Critical Distance

Everything I’ve read or heard about Manfredo Tafuri’s Modern Architecture in Japan—recently translated into English from the original 1964 Italian edition—repeats the same two facts: that he was just twenty-nine when he wrote it and had not visited the country nor the individual buildings and contexts on which he was to write. Even if you put aside matters of age, Tafuri’s decision to historicize from a distance of six thousand miles presents obvious problems. Without seeing the architectural and urbanistic “facts” on the ground for his survey, he was forced to rely on the books and journals in his bibliography—photos and texts translated out of Japanese, preapproved for foreign audiences. How do his selections and omissions from these sources put him in the role of “operative critic,” the type of historian-propagandist he’s remembered for later denouncing? Had he elected or been able to conduct onsite research, the shape of his account would have likely changed. But in what ways?

Beautifully reissued by Mack Books (no relation) and edited by Mohsen Mostafavi, with accompanying essays by five scholars, Modern Architecture in Japan today stands out more for its author’s name than its title. Tafuri’s Marxist orientation suffuses the text, though here the tone is far less pessimistic than in his more celebrated writings. Straightaway he erects a dialectical frame of reference free of Orientalist tropes or satisfaction with only formal innovation. Describing Japan as a place of “violent struggle between democratic popular movements and the forces of expanding capital,” Tafuri sees the nation suggesting “concrete solutions”—typically of the reinforced sort—“to problems that western culture has raised” as well. He finds these shared problems powerfully engaged in Japan in the form of an architectural language that credibly fuses traditions such as timber construction with modern techniques and, closely related, the huge urban challenge and potential of negotiating a “new scale of intervention.”

While Tafuri is mindful of including lesser-known architects and projects—in one striking instance, Tetsuro Yoshida’s Osaka Post Office (1939), a photo of which is suggestively paired with his drawing of seventy variations of traditional Japanese shelving—he foregrounds influential members of Japan’s postwar architectural establishment. Kunio Maekawa, Junzo Sakakura, and especially Kenzo Tange all figure heavily in his account. Indeed, as the scholar Ken Tadashi Oshima observes in one of the supplemental essays, almost half the images in the book depict buildings by either Tange or Maekawa.

Historians of the era and Japanophile architects may rankle over more praise being heaped on Tange, as if he needed the young Tafuri’s promotional help circa 2022. Yet owing to his attraction to crisis and conflict, Tafuri brings to his consideration of Tange a number of insights illuminating valuable design strategies (not something the historian is known for offering), such as that the “Japanese would pay the price for piecemeal planning,” a prescient comment that has become even more true than in 1964. This condition of residual and haphazard urban fabric explains projects that symbolically affirmed reconstruction. As Tafuri describes, it clarifies their symptomatic edge: The monumental city halls and other civic buildings that Maekawa and Tange specialized in designing were precisely compensations for a general dearth of effective modern planning. Another one of Tafuri’s deft extractions from Tange’s work relates to the famous Plan for Tokyo 1960, which epitomizes the “new scale of intervention”—the entire width of Tokyo Bay. But rather than fixate on the megastructural dimension of the project, Tafuri sees its “positive quality” as lying “in its potential to inspire new lines of thought.” Here, too, he would be proved correct: The scheme lived on in the cannibalization of its parts, as evinced in later developments by the architects Sachio Otani and Kiyonori Kikutake.

Modern Architecture in Japan was published the same year as the Tokyo Olympic Games, Asia’s first and a global debut for the reborn nation. As such, it’s regrettable that Tafuri barely touches on the vast planning and construction that made the event possible in the first place. Olympic infrastructure and related development were already well underway around the time he began his research. New subway lines were opening, as was the Shinkansen, the bullet train that connotes Japanese futurity as much as anything the Metabolists dreamed up. Tange’s Yoyogi National Gymnasium, completely absent from the book, had started to materialize by 1961. The company responsible for its construction, the Shimizu Corporation, appears in the prewar part of the survey, where Tafuri makes a doubtful remark about the soundness of its business practices—the very same practices that, in the postwar era, catapulted Shimizu to the top of the Japanese building industry. The company’s branding would have been visible within the gymnasium environs. If Tafuri had visited at that time, he would have quickly ascertained as much.

In an alternate timeline where Tafuri did travel to Japan (which he eventually did in 1980), he could have walked around the Olympic park before jumping on the elevated Yamanote Line to inspect the city from a reasonable height. Passing above Shinjuku, he could have seen Takamasa Yosizaka’s “artificial land” house, whose concept and size may have significantly inflected the book’s treatment of Tange’s Plan for Tokyo. Arriving in Ueno and attending a performance at Maekawa’s Tokyo Metropolitan Festival Hall, Tafuri could have assessed the acoustic qualities of the sculptural baffles in the main theater, resulting in a more nuanced description than the one he provides. From there, he could have explored Maekawa’s Harumi Apartments on Tokyo Bay. Also built by Shimizu, Harumi is one of the very few residential projects that figures in the text. Tafuri writes that its apartments, which recontextualize vernacular aspects of Japanese domestic design, help to “propose a new way of life,” seemingly unaware that this dwelling type (known as the “2DK”) was already being adopted in developments across Japan. Come evening, he might have gone drinking in Asakusa in the company of several Metabolists. Striking up a conversation with the twenty-nine-year-old Kisho Kurokawa, Tafuri might have learned that the Agricultural City proposal designed by his interlocutor was not an exercise in “generic avant-gardism,” but rather a specific response to typhoons.

Venturing beyond Tokyo, Tafuri might have elected to visit the first completed section of Senri New Town, on the outskirts of Osaka. Opened in 1962, the vast housing project reflects CIAM’s strong influence in Japan, not just in its slabs-in-the-park planning but also in its repetition of a domestic cell, the 2DK apartment. A kind of local adaptation of the existenzminimum, the apartment type relied on mass-produced equipment comparable to that of the Frankfurt Kitchen. Undoubtedly, this new town–style of development, between its urbanization and industrialization, speaks to the “neo-capitalistic” society “oriented toward an indifferent consumer” that Tafuri actually does tell us about but doesn’t show by way of architectural example.

Traveling farther west through emerging megalopolitan Japan, he would have had to visit Hiroshima, specifically its Tange-designed Peace Memorial Park, dedicated to the victims of the atomic bomb. The positive and negative aspects of Tafuri’s methodology are revealed in the Hiroshima passage, which misses the fact that the complex (completed in 1955) is composed in relation to the preserved ruin of the former Industrial Promotion Hall nearby. Better known as the A-Bomb Dome, the structure is also absent from the photos Tafuri uses, a form of perhaps inadvertent censure that nonetheless continued the censorship policies of the occupying American forces, which departed in 1952. Unaware of this symbolic connection to a ruin near the bomb’s hypocenter, Tafuri instead sets up a “dialectic” between the new architectural elements—a rectilinear museum offset by a sculptural cenotaph standing in the park’s plaza. At the same time, a lengthy footnote quoting Tange instructively points to the public debate waged over whether to proceed with the memorial’s construction when so many in the city “are still homeless.” Firsthand experience would have rendered this tension immediately palpable: Many of the homeless referred to by Tange were bomb victims living in shacks within view of the memorial site. Rather than exemplifying a lunge into an enlightened modernity, Hiroshima as “peace city” showed that Japanese elites and their American counterparts were more eager to make monuments than seriously address equitable housing.

One wonders if Tafuri’s book should have instead been called Modern Civic Architecture in Japan. Among its 106 images, only ten are of residential projects. In 1947, the critic Ryuichi Hamaguchi implored Japanese architects to train their focus on housing and civic buildings—a stirring call, but in reality, the one often came at the expense of the other, as seen with the situation in Hiroshima. Despite Japan’s major housing issues, state intervention was limited. Postwar housing was instead mostly built with local private capital or government mortgages, typically taking the form of privately built detached houses. Faced with a perceived split in patronage between “private capital” and “public authorities,” ambitious architects like Tange opted for the latter. Though he initially harbored an interest in residential design, civic commissions were the quicker and more effective route for raising an architect’s profile. For his part, Tafuri tacitly upholds the view that the serious architecture of the time concerned itself with artfully shaping the buildings and shared spaces of civic life. Not what we might expect from a critic of the base/superstructure persuasion.

A perusal of Tafuri’s bibliography, included in the book’s addendum, does reveal quite a few sources on Japanese residential design. One found there, the 1958 book Japanese Houses Today, is instructive for its spectrum of detached houses. Its focus is somewhat less architectural and more that of interior design, with numerous glossy photos indicating configurations of appliances, built-ins, and flooring options. Tafuri may have had this publication in mind when, in a couple sections, he laments Japan’s consumerist turn. While he does briefly mention respected house designers like Kiyoshi Seike and Kenji Hirose, he declines to illustrate their work. His silence on Maekawa’s PREMOS work, the experiments of Kiyoshi Ikebe, Makoto Masuzawa’s 9-Tsubo House, and Kikutake’s Sky House is more puzzling. These extraordinary house prototypes didn’t hide their attachments to progressive ideas of urbanism, manufacture, and lifestyle, in a nation whose cities have long been significantly made up of detached houses. The extent of this aggregate fabric of old, new, and innovative would have been impossible to miss from the ground.

From our vantage of ecological crisis, we can justifiably criticize Japan’s adherence to the detached house as an enabler of sprawl and a disastrous cycle of obsolescence, with houses often built to last just a single generation before being sacrificed to another round of real-estate speculation. But Tafuri’s virtual dismissal of residential design, particularly individual houses, as a vehicle of escape from postwar suffering toward democratic expression and domestic ease, suggests the “programmatically distorted” view of architecture he would spurn in his Theories and Histories of Architecture, from 1968, as the practice of “operative criticism.” In Modern Architecture in Japan, Tafuri creates a typological distortion whose effect is to privilege the democratic symbolism of peaceable people on plazas over a political commitment to putting people in houses. His qualified admiration for Tange’s skill in providing “symbolic” connection to a “past that is replete with constructive potential for the present,” in a nation then of “expanding capital,” is the reverse condition of today. Now, when many architects have lost faith in the discipline’s power to effect change on its own and ponder feasible exits from capitalism, we want our connections to past potentials, such as they prove useful, to be more than symbolic. We want them actual.