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| Photomontage of ruined structures of the future city, "Electric labyrinth", Milan. |
In 1960 Japan was just entering a period of exponential growth and, indeed, the future looked rosy. I was just about to start work as an architect. For all of us at that time, "the future city" was an imperative issue. We were impelled to propose an architecture that could embrace new urban possibilities, with which the present was patently pregnant.
Try as I might, I could not dispel a lingering scepticism about my drawings and models of Cities in the Air, underground and on the sea. They all lacked something: I just could not convince they would be constructed in the future. They were supposed to reverberate back to me, to inspire my confidence in their feasibility. No matter how hard I worked, no matter how long I waited, the future never seemed to arrive. Deep inside me, I was sceptical of the conviction of the brilliant future. It appeared that this was a void resulting from physical form imbued with hollow culture. It was darkness, yet at the same time, it was a blue sky.
As a boy of 14, I saw the cities of Japan burnt to the ground before my very eyes. Running through the rapidly collapsing streets like a hunted animal, I escaped the incendiary bombs; but not the complete and utter destruction of everything I knew which ensued of their wake. All the physical objects in my world and everything around me dissapeared. It seems as if the entire fabric of life, even the bonds of family and other human relations, were reduced to so many piles of rubbish.
There was not a cloud in that sky over the Japanese archipielago on the day Japan surrended. The summer sun cast sharp black shadows on the ground. It was silent. Time stopped. Moreover, it was the end of history. All explosion, dangers around and all that so clearly constituted the future dissapeared. One had to call it a void. As I stood long in that void, only the blue sky came up. My mind and body dropped away and I had no additional mental capacity to be self-aware. However, to recall a few of those moments I believe it was a feeling of despondency under the blue skies. At that time, the spectacle that spread before me was the plain of the burnt ruins.
The combined effects was psychologically traumatic. Etched into my very retina in that moment when suddenly time stopped, those burnt ruins would come back to me every time I confronted a white sheet of drawing paper. Back in the early 1960s working on the city of future, I could do little more than leave the white paper white. All I could draw were broken fragments, melted and fused, deformed and distorted, which created objects that were only formed by chance.
The concept of ruins is a potent idea found in the west, well represented by countless historical remains. Japan also has the same kind of concept, though, of course, the physical enviroment is very different. My interest in ruins, however, could never be just a question of architectural or archaeological study. I could never escape the connection with the ruins that surrounded and almost engulfed me that unforgettable day. Despite the trauma, it seemed natural to associated the views of those burnt ruins with the ruins found in the west. The first structure that dominated my thinking in my work as an architect was that of the ruin.
Sketching the future was what I believed to be the job of an architect. 1960, nothing was more important than developing firm plans for the future of the city. The atmosphere was utopian. Architects lined up in their factions with specific goals to be realized through architecture for changing our society.
My eyes saw only blanks and broken fragments on my drawing paper. It was depressing. How could I participate in the activity of the different groups with nothing to offer? In all honesty, I had to acknowledg that for me the future lay in ruins. I could not get away from that past when I saw cities, great complex urban structures destroyed in an instant, transformed into mountains of rubble and trash. I felt certain ruin was the fate of the cityscapes before me then. If the image of those ruins burned so deeply in my eyes and if my memory was prohibiting me from excercising my imagination on the future, should I not simply embrace the idea and accept that the future will be composed of the same kind of ruins? Depression remained, however, and this paradox was the only force that could free me from trauma. To everyone else the future seemed rosy but it seemed to me that utopia was misunderstood, severely limiting the development of our imaginative powers. Here was a paradox that had the power to wreak fundamental change in the situation at that time.
Absolute time could be defined as the linear axis from the past linking it through the present to the future. There is an alternative conception, which we can call the axis of imaginative time, that axis on which we actually live. Time as we inhabit it is thereby coloured with special hues, and one of its peculiar features is the freedom which we can develop it into the past and into the future. Absolut time is common to us all, its extentions conjugate, so that whenever we think of the future we concieve of it as a single determinate extension from the present along this uniform axis. However, imaginative time generates only collections of instants of remembrace. It is arbitrary and indeterminated. Do we not often get into a cul-de-sac because we mistakenly confuse it with the absolut time axis? Certainly it appears that the facts of the past are arrenged along a single axis, but we can run imaginative time along the line of the past also. Facts are always being tampered with. Historical interpretation is something that must be constantly updated and revised.
Ruins can be seen as fragments within the complex of absolute and imaginative time, forming definitive proof of past facts, facts broken and destroyed. We see them as once having formed part of completed, finished structures. Chance has conveyed them to us through the ravages of time. Extending imaginative time into the past generates such thoughts. Although they can never give us an accurate image of the complete structures to which they testify, none of this can diminish the fascination of ruins or the temptation to speculate that they offer. They have hidden effects on us, stimulating fantasies, visions and illusions: The elevated gardens of Babylon, Easter Island, the ancient Mayan pyramids, the Celtic megalithic culture, the Pillars of Hercules and the continent of Atlantis. It is no exaggeration to say that we live within endless series os such fantasies.
Through photographs, books and stories, the ruins of the west had long beckoned me. In the photographs, the ruins were no more than fragments of fragments. Had they been there inside me long ago in the past. Déjà vu. Standing before and among them, I was quite at home. I could not put it into words or reasons, but there was some strange resonance with those deep psychological scars.
Ruins are literally fragments of destruction, bits and pieces fallen from their original positions, and the gaps and holes they leave behind. Both the fallen pieces and their holes catch our imagination and lead us into a temptation notion of former grandeur. Completion and perfect beauty is to be found in those lost conditions. Tragic romanticisism is never far off - a longing for lost perfection. more than mere longing, to seemed important to me was that those fallen bits and pieces formed and invitation to fill in the gaps, to make the connections, to shore them up and where necessary to replace them. The axis of imaginative time forms spontaneously, soaring back to a particular point in the past. Does this extend only in the past?
If we could only reverse this time axis while maintaining its characteristics as we have come to know them from comtemplation in the past; could we by sketching and describing the past in imagination thereby turn all this into the future? Would not this be a way of sketching the future? bound to such an imaginative process. will not this future also just be fragments?
At least, envisioned with eyes that have savoured the temptations of ruins, surely will not be rose-coloured. Pitiful, wretched and miserable vistas of the future are more likely; a future superimposed upon the ruined landscapes of the past. It would not be a case of the time axis extending in both directions so much as the axis of the past imposed on that of the future generating an irrational disjunction.
In 1962, my future city photomontage showed the city of the future formed amid the ruins of the past. I assumed ruins of the present persisting into the future and time inverted or deranged by denining constructions left to be completed in the future. Scales were distorted and distinct structural elements were coupled with opaqued and invisible elements. It was a partial future and partially it was the past. None of it was clear in the present, for it was actually intersitial between latency in the present and non-existence.
I added this aphoristic lines to the montage: "The incubation process. Ruins lie in the future of our city, and the future city itself will lie in ruins." This was a new departure for me as an architect; it was a new declaration. as architects we are obligated to work within the framework of rational possibility, effective realizability; we have to build to last but this collage stood in semantic contradiction to all of that. It was a breakthrough that set my mind soaring. The simple effect of placing plain, massive ruins at the centre of tomorrow's world was to destroy that rose-tinted future that I never really believed in anyway. Psychologically, that transparent, wide blue sky was the perfect setting - indeed the very stimulus - for this irrational disjunction.
I expect to continue working as an architect for the rest of my life. From the moment the constructions I participate in are completed they begin their journey on the road to ruin, just as living things move on to their death. Indeed from the moment a building is conceived in thought, of itself it already includes its own decay. thus, architecture becomes thinkable as ruins.
Architecture that includes ruins is not necessarily a special case; in fact they lie within its general characteristic. architecture is designed to withstand erosion and weathering. The suspension of time is an absolut condition. Nevertheless, even as weathering progresses, architecture remains a longing for indestructibility and eternity, as countless monuments stand testimony throughout history. Only in rare cases has a monument been conceived in terms of architectural ruins. Monuments are usually considered as unchangeable structures, although many looks like ruins.
There is a photograph of Manhattan from the Queens Cementery in the book The Face of New York (1954) by the photographer Andreas Feininger. In the foreground is a group of gravestones. Most of them stand vertically with inscriptions on them and the massive skyscrapers of Manhattan rise up all around them in the background as the view extends out beyond them. The super-telephoto lens has just come into use then and it shortened the distance between Manhattan and Queens in the landscape, generating a continous space between the two. As a result the groups of skyscrapers of Manhattan look just like gravestones standing erects over a huge graveyard. There are the gravestones using unchangeable, inmutable stone material to conmemorate the dead, and the skyscrapers, eminently practical architectural systems, including of course buildings long used everyday by businesses. All this encompassed in the continous space.
The gravestones are models of skyscrapers, and the skyscrapers are nothing but gravestones. - an irony that soon imposes itself on the viewer. For me, Manhattan is still defined by this one paragraph, and the first time I visited New York I went directly to the place from which I was shot to look at the actual view itself. Of course there are many places that a newcomer should visit in New York and it took a lot to pacify the doubts of the driver as I urgently requested that he take me to the Queens Cementery.
The large city seems to us to be life itself, teeming and bustling. Yet we have all know that it carries death at its heart constantly; and it is no easy thing to express this relation between life and death in the city symbolically. It seems to me that Feininger's unique achievement was the discovery that the super-telephoto lens could dramatically shorten the distance between life and death. He found a way to expose a relationship between technology had concealed, in showing the derivation of this universal theme, that of the relation between life and death in the metropolis. At the same time technology accelerates both the living body and the physical destruction of the city, and he showed that all too.
Laws of Ruins
1970 was a very special year for me for reasons that had a lot to do with ruins. Two years earlier, The Great Cultural Revolution reached its highest pitch of activity Repercussions spread out around the world. In 1969, the Yasuda Hall at Tokyo University was reduced to ruins. Barricades were going up on campuses all around the world, corridors and windows were blocked with piles of rubbish and bits of wood and steel bars, desks and chairs, and their rubble were littered everywhere. The level of "warfare" was quite different, of course, with most of the combat, as well as the destruction, low-scale. Although window glass and partition walls were broken, the main structure of the building remained.
At the time there was a real war going at Vietnam. The campus struggles in the United States resulted from the extension of the anti-Vietnam campaign into the universities but in many cases the Grat cultural Revolution at that notorioius giant China was the model.
In the city outside the campus life went on normality and indeed there was quite free intercourse between the two worlds. One wonders how the occupying students felt about the scenes of ruins in those liberated zones under their occupation. Nobody seems to have asked why exactly was that independent space had to turn so soon into spaces had achieved that condition. Perhaps at some level the look, dare we say style, of ruins supported their anti-establishment behaviour.
In the midst of this city where ruins were generated everyday, I was involved in a multi-year project to produce the Festival Plaza, which would form a centre of the Osaka World Fair and National Festival Ground, and it would remain in existence for six months. After six months it would be all be torn down. The project had many fascinating aspects, not least of which was the work of integrating the invisible devices, lighting arrangements. sound lines and other fixtures that protrude only occasionally from the structures ussualy considered the main object of architecture. Uncomfortable with the political relations entailed by this work for the state, I was sympathetic to the anti-establishment impulses of the students even if the universities were being turned into ruins. This insecurity actually put me in a double bind. My enthusiasm for the technical and design problems of creating equipment and facilities (most of which would not be seen by the visitors and which, along with the rest of structures, would eventually be destroyed) could not assuage my misgivings about working on a festival glorifying the power of the state and the establishment. This was a serious contradiction, and when the work finished, completely exhausted, I suffered a breakdown and had to be hospitalized. Six months later the festival ended and they started tearing down structures that I and others had laboured for years to create.
Searching for a deeper psychological underlying cause as to why I participated in this brief festival, I went over those political negotiations again and again in my mind. My work for that festival that disappeared after only six months was riven with contradictions, and it was the consequent anxieties rather than the physical effort involved that pushed me towards catastrophe. was there a longing for Thanatos (the Greek figure of death) lurking behind all this? Was it erotic energy craving the ectasy of destruction?
Those firebombs that lit up the evening skies over Japan's cities towards the end of the war looked like beautiful fireworks to me. My memories of running to escape the bombs came back to me in the bursts of excitement chilldren feel in the mirror maze at amusement grounds. Terrified certainly, but even as I was desperate to escape, I wanted to be there within it all until the last possible moment. Perhaps I instinctively understood that once I escaped that chaos, nothing would remain but an abyss.
The morning, once the night illuminated by the firebombs ended, offered nothing but those vistas of twisted, charred ruins. When I heard the news of the destruction of Hiroshima, which lay across the bay from where I lived, when I saw the photographs of that ruined landscape, I had no way of understanding what that instantaneous point of light actually meant. When I saw the film of the mushroom cloud over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, I felt both terror and ecstasy. The awesome desire of destruction entailed by acceptance of that explosion must surely be a longing for Thanatos. Numbed in a state of inactivity divided from myself, I was overwhelmed by the feeling of being sucked into a point in the blackness of space. Seeking, expanding, I was scattered abd being sucked into the void.
What architecturak sense canwe make of working for destruction? Was there some premonition of this result in the original meaning of architecture? Then why is it usually conceived as the work of constructing buildings as unchanging, eternal structures? Thus, to myself I secretly called my work of the invisible devises "Invisible Monument"; however visible its results appeared to society, for it played with the laws of physics even as it was in the process of being destroyed by politics.
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| The Festival Plaza shelter in Osaka 70. The "Big roof" |
Edmund Burke (1729-97) said that by commanding formality, the force of this structures was precisely expressed by Piranesi daring to enphasize deficiency and breakdown. Piranesi's wood-block prints include, of course, careful depictions of the small remains as he saw them, he also did imaginative reconstruction, which may have emphasized the glory and majesty of the great Roman Empire. From the small remains around the Campo Marzio, Piranesi produced dense drawings of great architectural structures crowding the area. Piranesi's imaginative reconstruction may even contradict archaelogical evidence. Despite the fact that many of the structures remain precisely in the positions where he drew them, his work is unsatisfactory as historical documentation. His "completions" seem more like improvements towards modern forms. what he did was to follow the clues offered by the fragments and fill in the gaps, letting his imagination fly in the face of the facts if necessary, in the end producing an essentially fictional ideal city.
Nowadays there is a very precise and clear distinction drawns between the ideal future and architectural reconstruction. Via the eighteenth century, realistic architectural design involves a precise scientific elements deriving from the recovery of the ancient knowledge in the Renaissance and its turn towards accurate reconstruction of the classics.
The Greek Revival became systematized about 50 years after Piranesi and from that point on new designs had to conform to archaeological precision. The idea was to approach as closely as possible the forms that actually existed in the Greek era, with tha grand aim of revivifying the spirit that behind them. Piranesi at once preceded and surpassed the movement by going beyond archaeological precision in creating an imaginative architectural empire.
A distinct taste for ruins developed in the eighteenth century. It was very fashionable to place them in important locations in the pinturesque gardens from specific views. This was a form of the longing for the classical age; people considered themselves drawn to the natural enviroment of Arcadia. The same was true for the pleasure gardens that existed in the Greek age. In the background of these naturalistic gardens stood the houses and buildings of the time. andrea Palladio (1508-80) made measurements of the ancient remains, inferred dimensions of the original structures and tried to use his results in reconstructions of Roman palaces, bridges and monuments. Nicolas Poussin (c. 1594-1665) painted the buildings in his country scenes without significant change but as if they were just ruins.
This aesthetics of classical ruins dominated Europe from the eighteenth century to the neo-classical era and reached its peak in the age of romanticism. Ruins give us hints of the glory of the past now long gone, and have become decisive props in stimulating tragic feeling in us.
Ruins of the Electronic Brain
By 1980 ruins had come to look very different. Of course, their defining characteristic of being former broken structures did not change. Now they were not made of stone. Plastic and microchips replaced the old materials. In 1960 such elements were still far in the future. Urban space was now teeming with directive signs and symbols. they transformed reality without revealing their connections, the networks of the media media behind them. Suddenly they proliferated from non-existence into indispensability almost over-night, wandering through the city's space, interacting withand stimulating each other.
