The Organization of Ambition Or the Last Gasp

The Organization of Ambition or The Last Gasp

REM KOOLHAAS and HANS ULRICH OBRIST

On Project Japan: Metabolism Talks

March 8, 2012

LIVE from the New York Public Library

Celested Bartos Auditorium

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Now, I don’t believe in giving you a long biography of the guests we invite. Instead, for the last two or three years, I’ve asked them to provide me with seven words that define them, a haiku of sorts, or a tweet if you prefer. Rem Koolhaas gave us this definition of himself in seven words. Interestingly enough, he came up first only with two words and then with six. “Mystic, rational, sober, baroque, patient, immediate.” Hans Ulrich Obrist came up with eight words, so, on average, we have seven words. “Catalyst, conversation, curating curiosity, junction-making, protest against forgetting.” Both of them will give you a small presentation before we start the conversation. I think Rem Koolhaas goes first. Rem Koolhaas.

(applause)

REM KOOLHAAS: Thank you. I made a very short preparation and I tried to focus on everything I wanted to say and I wanted to introduce through this book. Ostensibly it’s a book about a movement in architecture, a Japanese movement in architecture, maybe the first avant-garde movement in architecture that was not Western. But all these things we can talk about. I only want to talk about a limited number of things.

The first one is that in order to understand this movement, which seemed to be a typical movement of the postwar period, a period of reconstructing the world, both in the West and in Japan, we actually have to go back to the period before the war because we discovered that actually the incursion of Japan into China, a military campaign, was the first time that the Japanese were confronted with the wide-open spaces and therefore with a provocation to begin to think how they should organize life from scratch, and that is very important I think to understand about the Metabolists. A seemingly progressive movement actually started by going to war.

The second really important thing is that what I think is the secret of Japanese modern architecture is they not, like us, cut the connections between tradition and modernity but that they always maintained, in reality but also as a kind of rhetorical ploy, a connection between tradition and the new. And basically this is a project of Kenzo Tange, a key figure in our book, although we were too late to interview him. He died when we actually started. It’s also a project from the war, so basically from the wrong ideology where he insisted it’s 50 percent modern, 50 percent traditional.

This is a picture of Tange. It’s a very unique type of personality, very rare in architecture, because he was both a builder and a thinker—that combination almost never happens—and he also was of course somebody with a very strong ego but he also had the ability to cultivate younger generations around him and I think this combination of being a very aggressive, recognizable identity and working on cultivating a younger generation is really one of the mysteries we try to understand.

One particular issue for me is that currently in architecture, we are all lonely operators, there is very little solidarity. We work in a relentless environment of competition. What you see in this picture—and Tange is there, at the center—is that the interesting thing about the Metabolists is that they could stay together and be individuals working in a movement. Perhaps the most special wunderkind that Tange discovered is him in this picture when he was twenty-four in Petersburg, Kurokawa, perhaps the most brilliant of these people, and what Tange did in 1960 was organize a platform, an international platform, where the entire design world of the world congregated, Louis Kahn was there, to name only one name. And basically on that platform he launched his pupils and the people he had cultivated. So somebody who actually is a very prominent person also creates a platform for the generation after him.

Currently we have a lot of media attention as architects but I would say that on the whole it has a very negative effect, because the more media attention, the less we are taken seriously, I would say. It creates a kind of effect of caricature. The Metabolists launched their movement at the moment that Japan invented television, therefore the two movements were almost coequal, and I think that this is a beautiful picture where you see that the emerging medium of television is exactly engineered to launch the emerging movement of Metabolism and that therefore media attention at that time was not destructive but actually supported serious thinking.

Here you see Kurokawa with his most prominent creation, the so-called Capsule Tower, Kurokawa became so incredibly—such an incredible focus of the national press in Japan that I would say he was the first not only role model for architects but actually he himself became a role model for the Japanese male, let’s say a representative of the new Japanese masculinity. Of course the Japanese lost the war, masculinity was compromised, it had to be reinvented, and Kurokawa was perhaps for the nation as a whole the most appropriate model, and he shared that role with another very prominent not architect but writer, Mishima, and my theory is that basically these two represented or invented, maybe, a new Japanese masculinity.

Kurokawa became so important to Japan that for fourteen years he had to go on a weekly television program in which he could tell the Japanese nation for forty minutes every week, his ideas, his suggestions, for the development of Japan. He could talk about anything and he had an audience and with that program he influenced deeply the course that Japan would take. And doing so he became also perhaps the most prominent person that was able to interview Japanese politicians, in this case the prime minister, so you see an architect kind of inventing and stepping outside the identity of architecture.

