Let's say you are an architect and what you really like to design is single family houses, with flair, with distinctive maybe even avant-garde features and you want to design houses that will actually get built. Well if that's who you are...than for you utopia might be Japan... — Freakonomics Radio
In a recent Freakonomics Radio podcast, “Why Are Japanese Homes Disposable?” Greg Rosalsky examines the short lifespan of Japanese residential architecture.
10 Comments
Fascinating podcast. There seems to be a connection between disposability and the avant-guard, at least interms of architecture. In the sense that, like H&M clothing, there's an implicit understanding that what's in today will be gone tomorrow, literally. For all the expressive freedom architects seem to have in Japan, it seems like a depressing place to live in the sense that the places one associates with certain memories will most likely be pulled down. Especially strange since they seem to have a high standard of construction compared to America.
Thayer,
An interesting take on the relationship between memory and architecture. Most residents live out their lives in their idiosyncratic houses, the house facing demolition after their death most likely; memory and architecture fading at the same time. I find more depressing the possibility that an architecture/environment tied to a particular memory could have duplicates; In suburbs for example, nostalgia is present even without one's previous experience.
Do you think the houses referenced are avante-garde? Maybe outside of Japan, but I think they will soon represent a pluralistic vernacular of experimentation. The fact that singular experimental houses are talked about without referencing a particular project, along with our grouping of these types of houses as Japanese points towards a vernacular (not to mention the ease at which one can point out a Japanese house without knowing its location).
D'Anconia,
I was thinking more of the wider built environment in which ones life is lived rather than one's own domicile. As for the hang-up about nostalgia, unless one' s ready to outlaw certain mental states, I suggest taking humans as they come, warts and all.
As for a "pluralistic vernacular of experimientation", that's somewhat of a contradiction. Maybe a culture of innovation or a fetishizing of the new, but any vernacular would have to go beyond constant experimentation to become native or indigenous. Damn you dictionary! ALso, I'm not sure that short life cycles are synonymous with experimentation.
I will grant you that there's something to Japanese modernism that's distinclty Japanese, but on just in terms of sustainability, I think one has to look negatively on this phenomenon. Not that I'm against experimentation, but it strikes me that there's something fundamentally wrong in scraping the built environment every 30 years. I like well built things to last, regardless of it's aesthetics. Call me old fashioned!
Thayer,
I see why you consider it a contradiction, maybe experimentation and pluralistic were the wrong word choices, more like highly individual, I believe the podcast uses the term idiosyncrasy. I'm not citing the short life cycles as the experimentation, but these life-cycles allow for the idiosyncrasies, which present themselves in the plans and sections of contemporary Japanese houses.
I haven't seen the numbers (embodied energy, energy use, etc.), so I can't say for certain if it is metrically sustainable or not. When you hear of demolishing a house it sounds unsustainable, until you think of all the retrofitting and remodeling that takes place in the American housing market. Does anyone have hard data on this?
Again, I think Japanese culture is more at peace with temporality than Western culture.
What I find interesting about this phenomenon is the stereotypical view of Japan as a collectivist culture versus America's individualistic culture; our built environment seems to contradict these stereotypes.
"I think Japanese culture is more at peace with temporality than Western culture."
I think that's something we could definatly stand to learn from them. Also, I agree paradoxical nature of our respective cultures. Maybe their thousand year old culture and homogeneous society underlies their embrace of the new where as our constantly changing culture makes us tend to seek out symbols of continuity.
"What I find interesting about this phenomenon is the stereotypical view of Japan as a collectivist culture versus America's individualistic culture; our built environment seems to contradict these stereotypes." Maybe there's a corrective aspect to the built environment -- some sort of unconscious tendency to counter a perceived cultural imbalance ?
Thayer,
Wouldn't you consider Western culture's quest for symbolic continuity a quest for constant nostalgia? This article comes to mind:
http://www.australiandesignreview.com/features/33549-longing-for-a-greener-present
SDR,
It is hard to imagine some unconscious tendency is dictating architectural trends. I was indicating a lack of true individuality in America; repetitive catalog designs and ubiquitous suburbs are more symptomatic of a keeping up with the Jones' culture.
Donatello,
I don't consider it a "quest for constant nostalgia" becasue one, you can't assume that the use of those "forbidden" elements are a result of nostalgia, and two, I don't share your assumption that nostalgia is somehow bad or aberrant. I consider it a normal aspect of the human condition. Sentimentality is something modernists abhored, and this stigma is still with our profession by and large. I find it a bit of sophistry in that looking backwards, in whatever emotional state, is essential for looking forward intelligently, and drawing an arbitrary line in time from which certain architectural elements can or can't be used is absolutely strange and completely un-modern.
Mind you, I don't begrudge anyone's self imposed censorship, and I also think context is essential when assessing a building or element's appropriatness, but even then, I would defer to our own cultural heterogenaity. Even though I might not like someone's borrowing, I find nothing philisophically wrong with such an act. It's done in various art forms and the only arbiter seems to be the quality of the output. Why should architrecture be any different in tterms of aesthetics?
Thayer,
You assumed I assume nostalgia is a negative, I never indicated it was. I take issue with nostalgia without content (or sentimentality as you call it). Borrowed aesthetics has suffered in architecture as images are borrowed, not the process, tectonics, or philosophy/theory behind the aesthetics.
Nostalgia with or without content is an extremely subjective statements and impossible to verify without looking into the person's mind, whatever assumption you might have had. It's irrelevant in the end becasue no one but the initiated realy care. Don't get me wrong, I don't have much respect for copying either, but I find this obsession counter-productive since we all borrow and learn from the past, however distant. Worrying about lineage and appropriatness seem as antiquated as the nineteenth century obsession with archeological correctness, just on the other side of the coin.
When we all start out in life, it's through borrowing and copying. As we progress, assuming we do, it becomes more part of ones own personality and possible ones style. Some of us do it better than others, but the users of architecture will care little, unless it reflects badly on them. And even then, who cares. Let people be who they are.
I can tell you any theory you'd like, and if that made you believe in my work any more than it does on it's own, then fine. I simply don't take preachers at their word, but rather their actions.
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