That incomprenhensible mechanism operating weirdly on the other unreachable side of Franz Kafka's The Castle abruptly came into reach as the microcomputer appeared on desktops everywhere, ready to read the now easy-to-understand mechanism with a telephone. Its wires and cables spread over floors and ceiling like spiders' webs running all over the place. And the online link with great central brain completed the invisible network.
Satellites in space now tie these communications systems up in one vast worldwide network. As central supervision in strengthened, that Kafkaesque ominousness pervades in the innumerable prohibitions against entering protected sectors, just like in The Castle, while hackers, like the surveyor K, search ceaselessly for ways to break the codes and break into the system.
This network will be expanded, its sophistication increased and it may already be beyond the limits of control. Expansions and reductions of scale and increases in both scope and density are forcing fundamental changes in the meanings of both enormity and minuteness. As technology moves from vacuum tubes to transistors, to IC's (integrated circuits), and further towards replicating neuron activity between brain cells, the worldwide network moves towards new principles of linkage affecting the generation of random cennections.
Is there not a possibility of a not altogether favourable metamorphosis into something that may surpass man in some capacities but which is incapable of understandin most of what we consider human? One response is expressed by hi-tech Luddism, which argues that the effects of imagination within brain cells are like holographs generated by the distribution of neuron pulses. Extending this hypothesis suggests that we all see completely different images of the world; at least it seems that the confirmation of the hypothesis ought to lead to this paradox.
It is easy to imagine how this analogy with brain effects could be extended to cover external reality. cityscapes of the electronic brain have already become reality and continue to transform it in their own image. Through mechanisms of breaking down and dismantling, this flesh embraces both Eros, and violence and death, and is thereby produced as an integral part of this very desire. Just when it looks like this orderly growth will reach a shimmering nirvana, frenzied noise suddenly seeps in, disturbance and derangement take over and the movement is reversed. Disorder and chaos mix, disolving all distinctions at the foundations of this flesh, and passion is pacified. Invaders, foreign matter or system disturbances generate radically distinct forms of deviance. this is a moment of realization, the moment when we discover the ruins in the space of the electronic brain.
In 1960, the future suggested to me only ruins. Then it was a question of dead masonry, now 20 years later, the prospect is filled with dead technology. Nuclear weapons have seen the world after destruction of the nucleus. The order and system that technology suposedly promised has been irrevocably disturbed.
A century ago architecture consisted of articulated combinations of large structural sections, massive protrusions that sought to impress the spectator. Electronics are silent, miniaturized, ambiguous, formed of indistinct disjuntions, which remain invisible as they are strewn through our spaces. Fluctuation invades the space, interrupting operations, eroding; and bright new devices and systems soon tuns into rubbish heaps.
The only new future space I was interested in sketching in 1980 were the electronics ruins of the cyberpunks. Various kinds of cyberpunk and science fiction operate imprecisely or inaccurately in the movies Blade Runner (1982), Brazil (1985) and Max Headroom (1987). They don't stand silent like dead masonry. Sometimes they're too voluble. Uncontrollable, they are dangerous and violent, and hence erotic. Our immersion in this space may have been facilitated by the approach to the gigantic and the sublime in 1970 via the laws of ruins; and this may remain at the foudation of owr perception of space now. Appearances change constantly. But why are people so interested at ruins, unless there is a need to destroythe dominant aesthetic order. erotic energy aims at exciting cold violence. So long as this passion exists, ruins will exists all around you. continue to love ruins, immerse yourlself in them and allow your body to be overcome by them. Flesh ruins growing along with the facilities of the electronic brain, androidized, wires entangled and cut. Thanatos continualy emerges in the spectacles of ruins. What form will ruins take in 1990? Will the decline and downfall of the electronic brain be reduced to rules? How many ruins of how many hundreds of nuclear explosions will have been stimulated by then? Will the "sublimity of the nucleus' be codified and reduced to rules anew?