What we discovered when we first thought that these were individual people working together more or less casually, in the end, when we had really penetrated the mysteries of the movement through interviewing not only the protagonists but also the ecology around them, their families, when we finally came to a bureaucrat who also had been trained by Tange to be an architect, Tange positioned the bureaucrat in the main bureaucracy of Japan, and in doing so Japanese architecture has a kind of permanent supply of commissions. What we discovered is that basically the Metabolists were not only creative people but also their creativity was to some extent sponsored and to some extent even an extension of the imagination of the state.

“Imagination” and “state” are not typically words that you hear together. And for that reason for me it was fascinating that perhaps what we were witnessing in this movement is the last movement that a state and creative sector, and maybe together forming a public sector, could plan or think about a country and a future. What we also discovered is that what we first—had first thought were independent propositions actually were an almost military campaign to deal with the weaknesses of Japan. Japan is prone to earthquakes, tsunamis, it is mountainous, and it has a kind of very pixilated property structure, so what we discovered is actually a blueprint where both on the ground, on the sea, and in the air, plans were made to address what was a Japanese inherent problem, and that is why we called the book Project Japan, so land, sea, and air, and this kind of comprehensiveness of the whole thing is for an architect who is currently kind of operating in a completely dispersed, fragmented, and very often contradictory situation, a miracle to behold.

I want to end with one other kind of discovery, typically in ’73 the first oil crisis means a serious crisis for the West. It was also a very serious crisis for Japan, but each crisis is an opportunity, and of course the Arab world was for the first time a rich world that could commission architecture and that could begin to think about its own future, and so what we discovered is that kind of after the chapters in Japan there is actually an entirely new career and legitimacy for the Japanese architects where they could plan the Arab future and also in Africa, newly independent, could work at an incredible scale and in that sense give us a first picture of a world without Western architecture. Thank you.

(applause)

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Ladies and gentlemen, friends and fellow travelers, thanks so much to Paul and his team for the invitation to present this book here and talk about the book. There could not be a more wonderful context than this place here to talk about the book. It’s very much what Anthony Powell and Lawrence Weiner both said, books do furnish a room. I’m just going to add a few more things about the Metabolist book, and I’m going to give you a little bit of background about the context, how this book happened. Rem and I met in the 1990s, together with Hou Hanru, and we worked on an exhibition together called Cities on the Move, which was mapping Asian cities and basically developed, performed an exhibition as a performative space in many different museums in Europe. The exhibition also came to PS1 towards the end of the ’90s here. And at that moment we realized that we both have this thing in common that we use interviews and conversations as part of our practice.

The process then intensified in 2006 when Julia Peyton-Jones and I invited Rem Koolhaas together with Cecil Balmond to design the Serpentine Pavilion and we started to think already before how we could actually go beyond this idea from a dialogue to a trialogue to a more polyphonic idea of an interview. We’re thinking about the polyphony of a novel and you’re thinking how could I maybe make a really polyphonic interview as a book? And the first project which came out of that was actually the marathon which happened in the pavilion Rem and Cecil designed, which was basically a conversation on architecture. The idea was to produce communities, to have intersecting of different knowledges and different intelligences and have seventy-two practitioners from all kinds of fields, to do a kind of a portrait of a city. And obviously the idea of making a portrait of a city, a synthetic portrait of a city, is kind of an impossibility, so it would obviously be fragmentary, and it’s at that time that we started to think what could be a portrait of a movement and also what could actually be a movement we could make a portrait of.

Here are a few more images of this marathon, it was kind of day and night, so it was nonstop for twenty-four hours. We never stopped. And the idea was also that all kinds of different disciplines met because obviously science, art, architecture, literature, all came together in the pavilion.

We were then thinking in terms of a movement, a portrait of a movement, about Fluxus first, but it was no longer possible to do that because many of the Fluxus members had died and at some point the idea came up with Metabolism. It’s something Rem had already brought up in the ’90s at the moment of the research in Singapore, but I’m sure we’re going to talk about that later in the conversation, and the idea was really that similarly to the marathon, this idea of actually creating and triggering a milieu, or as Rem calls it mixing a kind of chamber for artists, intellectuals, architects, that’s exactly what Kenze Tange did in his Tange lab in ’59. We must say that it’s kind of very interesting that that all happened in 1959 because 1959 is a very special year, it’s not only the genesis of Metabolism, it’s as Fred Kaplan shows in his book 1959: The Year Everything Changed, a year where many things happened, microchips, birth control, the beginning of the space race, the computer revolution, the rise pop art, free jazz, the new journalism, Castro emerged, Malcolm X, Motown, the generation gap happening, it’s a very, very long list, everything happened in 1959. And last but not least Chris Marker did his wonderful Little Planet book about Japan in 1959, the same year Metabolism emerged in Japan.

