MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI
Mohsen Mostafavi is a former chairman of the Architectural Association in London and dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, where he is now Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. Mohsen has just edited Modern Architecture in Japan, a book written in 1964 by the great Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, translated into English for the first time by David Kerr, and published by MACK Books.
Interview by Masoud Golsorkhi
Portrait courtesy of Harvard Graduate School of Design
Masoud Golsorkhi What prompted you to pick this book? Why now?
Mohsen Mostafavi I’ve been working on a multi-year research project about Japan, mainly on the question of what could happen in the future in urbanisation, the relationship between architecture and urban development. We’ve developed this research in different ways, through certain courses, in the design studio, as well as working with a team of people including Kayoko Ota, who was the curator of the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale some years ago. We publish various reports and books and have a website. We’re very multidisciplinary and deal with Japanese literature, music and design as ways to analyse or reconstruct the history of Japanese urban development. Included in this research is the idea of translation, and we have tried to translate some key texts for the first time, mostly from Japanese to English. Modern Architecture in Japan was written in Italian when he was 29; it doesn’t exist in Japanese. Despite all the material that’s now being published about contemporary Japanese architecture, there’s very little on the history of modern Japanese architecture prior to people like Toyo Ito and SANAA. Tafuri’s book is a kind of critical assessment of an earlier period, mainly what was happening in the post-war period in the 1950s and early 1960s. Since there is such a paucity of material we thought it would be interesting to make it available to a wider audience by translating it into English.
MG I love Tafuri’s tight and punchy prose; it reads like a manifesto. What’s startling is that he didn’t actually go to Japan to write the book.
MM Yes, indeed. He was not yet 30, and already making the fast transition from being a practising architect to becoming a historian. The book is quite revealing about Tafuri’s ideological position in relation to social and political issues. It’s also a book that is about criticism and history at the same time. It’s unusual because later on in his career Tafuri’s language became very complex; this book is one of his easiest reads.
MG It has the clarity of the beginning of a conversation.
MM Exactly. Soon after this period, he turned against the idea of architects writing criticism. This was also partly a result of debates that were going on in Italy at that time. The book is interesting precisely because it opens up the conversation about the relationship between criticism and history. In his later writings Tafuri would develop – and argue against – the concept of what he calls “operative history”. Basically, this means using history in an instrumental way, to make the case for a certain kind of contemporary architecture. But this book about Japanese architecture can be read as a reflection of the European and American position. Tafuri himself is using Japanese architecture instrumentally. To some extent, it’s a reaction to the questioning of modernism in the post-war period. The European avant-garde had not been able to provide any convincing responses to the crisis of modernism. As Tafuri sees it, the Japanese are providing an alternative approach. We can read this book as a criticism of the European avant-garde.
MG It’s also a traditional European projection of ideas onto the canvas of the “oriental” that may or may not have coincided with the way that cultural practices were experienced internally.
MM That’s true. But Tafuri’s text, instead of starting with the idea of 19th-century Japanese modernisation, begins with the way that the West has been influenced by Japanese art.
MG He is much more enlightened in the sense that he sees modernity or modernism as an element in a longer historical continuity that perhaps others didn’t.
MM In terms of Edward Said’s discussion of the concept of orientalism, the key figure is Kenzō Tange, who was familiar with what was going on in Europe in the 1950s. He participated in multiple CIAM and Team X meetings where he showed the work they were doing in Japan. As a result of these conversations, European architects ended up going to Japan. There was more reciprocity between East and West during the 1960s than there is now. Apart from the European connection, Tange spent a lot of time in the United States and taught in the early 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at both MIT and Harvard. These reciprocities and cultural exchanges make the conversations about orientalism more nuanced, and perhaps more complex than would otherwise be the case.
MG In the last chapter he talks about the theory of individual guilt, about this relationship between form, image and the job of architecture.
