Views from Vietnam

Dear Readers,

I apologize for the lack of travel documentation, so here’s a recap of some pics from my Spring Break trip to Ho Chi Minh City back at the beginning of this month. I went with four other friends from my Japanese language program for ten days to Vietnam and it was a wonderful relief from the harsh freezing cold Kyoto winter. The weather down there was in the balmy 90s and full of rejuvenating sunshine. I stayed in a hostel hotel for about $20 per night including a tasty breakfast with a variety of options including Vietnamese Pho, or noodle soup. 
One day we wandered out to the main market for a bit of shopping and gourmandising when I ran into a fellow traveler from abroad. This man was traveling with his equally ridiculously garbed wife and stood amongst the street surrounding the marketplace trying to capture the vivid atmosphere as the heart of the city transformed into a nocturnal food court. I took this picture because he embodies the stereotypical Western tourist with his fanny packs, camera pouch, tucked in polo shirt and easy-zip-off cargo khakis. His goofy grin of glee as he photographed obstructed pedestrians simply sealed the deal for this priceless picture.

The Stereotypical Tourist Just Begging for Attention

That night we also went to see a Water Puppet show, a traditional Vietnamese performative art. The stage is a shallow pond of water where puppets controlled by puppeteers hidden behind a semi-transparent green shade. Clearly this is an art that could have only developed in a country like Vietnam where large rice paddies and deltas dominate the landscape (when it’s not mountainous and rough). I also glimpsed a traditional water puppet theater built on a pond, which must have provided an amazing backdrop for viewing.

Water Puppet Show

The next day my friends and I took a tour from our hotel to see My Tho (?) and some small islands outside Ho Chi Minh City. After a long and bumpy bus ride we arrived at a dock where we boarded some river boats. Those boats took us to smaller islands where we disembarked and walked through an island passing a honey farm, snake liquor producer, coconut taffy workshop, and other local specialties before arriving at even smaller canoes. The canoes took us through little canals that were dark with mud and surrounded on all sides by leafy palm frond vegetation. It was a cooling and relaxing ride with the gentle sound of a wooden paddle stirring up the silty brown watery muck as we inched forward. The canal went on for quite a ways until we arrived out on a bigger lake and again boarded our little boat.

A Slow Canal Cruise

Lunch that day was a scrumptious “elephant-ear” fish. I’m not sure how else to describe it, but it was a really big, ugly looking fish that I think lived in the canals and silty rivers of the area. I saw a big pond full of them when I was looking around the restaurant area. The restaurant itself was mottled with smaller canals and ditches full of water that must have been used for some kind of irrigation purposes. Anyways, the whole fish was fried and served to us standing vertically along with a large plate of fresh Vietnamese basil and other mysterious herbs. The fish was pretty good and my friends and I picked it clean.

Fried Elephant Ear Fish

Our adventurous day finished with a roughly 5-hour boat ride back along the river to Ho Chi Minh City. About 1 hour in, our seemingly-legit (as compared with the rickety Cambodian) vessel broke down and we pulled over towards the bank for a brief rest while the mechanical engineers attempted to figure out some kind of quick fix for our problem. One of them came towards the back of the boat where we were sitting and promptly jumped down into the waist-deep water where he plunged down for a second and returned bearing none other than the boat’s propellor. Another seasoned crewman apparently knew what he was in for and started trimming his fingernails at the bow of our broken down craft. Eventually another boat came along and rescued us from what could have been an interminable marooning along the banks of the mighty Mekong.

333 Beers, Mr. Puppy, and Leftover Mystery Poultry

Once on the new boat we were well on our way again when we made the acquaintance of on Mr. “Puppy” who (unknowingly on our part) sold us a brand of local Vietnamese beer called “333” or bai bai bai in Vietnamese. He also offered us the remains of some kind of finger-lickin good duck or chicken spattered with some really really succulent sauces. Puppy was quite the character and one in a series of Vietnamese we encountered with diminutive animal names along with “Kitty” (the receptionist at our hostel in Ho Chi Minh City) and “Monkey” (one of the staff at Bo Resort, where we stayed in Phu Quoc). It was quite a memorable couple of days in Ho Chi Minh City and the sunset on the Mekong River was one that I won’t forget.

Post-Modernity and Post-Vietnam

Last week was quite a whirlwind as I returned from Vietnam on Monday at 7:00 AM and went straight to class from Kansai airport to make it just in time after the end of first period. The next day whilst volunteering at Eastern Design Office, I stumbled upon an architecture program in France during the summer and realized it would be the perfect opportunity for me to build more material for my portfolio before graduate school. Unfortunately, the deadline was Monday, in less than a week and I needed two letters of recommendation. I immediately sent out emails to a couple of my professors who I thought would be able to do it and received positive responses from two of them. So I continued with the application and busted it out in time to mail the hard copy on Thursday via FedEx (for $45 mind you!!). I heard back from one of my professors saying he was finished with the letter and had sent it off, but I had not heard any contact from the other professor despite sending emails almost daily with updates on the status of my application. Even now, I am somewhat nervous as I have asked another professor with even less time (2 days!!) to finish the application for the second letter of recommendation and am currently awaiting his letter. In any case, hopefully I can get into this program called the Fontainebleau www.fontainebleauschools.org.

A Catholic Church in Saigon

Since my mind has been on architecture lately and I saw a bit of thought-provoking architecture in Vietnam, I thought I’d write another article on my architectural ponderings (and please enjoy the random photos as well!). On the subject of Post-Modernism (Po-Mo), I feel like the next stage for society is to emerge from the directionless subjective randomness that is life after the myth of Modernism. As Po-Mo has taught us, there is no ultimate and absolute answer to the problems posed by Modernity and society today. The International Style and Corbusier’s theories for efficiency in building and the vitality of the automobile have created a world in which ubiquitous glass, steel, energy hogging architecture have become the norm for cities around the world. Po-Mo surfaced as we realized that the technology-driven progress of Modernity did not solve the problems of society but instead created new ones such as environmental degradation, a deceptive virtual reality, and new outbreaks of diseases. With it came the doubt in the power of architecture as an idealized universal economic solution that met the aesthetic needs of man, the end of any discernible “style”, and the realized shortfalls of comprehensive urban planning.

Nocturnal worshipers at Notre Dame in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)

What was once a maximally efficient “machine for living” with its plain white walls restricted of any unnecessary ornament became a symbol for the foundering of the past age of technological presumptuousness. Without the goal of maximum economy, architects such as Michael Graves, Robert Venturi, and at times Arata Isozaki turned towards the past quoting elements from historical styles in an attempt to summon antiquity’s power to satisfy historical man’s aesthetic needs for the modern subject. Others like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid pushed modernism further using new technologies to create heretofore inconceivable designs completely devoid of economy and historical reference. Po-Mo was an age without style, without rules, and without laws. Architects ceased to writing manifestoes because Po-Mo taught us that it was impossible to expound anything flawlessly comprehensive.

As we stand today in our Po-Mo age floundering about in the tumultuous aftermath of Modernity, we struggle for a new direction, a new guiding goal for our efforts.
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Gah I’m really not in the mood to finish writing everything I was thinking of when I started that post yesterday, but I’ll sum up my main points about climate and its dictates over the limits of energy efficient design and how it governs all sustainable strategies that are inherently local based on the available materials and natural energy sources. Unlike the age when concrete, glass, and steel were the cure all to end all as far as materials for architecture were concerned, regional differences and regional architecture must once-again emerge as architects search for materials with low embodied energy costs which will express the spirit and nature of the place. As Prof. Baek at a talk I just went to on Watsuji Tetsuro argued, the design strategies that utilize the benefits of the natural climate have an effect on the social and ethical interactions between the building’s inhabitants. Prof. Baek’s concrete example was of cross ventilation in Japanese homes. The openness required to have efficient cross ventilation also leads to a lack of privacy within the home and reinforced social attitudes of openness within family relationships. In any case, the concept of climate as the dictator of architectural design and consequently the social interactions within that space was my first point for this little tidbit.

A zen garden at Daitokuji

My second point was going to be about the return of religion (in the sacred, spiritual, and numinous not dogmatic sense) after the death of science. Firstly, science is not quite dead per se, but Post Modern doubt definitely dealt a blow to our faith in the wonders of technology. For all the technological development of Modernism, contemporary man has noticed something lacking, perhaps a spiritual emptiness or perhaps distanced contact from understanding oneself as more than just an accumulation of molecules. The rise of new age spirituality with a particular blossoming of eastern religious philosophies is indicative of man’s search to rediscover the sacred, spiritual, and other-worldly. Technological gadgetry could not satisfy the needs of the spirit. Architects have sought to infuse a sense of the sacred and other-worldly in the buildings they create. These buildings, while sometimes actual houses of worship, are not necessarily confined to religious edifices. Whether a house by Tadao Ando, a bath by Peter Zumthor, or museum by Louis Kahn the sacred, spiritual, transcendent, numinous, whatever you want to call it other-worldy sensation pervades and fills the viewer’s inner sense of being. There is something awe-inspiring about the architecture of the ineffable which Modernism could not account for.

Burning pyre at Yoshida Shrine at the Setsubun Festival

That’s about all that was on my mind I think when I started that post, but I hope that architectural design that accounts for climactic and spiritual needs will be more prevalent in the coming years. In any case, there needs to be something that guides design out of the chaotic forest of relativity that is post modernism.

Some Architecturing: Frank Lloyd Wright and Shin Takamatsu

Dear readers, sorry for the delay in posts, but things have been hectic here in Kyoto. Two weeks ago was the week before spring break so I had tests and midterms etc. and the following week was spring break for which I went to Vietnam with some of my friends. Anyways, here is a post that I have been meaning to write a little blurb on for a while about some of the architectural sights I've been seeing here.

I recently went to visit the Yamamura House near Kobe originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and also not so recently visited Shin Takamatsu's Week Building project in Kyoto. Both projects exhibit a strong affection for details in an exuberant manner that might be called ostentatious by some minimalists. Most of today's architecture has focused on the minimalist aesthetic, cutting back on sculptural detail in favor of clean lines and increased economy. Other sculptural modern architecture such as that of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid design their flowing lines and curves at a super-human scale that is fairly removed from our immediate tactile perception. In addition, Takamatsu and Wright's works, despite being in Japan, do not exhibit the sort of minimal "Zen-like" aesthetic commonly associated with Japan and Japanese design in general.


"Week Building" Facade

Shin Takamatsu developed an early affliction for a technical and mechanical tectonic expression. Takamatsu's "Week Building" was completed in 1986 and expresses a fascinating robotic tectonic that embodies the zeitgeist of the Japan's Bubble Economy at the time. Riding the wave of technology, trade, and speculation, the high-tech mechanical and man-made was seen as the hope for Japan to rise as a leading power in the 20th century. This fetishization of technology carried over into the aesthetics of Takamatsu's work of which the "Week Building" is a prime example. In place of capitals, the transition between pillar and lintel is expressed with a hinge-like joint.

Handrails, bridges, and beam connections are all connected via a similar round member. Despite their appearance the hinges and joints does not move, yet the give the impression of a flexible, machine-like transforming building that operates based off motion and movement. Technology as an agent of mobilization for Japan's economic development is the underlying theme of this shopping complex. Takamatsu's sculptural details are perhaps an excessive tectonic statement, however this excess is representative of the excess of the bubble age. Nonetheless, they provide an interactive tactile experience when wandering through the now-deserted building's grounds.


Detail of Column Joint

Perhaps the greatest master of sculptural details to come to Japan was Frank Lloyd Wright. His (in)famous Tokyo Imperial Hotel was devoid of plain surfaces as nearly every sill, wall, and ceiling was detailed in his unique style. While here in Japan building the Imperial Hotel, Wright designed an initial scheme for the Yamamura House in 1918 that was carried out by his assistants, Arata Endo and Makoto Minami, in 1924 after Wright's departure. The Yamamura House is full of similar sculptural details and the ubiquitous use of the famous Oyaishi stone. Wright's custom-designed furniture and sculptures create a rich tactile experience for the senses.

Central Dining Room

Although the original design was fairly devoid of any association with Japanese traditional housing types (aside from perhaps the low horizontality naturally found in most of Wrights "Prairie Style" buildings), Endo and Minami added several washitsu (Japanese style tatami mat rooms) as well as staggered shelving similar to those found in traditional Japanese Shoin mansions. The inclusion of such uniquely Japanese elements like the staggered shelving, which was admired by Bruno Taut in his 1930s writings on Katsura Villa, presaged the West's soon-to-be-rediscovered fascination with Japanese architecture.


Custom Furniture in Study with Staggered Shelves

Today, both Wright's Yamamura House and Takamatsu's Week remain deserted and devoid of their originally intended functions. Whereas Takamatsu's suffers from the economic depression, ironic considering the spirit it embodied of a rising economic power, Wright's is devoid of permanent inhabitants and functions merely to preserve the memory of Wright's intervention in a wealthy Japanese suburb. Just as the West no longer looks towards Japan as an economic or architectural role model, the movement for scupturally focused architectural design has been forgotten in time as well.

Ground Entrance to Yamamura House