The idea of Metabolism really was the aesthetics of movement, everything in transformation, life cycles, birth, growth, that was the idea. When we started the research, as Rem described, it was actually a very strange thing. Because it could have not been more unexpected. We arrived in the house of Kikutake the famous Sky House, it’s actually a very interesting thing is that we expected a futuristic scenario and a futuristic conversation and we were immersed in a conversation about the Issa Shrine, Kikuake’s obsessions with the past, this famous shrine, which is more than twelve hundred years old, which is a continuous timeline, Villa, about this Katsua detached palace, it had all to do with memory, and basically, the Sky House, which you see here, and Kikutake explaining his three-step methodology, which was really the idea of very open architecture a large space for myriad kind of functions. The Metabolists’ idea that it could actually be changed whilst it’s being used.

Rem mentioned Kurokawa. It was actually towards the end of Kurokawa’s life. And as James Westcott pointed out in a conference we did at the AA, a few weeks ago, it was a very special last year, actually the last year of the life of Kurokawa, because he ran for mayor, made only four percent, but wanted, that was sort of his last project, he also opened his National Art Center and created a weird situation with the emperor, because he put himself actually on a throne. Kurokawa, as you can see here, it was a particularly intense conversation, is the architect who invented the Capsule Tower, it was really the idea of newly defining the family as a system, kind of finding new spatial entities, really asking the question which all Metabolists ask, how do we want to live today, the idea that maybe married couples are no longer the only entity, and that there are all kinds of flexible cells, units, maybe new cohabitations and new micro-communities.

The idea is also that actually in the book all of these buildings were revisited and Charlie Koolhaas made a whole set of photographs of how these buildings are now in the current moment. One of the things which is important, is that there is not only the architects, Kikutake, Kurokawa, Maki, but it became also clear that there are actually many other protagonists as part of the movement, such as Kawazoe here, an architecture journalist with a Marxist background, who according to all the architects was very important in bringing everybody together, so a movement needs somebody who is kind of the glue, somebody who is a trigger, the same thing is true for the only member who died very early, Asada, he was the stimulator, or as Kurokawa said, he was the puppetmaster. And the idea was also that the movement had a kind of a ritual that they would always meet at 6 p.m. every day in a small kind of inn where Asada would live.

Fumihiko Maki with the idea of the group form, the hillside terrace, what is interesting is that most Metabolist projects have come to an end or have actually been destroyed. This project is continuing to grow, it’s a very very discreet project of integration. This was a nonstop project. The big question was obviously how could it bring this whole explosion of information into a book. There were so many diverse materials, and the project really grew over seven years. Whenever we had thought it had come to an end we actually realized that it hadn’t come to an end. And when we really had done all the interviews, Rem realized that was a fantastic idea that we needed to urgently to also interview the widows of Tange, because we could no longer interview Tange, so that was the fourteenth trip to Japan, and by the time these seven years had passed, we had so much material, and then very decisive was actually Irma Boom, who entered the process, the designer, and she developed through her genius invention of color coding this very great possibility to actually bring a system into the book, which you see here. Books do furnish a room. Thank you very much.

(applause)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A great pleasure to have you both here tonight, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Maybe it might be good to go back to the genesis, of how Metabolism entered into your metabolism, in other words when did you in fact come upon it, Rem Koolhaas, and when did it start to mean a lot to you?

REM KOOLHAAS: Maybe I should be—go back longer than the time I was an architect. I would say that the first susceptibility perhaps is the better word, to the Metabolists happened when I lived as a child for four years in Indonesia, recently independent, and therefore had an experience as an Asian, went to Asian schools, spoke Indonesian, and I think that that pre-primed me to be susceptible or sensitive to the creativity and particulars of Japan. So from that moment I had what I would consider an obsession with Asia and in that obsession Japan plays a big role because for architecture it’s a utopia in the sense that they cannot build a building badly, so at one time—