MM Tafuri’s ideas during this period were influenced by the art historian and critic, Giulio Carlo Argan, who refers to the “theory of individuality as guilt” when describing the move towards abstract painting as a symptom of the failure of the ideological programme of the modern movement. For Tafuri this critique forms the basis of an alternative strategy – that of an authentic existence beyond real experience. Tafuri felt very strongly about three things in terms of looking at Japanese work: the importance of the relationship between an end position and how you get there, the connection between what he would call language and the way in which this language was a means of communication, and the relationship between architecture and the city and the wider socio-political context. He appreciated the Japanese relationship to history and tradition, because the idea is not that you would be copying or mimicking historical forms, but that you would be in a way interpreting and examining your current position in relation to the historical condition. In Europe and the United States, this relationship to history is dealt with through the idea of history as something to be replicated – the belief that the replication of form carries with it all the content that this form embodied in an earlier period. But for Tafuri, this is not the case. The idea of looking at things in a different way, being continually self-reflexive in one’s relationship to history, is also a key part of how projects are assessed.
MG Does that explain why the Japanese are less sentimental about old buildings? When I was there, it seemed like the Japanese were a bit ambivalent.
MM You’re absolutely right that in many parts of Japan they show no hesitation in tearing down buildings after 20 years. There’s a market-driven, realistic attitude. That’s really partly to do with capital and the role of these development companies. On the other hand, I think we shouldn’t equate what’s happening with these large-scale developers with the idea of rebirth and renewal and a more culturally based attitude towards form and reconstruction. There’s also the case of the famous Ise Grand Shrine, which is dismantled and rebuilt every 20 years. The idea of rebuilding is really a reflection of the Japanese attitude towards nature and culture.
MG Does Tafuri connect with the set of ideas bubbling under the surface in intellectual circles in Italy heading towards 1968? Italy had a particularly vibrant 1968.
MM I don’t know that he did directly. In a way the value of the book is more to do with this transition from modernism and post-war reconstruction, what Tafuri refers to as mannerism. He asks, what are we doing with this moment? How are we using this opportunity? The Japanese are appreciated because their ideas about architecture are connected to the city, to the new urban realities, even though many projects are speculative. Very few of the Japanese Metabolists’ big ideas about the city were realised; they were very experimental. Nevertheless, they are thinking about the relationship of architecture to society and to modes of production. For example, there are clear proposals for building urban conurbations on water. Questions of prototyping, modes of construction – all of that is happening. The way in which this is occurring in relation to the re-examination of history and the question of architecture and the city, the urban experience, the status of infrastructure becomes very critical. These things have a very strong social dimension.
MG The other spectre looming large is the memory of the war.
MM There is a multitude of experiences of destruction and rebuilding that Japan has gone through. Just in Tokyo, the Great Kantō earthquake in 1923 demolished everything. Then Allied forces came in 1945 and firebombed the city. What we now see was essentially built after the Second World War. The concept of destruction is very much present in the Japanese psyche, for example, in the Godzilla movies, the monster destroys Tokyo and its landmarks, among them Kenzō Tange’s Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. So, there is an idea of violence but also of rebuilding, of continuity. And again, in relation to your comments about tradition, one of the interesting things is that the city is rebuilt, but not ex nihilo in the manner of a European new town. In some ways, it is rebuilt following certain topographic patterns. So even though the city is new, the context, the surface, is a palimpsest of what came before.
MG As an educator in architecture, how do you prepare people for this new climate where the position of the architect, as a professional authority, is more undermined than ever? How can architectural educational institutions such as yours respond to this situation in the most positive way?
MM It’s a really important question and a big challenge. It’s becoming more widely understood that there is a greater value for architecture, as a discipline, to engage with a multiplicity of other disciplines or fields. There are different ways in which architecture can contribute to society and to social well-being. Younger generations of architects are more and more interested in this aspect and less and less interested in signature architecture. They are working either through smaller-scale collaborative practices or embarking on more modest projects. But this still leaves open the space for exploring alternative relationships between the architectural and the political. This is certainly happening in Japan, where there is an emerging group of architects who are working outside of metropolitan Tokyo. Today’s circumstances are very different from the era of the grands projets.
MG And the oligarchs who commission them.
MM Some very interesting things came out of that situation, as well as the way in which technology has impacted architecture and the direction it might take in the future. There’s the question of how technology is able not only to produce the form but to transform the relationship between the artefact and society. One of the things that the academy hasn’t really been able to delve into, despite all these discussions about collaboration and so on, is how do we see architecture in the next ten or 15 years at the intersection of the physical, digital, virtual and social worlds? ◉