Back to basics: exploring old ideas in new ways, Japan's architects move toward an architecture of the future primitive.

Gabriele Vorreiter, writing in her introduction to the November 1987 issue of the AR, concluded by saying that Japanese architecture defies definition. Occupying middle ground between substance and the insubstantial, where traditionalism, speculation, permanence and impermanence co-exist, she described a generous mentality within Japanese culture that appears able to accommodate diverse style and multifarious expression. In contrast to Western single-mindedness, where choices distinguish between things, either 'one thing or the other', she suggested that in Japan, solutions emerge from considering 'one thing and the other', as ideas and styles coalesce. Writing when Japanese architecture was most confused, she identified Japanese Baroque as a problematic outcome; an architecture that satisfied consumer-orientated cravings for the unusual, the gimmicky and the new. Twenty years on, as the country is in a less pressurised, but nevertheless inflated economic bubble, similar traces of visual eclecticism still exist.

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Style: a dichotomy across generations

Adopting Vorreiter's twentieth-century classification, Japan is currently in its fourth architectural generation. After Takeda Goichi and Kingo Tatsuno pioneered with Western influence in the 1890s, the second generation focused on the influential BUNRI group, established in 1928 by Sutemi Horiguchi to stem the ad-hoc eclecticism of Western influences, in favour of the so-called Imperial Style. Today following Tange's death in 2005--the chief Metabolist widely recognised as a key architect in the third generation--the governors of generation four include two architects featured in this issue, Toyo Ito and Tadao Ando, who encapsulate Japan's dichotomy of style, operating at either end of the country's broad spectrum of architectural expression.

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As early as 1987, Vorreiter recognised Ando's unyielding consistency and single-mindedness, highlighting criticism for predictability in his design. Regarded by Vorreiter as a rarity among Japanese designers, following as he has Modernism's single-track approach, when describing his latest building Ando concedes that his continued obsession with low-tech construction may indeed have placed him out of step with today's society. In contrast, Ito epitomises the peculiar Japanese generosity that is more willing and able to change course. As described by Jencks in an essay entitled 'Toyo Ito: Stealth Fighter for a Richer Post-Modernism', Ito's work displays his capacity to play a number of lead roles from Ito the traditionalist, Ito the Techno-Futurist, Ito the poet, even Ito the Post-Modernist.* Moving from one role to another, he continues to surprise, seen in this issue deploying primitive forms in pursuit of radical spatial matrices. Curiously though, both architects speak of primitivism, with Ando's 'low-tech' construction (p66), and Ito's archaic formalism and vastly reduced architectural tectonic (p46). With this dichotomy evident between two of Japan's most senior figures, a similar dynamic can be traced within the emerging generation, comparing, for example, the work of Ryue Nishizawa, with that of Sou Fujimoto.

Nishizawa and Fujimoto have distinctive styles, illustrated by two projects that share a similar brief: Nishizawa's Moriyama house (bottom) and Fujimoto's soon to be built proposal for collective housing, Tokyo Apartment (left). In contrast to Nishizawa's dispersed white cubes that typify his consistent language of expression, Fujimoto draws on, blends and merges familiar motifs, with a series of traditional ramshackle Tokyo dwellings stacked one above the other. While developing new paradigms in collective housing, both test notions of privacy and use, creating interstitial spaces between very particular clusters of form. Confirming his fluency, a second scheme by Fujimoto shows the breadth of his language, with his design for House N that adopts a more reduced, SANAA-esque mode of expression.

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This adaptability may of course, raise concerns about the consistency of his approach, as critics who like definitions could quite reasonably ask, which of these two architects is engaged in the most sophisticated, authentic, or serious approach to architecture? Is Fujimoto displaying the fitful enthusiasm of youth, in comparison with Nishizawa's cool maturity (tempered by his celebrated partnership with Kazuyo Sejima)? Or is Fujimoto simply more liberated and fluent?

Future-primitivism: in search of essence over style

Such lines of enquiry however, are of little value, as both would sidestep the question making no claim of loyalty to any given style. What is more interesting, is to consider shared preoccupations, as both moderate creativity and invention by considering notions of the primitive. As a term more explicitly used by Fujimoto, traces of their search for future-primitivism are clear in both streams of work, in terms of use, atmosphere and environment. Through the arrangement of basic, so-called primitive forms, in the case of Nishizawa's language, strong formal consistency is more of a by-product than an end in itself. Despite popular belief, the architecture of Nishizawa (and SANAA) does not promote emptiness or attach obsessive value to the formal neutrality of white. This illusion is the unfortunate consequence of the manner in which their work is presented, with photographs purposely stripped of depth, contrast and colour. When asked about their virtually expressionless language, Nishizawa will not discuss colour, material or form, but does admit that in earlier work, unadorned white surfaces represented an active evasion of decision-making. Displaying Vorreiter's relatively blinkered 'one or the other' attitude, while engaged in what Nishizawa describes as an already agonising process, resolving the distribution of programme, consideration of additional variables such as material and texture was dismissed as an unwanted complication. Even now, despite their success, form is still presented as an outcome rather than an end in itself, with Sejima saying almost incidentally, 'of course, regardless of specifics, I insist that the final form must be beautiful', as if to say that making beautiful white boxes is the easy part; the ultimate architectural no brainer.

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Complementary in essence, Fujimoto's openness to more liberal expression provides a refreshing alternative. Clearly more comfortable with Vorreiter's notion of 'one and the other', his strategies merge a variety of ideas. In proposals for a new library at the Musashino Art University, for example, he disperses the grid and manipulates territory between solid and void. And, while House O (p56) keeps its feet firmly on the ground, Primitive Future House speculates with an undefined architectural language in order to explore how a primitive man cum monkey could climb through a domestic realm.

Other outcomes are also featured in this special issue that explore notions of the primitive. These include, Takaharu and Yui Tezuka Architects' Kindergarten, a primitive hut, in the round; TNA's phototropic Mosaic House, that bends to catch the light; and a second project by Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects, that in recognition of man's final threshold in life, evokes rich essences of the natural world. It also illustrates the reality of Nishizawa's stunning Moriyama House, revisiting the building two years after completion, to look beyond the purity of its composition.

* AD monograph no 41, Toyo Ito, 1995

In the preparation of this issue, sincere thanks are extended to Edmund, Yuki and Cosmo Sumner, Mark Dytham, Takaharu and Yui Tezuka, and my guide Keiichi Kato.