited the National Museum in Tokyo by Le Corbusier. Without getting too much into the design, it was apparent the building was quite far from satisfying functional demands, and had been modified extensively for acoustic, lighting, organizational, and fire code requirements, as well as suffering from a poorly considered additional building.



In the context of Modernist buildings, with their hierarchy of author - design - construction - use - end-user, the number of interventions made by the user after the completion of the building can be seen as a measure of its ability to accommodate functional requirements. In the case of the Le Corbusier building, a combination of organisational inflexibillity and changing requirements over a thirty-odd year period had resulted in circulation obstacles, didactic directional arrows, jarring material palettes, and general curatorial detritus ruining any architectural coherence the building originally possessed.

We see none of this attempt to reconcile design intent with actual utilitarian demands at Sendai. Granted, the building is far newer with less time elapsed between original and current requirements, but there is also a strong argument to be made that the flexible nature of the planning allowed by the relegation of structural concerns has lead to a basic improvement in the open-plan typological form.


This places the building, conceptually, in a timeline that can be said to begin roughly in the nineteenth century scientific and industrial revolution, a particularly Western point of view which sees all human output, be it cultural, scientific, artictic, technological, or otherwise, as a process of continuing improvement. The birth of modern science and the understanding of physical laws gave the first engineers the tools to build with steel and concrete, which then allowed architects to experiment with these building techniques and produce meaningful architecture with them. Ito's building is a further improvement on what is seen as incremental progress, tending continually towards, but never quite reaching, a perfect condition.

Cambodia: Ta Phrom

Picking photos out of the nearly 100 I took here was a cruel and unusual punishment. It really was beautiful.

Japan: Three Views of Time

1. Isé Shrine at the Forest of Jingu

This forest and the river running through it are considered are considered the holiest in Japan's native Shintoist religion. The bridge crossing it, and the many shrines and ancillary structures within the forest constitute the most revered site for Shintoists.

The main sanctuary building at Isé cannot be visited by pilgrims or others, or even photographed from the outside. These are some sneaky photos I really shouldn't have gotten away with - the first is the torii (sacred entry) leading to the gateway through the outer fence of the Goshóden (main sanctuary building). Here people stand, look over the fence at the main sanctuary building, and pray. I didn't realize, until a pilgrim stopped me, that I wasn't permitted to even take this photo - what I was actually trying to photograph wasn't the torii, but the tree to the left of the photo.

I thought it was interesting that, rather than cut down the tree, or locate the path slightly to the right, the tree is incorporated into the path. This harmonization of artificial with natural, manmade intervention as an extension of nature, is one of the defining characteristics of Isé.


This is a part of the main sanctuary building, as seen from the other side of the fence. This building, and the others within the sanctuary fence, are built in a style of architecture called yuiitsu shinmei zukuri, which is unique to Jingu. Derived from vernacular grain store architecture, it is considered the most purely 'japanese' building form in Japan, free from all external influences.


The is the alternate site of the main sanctuary. Every twenty years, each shrine within the holy forest is dismantled, with the building elements, artifacts and apparel redistributed to other sites around Japan. With timber from the surrounding forest, the shrines, torii, and ancillary structures are reconstructed on a site next to the old one over the course of two years. The entire ritual, known as the Shikinen Sengú, culminates with a ceremonial moving of the august mirror (symbol of the kami, or spirit of the shrine) to the new site. The small structure in the middle ground of this photo is small shrine to house the kami until the next iteration of the cycle, (the 62nd) in October 2013.

It is this notion of ritual which is key to understanding Isé. The functional origins of this tradition are rooted in a desire for permanence and continuity. Under threat from a foreign faith (Buddhism), the tenth Emperor and head of the religion, Suinin Tennó, instituted the shrines at Jingu and the cycle of reconstruction as a means of maintaining the current belief system. Through the regularity and repetition of a vast and complicated system of ceremonies to exact traditional specifications, a kind of stasis is maintained, leading to the purity required to maintain both a political and religious status quo.

This stasis requires that the entire phenomenon be rooted directly to a particular environment, that it be, literally, genus loci, spirit of place. A harmonization of artificial and natural is obtained physically through a homogeneity of material, and operationally through cyclic ritual.


Timber from the forest is used for every element of the building (structure, cladding, even roofing). Construction techniques become a celebration of wood, metal fixings are rejected in favour of a materially homogenous system of pegs maintain rigidity in the structure.


The regularity of ritual is used above all to root the tradition temporally in its context as the use of wood roots it physically. The cyclic character of the Shikinen Sengú makes it an extension of nature, aligns human activity with other natural cycles - daily, lunar, seasonal, generational, etc. The stasis implied by this repetition implies that a perfect, ideal, or natural condition has been attained, that merely needs to be maintained. A diagram for its temporal status might look like this: