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conversations with five Japanese architects
Closing my article 'Chaotic Taxonomies' in the previous issue of Spéciale'Z, I wrote that contemporary Japanese architects have creatively re- appropriated familiar or even forgotten themes of architectures past, filtering them through a spectrum of playful modernity. Indeed, given Japan's master-apprentice system and the now decades-long instability of the Japanese construction industry, the nation's under-40 architects hail from a variety of offices of preceding generations - from the patriarch Arata Isozaki, to the 'forever young' Ito and the metamodttn flaneurs, Atelier Bow Wow. Hence, the so-called 'post-Bow Wow generation effectively re-appropriates a range of influences.
The artist Takashi Murakami has coined the term 'superflat' to describe an approach devoid of perspective and hierarchy, one where all references exist equally and simultaneously1 Such a perspective has created an architectural context that operates less as a discourse and more as a kind of mediating platform, further heightening the effect of genealogy and the coincident intertwining of ideas; it is an informal yet theoretical framework that has catalyzed the development of a novel architectural vernacular.
Through these brief conversations with representatives of the generation pushing beyond the superflat, I attempt to return to issues discussed in 'Chaotic Taxonomies' - urban context, scale, constraints, thresholds and media - by filtering them through the perspectives of local practitioners. In other words, I intend to put my gaijin2 perception of the city and its architecture on the dissecting table, using Tokyo-ite tools. The young architects answering my sometimes naive questions comprise an anthology of contemporary Japanese architecture; they produce fresh and original work and are the nodes of invisible axes that run through the archi-genealogy Akihisa Hirata traces a line from the electronic-cumurban nomad-cum-organically geometric Toyo Ito. Yasutaka Yoshimura represents the Japanese fascination with the West that continued through the Koolhasian 1990s and the subsequent Super-Dutch scene epitomized by MVRDV. Masahiro Harada belongs to several Tange-school hybridisations through his experience working first next to Kengo Kuma, a student of Hiroshi Hara (who in turn was a student of Tange) and then Arata Isozaki (also a former Tange student who would come to embody the status, creative impulse and intellectual capacity of what can only be described as the Japanese equivalent of Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman...