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

Festival Food!

As promised, here is a post about some of the festival food my friends and I ate at the Setsubun Festival the other week. First off is some corn on the cob. Usually a fairly difficult item to find in standard Japanese restaurants/convenience stores, yet tasty nonetheless. Imagine if convenience stores sold corn on the cob, I would totally buy that all the time. This also reminded me of my days in Cambodia (see older posts) when we would snack on corn on the cob from street carts for like 20 cents or something amazing like that. Speaking of southeast Asia, I just made plans with some friends to go to Vietnam for Spring break in TWO weeks! I'm super excited, but still have a LOT of planning to do.


CORN!

Next up are some ginormous takoyaki dumplings. Usually made about a quarter of this size, these octopus-filled dumplings are standard street and party food (playing a central role in the "round things" party my friends and I threw in which we made and ate lots of round foods). Other ingredients in takoyaki include cabbage, ginger, egg, and flour. I didn't buy any of these, but they're usually pretty good so I can only imagine how delicious these giant ones are.


Mammoth Takoyaki (Octopus Dumplings)

More griddle-fried goodies, here a variation on Okonomiyaki, sometimes erroneously called Japanese pizza. Perhaps it could be better thought of as a combination omelet and pancake covered in tasty sauce and in this case, egg, bacon, and fishcake. Okonomiyaki seems to have evolved sometime in the Showa period after a long evolution beginning around the 16th century and through several eras and permutations before it reached its present form. This particular style of okonomiyaki also has noodles in it, a characteristic of Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. Don't worry about the raw egg, as they crack it over the okonomiyaki right when you order that gives birth to gourmet gooey goodness.

Okonomiyaki

Finally, here's what I bought: Ayu, a.k.a. Japanese Sweetfish, skewered and roasted to crispy, salted perfection. Ayu is typically a summer food, but luckily for me, they had it here. It was pretty good, not the best I've ever had, which was probably either in Nagoya or Yamaguchi, but tasty nevertheless for being out of season. Its crispy texture, salty flavor, and sweet (not fishy) meat were just what I wanted after a freezing fire festival.


Roasted Salted Ayu (Sweetfish)

Setsubun Matsuri and Food

Flaming INFERNO!

Sorry for the late post, dear readers, but here it is. Last week was Setsubun Festival, which celebrates reaching the half point of winter and involves throwing soybeans at demons in order to ensure good luck for the year. I went with some of my friends to Yoshida Shrine near Kyoto University to see the festivities. Here are some photos of a mound of stuff that they burn at around 11 at night and you can throw paper and stuff into it. There were throngs of people at the temple as you can see, so it took a while for us to get to the fire, but when we did it was glorious. It must have been below freezing that night, so passing by an open bonfire was a welcome relief from the frigid February air. It was so cold indeed that I had to borrow my friend's hat (the blue one if you couldn't tell).


Warming my icy hands by the bonfire

Another peculiar custom of Setsubun is the eating of Eho-maki rolls or really big unsliced sushi rolls stuffed with all sorts of goodies. An Eho-maki is basically your standard futomaki (thick sushi roll), but with the added twist that you have to eat it facing the lucky direction specific to the year. This year's lucky direction happened to be West-South-West and luckily thanks to Kyoto's orthogonal grid layout arranged in the cardinal directions, it was very easy to determine which way west-south-west was from our convenient location inside a Family Mart convenience store. Usually you buy the Eho-maki from some sushi place or perhaps a more legitimate joint than a common convenience store, but we realized that at the last moment on our way home from the festival at Yoshida that we had yet to eat the Eho-maki in the lucky direction, so we stopped by in a Family Mart where they luckily (maybe all that setsubun stuff really did work) had four Eho-maki left for our consumption. I'm sure we also appalled the poor store workers by ripping open Eho-maki in their store, consuming it all in one go (you're also not supposed to talk until you finish eating it), and then requesting them to take a picture of us (using the most polite language, of course). The Eho-maki was tasty, but I was really full after an evening of festival food, which I shall report on in an upcoming blog, so stay tuned!


Pre-Eho-Maki

Seijin Festival and Goals

A Tree with bad luck fortunes tied to it at Heian Shrine

Here's another response to the Light Fellowship-generated question:

Re-evaluate your goals for the year. How have you done? Have you needed or wanted to change your goals over the course of your study? Do you have new goals for this term?

My goals and perspectives have indeed changed since returning to Japan. I feel like Kyoto has become my home in that I no longer feel the need to go out and see all the sights. Every day is just another day, not another day IN Kyoto. Like the residents of a city who haven't seen all the tourist attractions in their hometowns, I have lost the fervor of being in Kyoto. I've started going to the gym three times a week instead of going out and exploring the city. Clearly my goals and priorities this semester have changed. I have some mixed feelings because I know I should go out and see more, but sightseeing and playing tourist feel so unnatural and out of sync with the established rhythm of my daily life.

