Demolition traditions: Isozaki and Sakaguchi

If ever an architect bit the hand that fed, it was the young Arata Isozaki, a mercurial and uncompromising architectural talent who would go on to secure establishment respectability with the Pritzker Prize of 2019. But he made his renown with designs and exhibitions exploring themes of death and destruction, not least his ‘Fractures’ pavilion for the 1996 Venice Biennale, which sought to stage the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake from a year earlier, while also being a leading proponent of a playful, almost saccharine postmodernism, with projects including the Team Disney HQ of 1991. Immersed in the leading currents of Japanese architecture from the 1960s onwards, his tendency to snipe at the motives of his collaborators was legendary. Commentators have tried to account for these professional shifts and antagonisms, his dour and contrarian thematic obsessions, as well as his critiques of architectural traditionalism and technological progressivism. Why did he conduct his professional life and art this way? The conclusion seems to be that he was a nihilistic maverick pushing at the outer limits of architectural culture and even taste.


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If ever an architect bit the hand that fed, it was the young Arata Isozaki, a mercurial and uncompromising architectural talent who would go on to secure establishment respectability with the Pritzker Prize of 2019. But he made his renown with designs and exhibitions exploring themes of death and destruction, not least his 'Fractures' pavilion for the 1996 Venice Biennale, which sought to stage the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake from a year earlier, while also being a leading proponent of a playful, almost saccharine postmodernism, with projects including the Team Disney HQ of 1991. Immersed in the leading currents of Japanese architecture from the 1960s onwards, his tendency to snipe at the motives of his collaborators was legendary. Commentators have tried to account for these professional shifts and antagonisms, his dour and contrarian thematic obsessions, as well as his critiques of architectural traditionalism and technological progressivism. Why did he conduct his professional life and art this way? The conclusion seems to be that he was a nihilistic maverick pushing at the outer limits of architectural culture and even taste.
This article reopens this question by tracing key themes through Isozaki's more extreme theoretical writings and design activities as they developed in response to Japanese culture in the 1960s and 1970s. It is in four sections: the first introduces the provocative tensions in Isozaki's work and how this has been accounted for; the second explores the interweaving of theories of tradition with theories of destruction by Isozaki and his contemporaries; the third focuses on Isozaki's contribution to Expo '70 in Osaka, comparing it with his paradoxical advocacy of Todai-Ji as an ideal kind of non-Japanese Japanese architecture. The article draws these threads together in a conclusion that offers a parallel reading of the writer Ango Sakaguchi, who was a major influence on the postwar artistic circles that Isozaki moved in. Sakaguchi's popularity history The writer Ango Sakaguchi provides a helpful lens for re-reading the radical, subversive and destructive obsessions of the architect Arata Isozaki.
stemmed from writings that disparaged -quite outrageously and scatalogically -the traditionalist values demanded by the Japanese censorship regime during wartime. In that stance he was something of an outlier in the literary landscape of his time, much like Isozaki who sought strenuously to distance himself from architectural peers who held to the government line on traditional Japanese values and economic progress. And yet both men were perhaps much closer to the ideals, cultural practices, and people that they disparaged than they seem initially to appear.

Anti-architect
Isozaki was asked to join the Metabolist movement for its launch at the World Design Conference in Tokyo in 1960. Kenzo Tange was founder of the movement as well as Isozaki's employer at the Tange Lab of Tokyo University, and given the respect traditionally accorded to bosses and organisations in Japan it might seem unthinkable that Isozaki would refuse. But, refuse he did. 2 Isozaki was sceptical of the Metabolists' technoutopian solutions to urban problems as well as their grounding of those solutions -in a seemingly contrary way -on the architectural traditions of Japan. In short, the Metabolists sought to find precedents within traditional architecture that would allow them to keep something of its essence even while modernising it to answer the need for economic growth and infrastructural expansion, both of which -respect for tradition and economic expansion -chimed with government policy at the time. The Metabolists also liked to present this cultural formulation as distinctively Japanese. Isozaki, however, was having none of it. Shortly before setting up his own practice in 1963 he marked his rupture from Tange and the Metabolists with a short story. Published in the September 1962 edition of Japan Architect, 'City Demolition Industry, Inc.' was a fantastical autobiographical sketch typical of Japanese tastes in the short story genre. 3 The story presented the young architect's encounter with a respected, cultivated, technologically driven and progressive businessman, but one who also happens to be an assassin. The assassin -a stand-in for Tangepropositions the young architect with a job: to assist him in the business of murdering the city itself.
Four decades later the concluding part of the story emerged. In Isozaki 10 The medieval Buddhist aesthetic of mujo or impermanence, as celebrated by the monks Chomei and Saigyo in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with their temporary and ramshackle dwellings, were also seen as formative for Isozaki. These living spaces celebrated existential impermanence, the natural cycle of seasons and even natural disasters, but rather than appreciating the recurrence of birth and decay positively Isozaki pushed it towards the straightforwardly nihilistic celebration of manmade destruction, for an architecture of what Jin Baek calls 'meaningless ashes and debris', a reflection of 'Japan under disintegration to its root'. 11 Isozaki remarked that, 'I have always maintained the position of an anti-architect', and that 'anticonstruction [ and Yayoi (the refined post-and-beam construction techniques developed from 300 bc-300 ad). This was used to infer a prehistoric Jomon origin for the sculptural Brutalism of Metabolist architecture, while they also drew heritage from the structural innovation and modularity of shoin architecture. Katsura Imperial Villa, which was built in increments on the outskirts of Kyoto from the early seventeenth century, was the touchstone for taking a responsive, incremental approach to design using modularised building elements and dimensions, as dictated for example by the dimensions of tatami mats and shoji screens. Notwithstanding Tange A key design idea that emerged from Metabolism was the megastructure, conceived as a sprawling land mass rather than a building. Megastructures would be raised up over the earth and cities below, delivering essentials such as water and electricity, and plug-in capsules would be used to adapt residential, commercial, industrial, and leisure facilities as required. So vast were many of these schemes, such as the proposals to colonise Tokyo Bay for millions of inhabitants in the late 1950s, that the inheritance of tradition from Ise and Katsura might seem a bit strained. But Ise's sengu with its respect for nature's rhythms and Katsura's incremental growth were distilled to a metaphor of cycles of renewal and adaptability, as living cells and tissues accrete and regenerate metabolically around the nerves and circulation systems of the megastructure. This represented a living vernacular for the Metabolists.

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The Metabolists combined this other aspects of tradition inspired by disaster and destruction: the inescapable fact of inhabiting an earthquake and tsunami stricken land; the fires that razed the packed timber houses of Tokyo so often they were aestheticised into the phrase Edo-no-hana or 'flowers of Edo'; the firebombing of cities during the Second World War and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at its close. All of these were embraced and folded into an aesthetics of destruction as a kind of Japanese tradition in itself.
Kurokawa witnessed the aerial bombardments of Nagoya in WWII and recalls: One night, two or three hundred bombers flew over the city and nothing remained. Nagoya's population of 1.5 million and its 230-year history disappeared overnight. I was shocked. Standing amidst the rubble, my father said, 'now we must build the city from scratch'. 21 What one might take for a straightforward pragmatic resolve to put things right, however, ran photographs, models, and books from the previous century, all stacked on, stapled, or taped to trestle tables, filing cabinets, packing crates, pallets, and oil drums.  15 Tange had spoken at the final CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture) meeting in Otterlo in 1959 as the Team 10 splinter group claimed their victory over the old guard. 16 It was here that Tange and Ernesto Rogers clashed with Peter Smithson over the value of tradition, Smithson saying it might be relevant in Japan due to the happy coincidence that the stylistic openness, lightness, and modularity of Japanese shoin design matched contemporary European trends, but traditional architecture in any other country was bankrupt. 17 Rogers responded positively to Tange's views on tradition in this meeting, not least because he had recently completed the Torre Velasca in Milan (1958), a combination of residential and commercial skyscraper with the feel of a bristling fortress watchtower. 18 Tradition was used intensively to legitimise Metabolist concepts. In 1962 Tange and Noboru Kawazoe published Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture, in which the Ise Shrine complex, rebuilt in a process known as shikinen sengu every twenty years since the seventh century was presented as a fusion of Jomon (referring to the rope-patterned clay pottery, chunky figurines, and heavy-eaved pit dwellings characteristic of Japan c. 10,000-300 bc) arq . vol 25 . no 1 . 2021 history 34 It begins with the protagonist S., an assassin later revealed to be Sin, presenting the business card of his new company to the architect known as Arata. A connoisseur of 'the beauty of a murder well done', Sin changed career when it turned out 'a monster had emerged that kept hurting his professional pride day and night!' 29 The monster was 'the mechanism called the city', which had perfected the automated mass murder of its populace and damaged the pride and earning potential of assassins. 30 In order to restore murder to its status as a creative art, into something 'elegant, pleasant and humanistic', these 'inhuman cities' must be destroyed. 31 The gaudy and rickety heap of Tokyo was the number one city on Sin's hit-list. Sin, a cypher for Tange, offers Arata a job. Sin's business plan included three types of city destruction. First came the physical, ranging from muscle-power to nuclear bombs; second was the functional, involving the sewing of anarchy by abolishing planning laws, disrupting communication networks and traffic signals, and the poisoning of reservoirs; third was destruction via images, by means of the encouragement of silly, utopian, future-looking planning schemes and architectural theories. The implication is that the encouragement of organised planning and utopian ideals is no less destructive than the more obviously wanton measure outlined in points one and two, which is confirmed with Arata's assertion that when you 'put city planning into practice, and you will find it an excellent means for throwing the city into turmoil and for stultifying its energy'.
32 Arata considers Sin's offer before concluding that the city is a 'complicated feedback mechanism' and would outfox any attempt to control or destroy it. 33 Sin is implied to be a fool and they part in a flurry of insults before Isozaki's postscript that 'Sin' and 'Arata' are the Chinese and Japanese phonetic readings of the kanji of the author's name. But 'S. is a poet', he teases, 'and so it may be that he is proud that only poets can understand his true intention.'

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The meaning of this text is not so inscrutable, however. It is Isozaki signalling his disenchantment with an architectural movement that is committed to a foolhardy plan to bend cities to its will through a murderous combination of total destruction and utopian planning, which for Isozaki equate to the same thing. It is also Isozaki dramatically raging against an internalised version of Tange that worryingly has become part of his own personality. In the same year, 1962, Isozaki published his 'Clusters in the Air' scheme, a proposal for residential megastructures. The clusters would have risen above the city and flouted Japan's residential height restrictions at the time, but most importantly the design gesture served to underline Isozaki's disdain for the optimistic urbanism of the Metabolists: I am no longer going to consider architecture that is below 30 meters in height […] I am leaving everything below 30 meters to others. If they think they can unravel the mess in this city, let them try. 35 Isozaki's fascination with destruction, which he shared with the Metabolists, was rooted in a keen much deeper. The Metabolists saw the growth, responsiveness, and adaptability of their megastructures as keying into an aesthetic of what Tange and Kawazoe called 'the impermanence of all things', which combined the architectural prototypes mentioned earlier with the Shinto respect for the rhythms of nature and the Zen Buddhist-inspired aesthetic of wabi sabi, where dilapidation and decay are celebrated. 25 In the Western cultural consciousness, and indeed in institutional heritage practices, tradition is most obviously linked with preservation rather than destruction, but the Metabolists harboured an aesthetic of tradition that is nourished and refreshed by destruction. Koolhaas swatted this away as a strange manifestation of extreme right-wing sentiment, akin to a modern architect under the Nazis taking up neo-classicism for pleasure rather than under coercion, and he was right to be sceptical of some of the more mystical claims about the spiritual depths of this kind of tradition, as some of it was politics pure and simple. Kikutake, for example, saw the artificial ground of his vast A-frames as an ironic reclamation of the extensive territories across Kyushu that his rich landlord family had been dispossessed of through the US-mandated Land Reform Act of 1947. 26 Isozaki sought, in his own words, to 'keep a distance' between himself and the Metabolists, being suspicious of their views on tradition and nationhood and of the way they fed this back into a 'too optimistic' technology-driven progressivism. In summary, he said, 'these architects had no scepticism towards their utopia'. 27 He was critical also of what he saw as their lack of cultural curiosity beyond architecture and technology, especially their ignorance of the radical artistic circles that Isozaki himself moved in. 28 The short story mentioned earlier, 'City Demolition Industry, Inc.', became a key marker of this standpoint both in its content and in the experimental form it took to deliver an architectural theory.
sensitivity to Japanese and other Oriental traditions, also shared with the Metabolists. His 1962 clusters were hyper-modern but modelled with knowing irony on the interlocking bracket-system typical of traditional dougong style joinery that the Japanese had imported from China. Indeed, one of his most elaborately disruptive designs, the Tsukuba Center (1983), was motivated by a perceived affront to Japanese urban traditions. Isozaki commented that when CIAM sought to rediscover the urban core with their 'Heart of the City' conference in 1951 it could never apply to the Japanese, who had no urban or even linguistic concept of city centre or plaza. He reinforced this point with the Tsukuba Center, a central plaza for Tsukuba Science City, which was built from the early 1960s onwards north of Tokyo as Japan's first postwar new town. For a country that had no concept of plaza, Isozaki designed a broken, sunken version of Michelangelo's Piazza del Campidoglio, and undermined the typical enclosing function of plaza typology with an L-shape of surrounding buildings, which themselves seem broken. 36 Isozaki has traced the oval outline but reversed the colouring of Michelangelo's paving: grey on white instead of white on grey. Granite and silver mirror tiles, freestanding columns, and quotations ranging from Francesco Borromini and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux to Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman are brought together into a nervy mess of imported Westernisms, centred on the ruined plaza. Inverting the orderly ascension into Michelangelo's piazza, here the Campidoglio oval is sunk into the ground and smashed at one corner, as if melted by an atom bomb or the ground shaken away, and it is down this crumbling corner that one enters it, accompanied by a waterfall that drains away through the plughole of a feeble fountain in the centre. 37 In short, Isozaki's composition combines the imagery of destruction into a prickly and intellectual kind of protest architecture that violates the concept of the urban plaza. anodised aluminium craned its neck forwards, two huge arc-lights for eyes scanning out from either side of a parted beak. Within the tower was an installation, the 'Tree of Life', whose trunk and neoncoloured branches snaked up through the space. The story of evolution was enacted around the tree with models designed by Okamoto in collaboration with the special effects company Tsuburaya Productions, who made the heroes and monsters -or kaiju -for the Ultraman TV series. Starting at the bottom with protozoa as large and gaudy as space-hoppers the exhibits rose up through sea creatures, smiling dinosaurs and beyond. Visitors entered the installation from ground level and exited through upper level platforms where the tower linked into the chic space-age living pods of the Big Roof, symbolising the pinnacle of the evolution of human life. Okamoto's insistence on having the Tower of Sun erupt through the Big Roof was a playful yet confrontational gesture against the serious-minded Metabolists and his own friend Tange.  Isozaki soon distanced himself from this as well, mentioning that, 'the name "festival plaza" impressed me as totally uncool, the kind of cheesy term one would even hesitate to pronounce'. It was this experience that turned him against the plaza concept entirely, leading to its provocative inversion in the design of Tsukuba and his criticism of the plaza in Tange's Tokyo Metropolitan Government complex (1991) as 'a pastiche solution based on a defunct Western cliché'. 43 And it did not help that the radical artists who Isozaki was associated with protested his cybernetic plaza with its militaristic origins -which indeed Isozaki knew about -and the dangers it posed in paving the way for government surveillance systems. 44 Isozaki would ultimately conclude, in typically abrasive style, that the Expo was akin to a nuclear meltdown or an oil spill, and his own participation was equivalent to a war crime. 45 Isozaki sanctioned one work of architecture above all others as an authentic response to Japanese culture and identity. Predictably, perhaps, it was a work that in his view was demonstrably not Japanese; and strangely, it was a vast open latticework structure housing a colossal figurative sculpture. This work was the Daibutsu-den (Great Buddha Hall) of Todai-Ji in Nara, the colossal housing for a Buddha statue that was rebuilt from 1190 by the Buddhist with 'Festival Plaza' -was proposed originally by Uzo Nishiyama, a local planner with a commitment to community housing and welfare. Nishiyama was brought onto the master-planning team jointly with Tange and rivalries arose from the clash of what vision of Japan the plaza should represent. For Nishiyama the plaza was intended to stimulate the face-to-face human interactions of traditional Japanese festivals or matsuri, while Tange favoured a digital plaza replete with the imagery of technology, cybernetics, and networks. Nishiyama did not share faith in peaceful technological progress that the Expo foregrounded in its motto of 'Harmony and Progress' -citing the technologised Cold War as proof against it -and resigned under pressure from officials who favoured Tange's vision. Tange's team led the final designs but retained Nishiyama's core ideas and terminologies. 39 The centrepiece of the exhibition remained the Symbol Zone under Tange's imaginatively titled 'Big Roof', a Konrad Wachsmann-inspired space-frame structure, covering 30,000 square metres of the Festival Plaza below [2]. Isozaki accepted the job of technical lead of the plaza. His 1966 essay 'Invisible City' redeployed Norbert Weiner's research into cybernetics, inspired in part by the electromagnetic feedback systems of Second World War anti-aircraft technologies, as the basis for a cybernetic city, and he tried to realise this in the plaza as an ever-adapting performance space. He designed two robots, named 'Deme' and 'Deku', each fourteen meters tall, which could sense ambient light and sound levels around the plaza and responded by choreographing their own light and sound show through remixing combinations of prerecorded magnetic tapes. 40 Suspended high up in the lattice of ball-joints, trusses, and girders, and just the below the inflatable roof panels, were a scattering of candy-coloured capsules offering visions of future living by Maki and Kurokawa as well as by foreign architects including Moshe Safdie, Yona Friedman, and Hans Hollein. As an optimistic, tech-infused Metabolist metaphor, Isozaki's design could not have been more on-message.

Expo '70 and Todai-Ji
The most striking thing about the Big Roof, however, was the 'Tower of the Sun' by the charismatic sculptor Taro Okamoto [3]. Okamoto had worked with André Breton and Georges Bataille in Paris in the 1930s but made his name after returning to Japan in 1940 and commencing quasi-Surrealist work drawing on Japanese folk traditions including Jomon clay figurines. As one of the producers of the Expo, Okamoto was able to demand that a circular hole be designed into the Big Roof to allow his sculpture to emerge up through it. From the front it presented a rough-textured white cone with arms extended and red tiles zig-zagging down the sides of a pinched face. Viewed from underneath the face morphs into a crescent moon passing over the surface of the sun, and on the rear a calmer, less animated face in black tile peered directly forward, green flames radiating out, the moon here in full eclipse of the sun. Topping it off at a height of seventy metres a radar dish bird's face in gold that, 'it is quite conceivable that customs followed in foreign countries and not in Japan are, in fact, better suited to the Japanese.' 53 Sakaguchi's advocacy of vulgarity and decadence was not just for shock value, however. In this fall into 'the womb of all truth: decadence' and in the adulteration of their culture the Japanese would rediscover their authentic core-identities for the 'resurrection of our humanity' and 'true human salvation'. 54 Anything that halted that fall and rediscovery -such as adherence to the 'conventional proprieties' of traditional aesthetics, good taste, well-mannered behaviour or moral codes -must be destroyed. 55 It is likely for this reason that Sakaguchi's earlier 1942 wartime piece went uncensored, bearing in mind that the imperial censorship regime had been in place since 1925 and was by that time at a pitch when any anti-Japanese sentiment could lead to imprisonment. This is because Sakaguchi fundamentally took a positive view of a Japanese resurgence, rooted on a core national character. Those Westerners who laughed at what he called Japan's 'apish imitation' of Western culture might find that 'the last laugh might not be theirs after all'. 56 He caused little controversy during his lifetime, which included writing pro-government literature and fundraising propaganda for the war effort, and it was only after his death in 1955 that leftist commentators in the 1960s and 1970s re-invented him as a transgressive and subversive'. What Ango in effect accomplishes in his dismissal of the more transparently contrived discursive constructions of nation', concludes James Dorsey, 'is the production of an alternative, tremendously seductive, and almost invisible nationalism.' 57 The thematic similarities with Isozaki are striking: the advocacy of architectures of excess; the acceptance of imported styles, tastes and expertise; the revelling in destruction and conflict; the flouting of standards of professional conduct. Sakaguchi indeed pre-empted the more orthodox Metabolists in his reminiscences of the 'mystical intensity' of the aftermath of a Tokyo firebombing raid: 'I loved the colossal destruction […] The curiosity I felt towards the coming miraculous rebirth in a new world was by far the most striking emotion I've ever experienced.' 58 With their ostensibly nihilistic and even selfloathing rejection of Japanese tradition tempered with a pride in recovering something fundamental from those traditions, I believe Sakaguchi's writings help shine a light on similar tensions in Isozaki. They suggest a belief in an authentic national culture predicated on vigorous rebirth, but one that only comes after everything suspect -including the wellestablished clichés of good taste and culture -had been scandalised and forcibly shaken down to their foundations. It seems that the more acid these men could pour on the traditionalist forms and narratives that their peers used to nourish a sense of nationhood, the better they felt their chances of revealing whether there was anything authentic still surviving beneath.

Heart of Japan
Isozaki's stance on questions of Japanese architectural culture and practice shifts in a way that seems unpredictable. Whether considering architectural tradition, technological futurism, a structural-tectonic, or a surface-scenographic approach to architecture, his stance shifts from disdain to advocacy and back again; and usually in relation to collaborators linked with these approaches, who then come in for scathing recrimination. It is difficult to see much other than a design method and intellectual agenda fuelled by the desire to be disruptive and contrary at every turn. But this churn of values seems to owe something to another controversial figure whose work was lionised in the radical artistic circles that Isozaki moved in: the novelist Ango Sakaguchi. Sakaguchi achieved notoriety with two highly confrontational essays, 'A Personal View of Japanese Culture' (1942) and the two-part 'Discourse on Decadence' (1946), both of which delighted in excoriating traditional Japanese taste and any notion of national identity. 49 At first the essays read like an over-strenuous attempt to shock at any cost. Sakaguchi derides the priesthood as a bunch of lecherous crooks, dismisses the postwar rediscovery of the traditional values of rural culture as absurd (as the rural has no culture), advocates the demolition of famous temples and palaces and replacing them with carparks, and derides the notion of good Japanese taste and the stereotypes of traditional Japanese culture such as ikebana, Sumo, the bushido warrior code, Katsura and the rock gardens of Ryoan-ji. He much preferred to be 'enveloped in the stench of piss in the Arashiyama theatre', watching cheap variety-show skits, 'every last one of which was too terrible for words'. 50 Like Isozaki, he celebrates the excessive and over-scaled over the refined and selfconsciously Japanese; much better, then, the bombastic excesses of the architecture of the warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi, rather than the fauxpeasant restraint of the teahouses designed by his tea-master, Sen-no-Rikyu. Indeed, Sakaguchi argued, the very self-consciousness of the Japanese aesthetic of restraint and purity, and the strenuous attempt of Zen Buddhist aesthetics to see beauty in transitory phenomena and the passage of time, was so counterintuitive to the human spirit and required such huge expenditure of time and effort that it was already a kind of kitsch excess in reverse. 'If both simplicity and ostentation are ultimately vulgar', he reasoned, 'then surely one is better off adopting a magnanimity capable of embracing a vulgarity that revels in its vulgarity rather than clinging to a pettiness that remains vulgar in its attempt to transcend that state.' 51 Why not be honest, then, and throw oneself into those arts and activities that involve 'pushing a worldly vulgarity to its very limits'? 52 Sakaguchi admired the brutal, honest architectures of Kosuge Prison, a dry ice factory, a battleship. 'More than traditional beauty or intrinsically Japanese forms, we need more convenience in our lives', he argued, concluding