In an effort to combat this feeling of routine life, I have made another bucket list for Kyoto. At the same time I am busy trying to find a job. I am working on my resume and a list of firms to apply for as well as trying to contact my friends in Japan who are currently working in offices. One of my friends at Sou Fujimoto says she's going crazy from all the working she has to do. I have heard similar stories from other people who have worked in Japan, which is perhaps one reason why I don't want to live and work here permanently, but I think a year of working here would be a good experience before I move on to grad school.

The prospect of entering the workforce is exciting, nerve-racking, and stressful all at the same time, but it's the next step in my life and maturation. My birthday was yesterday and another year later I do indeed feel like I've grown up in so many ways. On the subject of growing up, here are some photos from Japan's "Seijin Festival"成人祭り, which is a coming-of-age festival for Japanese youth.


My friends and I with some newly minted Japanese adults

Study Abroad + Manju

In response to the Light Fellowship-generated question of the week, I would like to discuss my feelings about study abroad at Yale. Here was the prompt:

Many students at Yale almost automatically dismiss the idea of studying abroad during term time. Conversely, we'll often see students returning from a term abroad saying it was their best time ever "at Yale"? What are your thoughts? Did this time abroad contribute to or detract from your "Yale education" in any unexpected ways?

I was one of those students who dismissed the idea of studying abroad during my time as an undergraduate for several reasons, chiefly because my major did not allow me to easily take a semester off and continue on schedule for a timely graduation. The architecture major only had two or three study abroad options, all centered in Western Europe. I was looking for a program outside the Western canon of architecture, yet there was nothing really available that was approved by the major. Of course, I always had the option of applying to the Light fellowship for a year off, but I hesitated because I did not want to fall behind in the architecture track and fall back another year. I really loved my architecture studio family/friends and did not want to miss a year with them thereby placing me in the '10 architecture class of whom I was not especially close with.

I am extremely grateful to the Light Fellowship for giving me the opportunity to study abroad post-graduation and providing me with an experience that was not easily facilitated with the complexities of the architecture major. Indeed, last semester and this year so far has been one of my most exciting semesters of my academic career. Although, at the same time, there is the tinge of evanescence that comes along with any limited period of study abroad. By that I mean it feels like everything I'm doing/ have done here is just going to fall back into some distant, hazy, dreamlike memory once it's over. All these people I've just started to connect with will go back to their separate lives and schools around the world once this year is up. I suppose in a normal study abroad situation I would be returning to Yale next year, but instead I will attempt to enter the real world (once more >.<) and have no idea what is in store. It would be comforting to return to Yale for another senior year after what would have been an amazing junior year abroad, but unfortunately that is not the case for me. The prospect of being pushed out into the uncharted post-grad life instead of the safety of my home university has given me an anxiety that most of the other people (mainly juniors studying abroad) in my program don't seem to have to deal with.

Anyways, there's a quick record of my thoughts on study abroad and now for a lighter, tastier subject, here are some pictures of a manju I ate last week.

On the way back from the archery festival at Sanjusangen-do I stopped by this shop with steamed manju outside. Manju are Japanese sweet buns, often filled with delicious tastyness, in this case filled with sweet rice, beans, and topped with a piece of chestnut.

Bow and Arrow Festival

Today I went to Sanjusangendo, a Buddhist temple in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto for the annual Yanagi Kaiji and First Arrow Festival. The festival is a competition where the best archers from around Japan gather to exhibit their skill in a shooting contest. Traditionally the contest was to shoot the length of Sanjusangendo, whose name means "Hall of the 30 Bays". Sanjusangendo is also known for its 1001 statues of Kannon観音, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, as well as many national treasures of sculptures depicting the guardians of Kannon.

The competition was really cool to watch all the archers. There were three main divisions: Young women, young men, and teachers. Of course, the teachers were the best group to watch because they actually hit the targets and several got bull's eyes as well. The girls were also very entertaining to watch because of the aesthetic appeal of their kimono and hakama (archery outfits). After each round of shooting, several volunteers in little yellow jackets scurried out onto the shooting range and gathered the arrows from the targets and ground. The people in the yellow reminded me of the kids who collect the balls at tennis matches. The shooting also reminded me of tennis matches because the audience reacted very calmly with "oooooh"s, "awwww"s, and several "oshii"s (oshii means regrettably close in Japanese). The audience also politely applauded and remained in a very good temper even during the champion round when the winner hit the target nearly in the bull's eye. One can only imagine how an American athlete would act after such an achievement. Even Tiger Woods used to do a fist pump or a cheer in golf, perhaps America's most etiquette-conscious sport. Japanese archery is also tightly bound to tradition and watching the ritual approach and stringing of the bow made for an entertaining sight regardless of whether or not the arrows hit the targets.

This week is my second week of Japanese classes and I hope to resume my volunteering at the architecture firm this week as well. Here's to a great start for a new semester!