Zen Spaces and Neon
Places Reflections on Japanese Architecture and Urbanism
By Vinayak Bharne (Novato,
Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2014)
LAUREN W. DEUTSCH
KYOTO JOURNAL 81
Vinayak Bharne is a distinguished
scholar, educator and practicing urban planner (and contributor to Kyoto
Journal among other prestigious venues)
whose extensive CV would suggest that he has little time to step beyond the borders
of his professional life to engage in intimate relations with the objects of
his inquiries. Yet, since his youth, his heart and mind have been deeply
smitten by Japan. This compilation of essays is proof: at once a “labor of love”
and “a love letter to Japan”. Provocatively titled Zen Spaces and Neon
Places, the text reveals his “reflections
and intuitions” about “what is Japanese about Japan’s built environment”.
It is curious to this
reviewer why lovers try to explain their infatuations and share them with
others. Japan has been the subject
of so many literary suitors— from Edward Silvester Morse, Lafcadio Hearn and
Ruth Benedict to Bernard Rudofsky and Harold Williams, to name a few writing in
English alone. Kyoto Journal
itself is a record of such romances. Does beauty, like misery, love company?
Each of us who has fallen hachimaki over zori
for Japanese culture knows this feeling well, but Bharne’s professional
expertise enables him to provide readers with some fresh perspectives. The book
explores in depth the link between cultural attributes and architectural and
urban planning considerations, historical as well as contemporary.
For example, in an early
section on temple architecture, he takes us beneath the eaves of temple roofs to
show how functional and aesthetic aspects of the joinery mirror Japan’s long-standing,
sophisticated relationship with the source of wood. Bharne quotes Gunter
Nitschke who wrote in these pages:
“It has clearly been a cultural
choice of the Japanese to make dwellings from living rather than dead
materials, from trees rather than stones, and to rely on structures which
because of their impermanent materials will have to be replaced every 50 to 100
years.” In addition detailing
building design and construction processes, Bharne comments on how Japanese
styles adapt to the activities contained within them. He also explores in depth
how Japanese aesthetics reflects a skillfully employs a broad palette of light
and darkness, with glint and shadows shaping space and tracking time.
An expert in the 20 year sengu
(cyclical rebuilding, of Ise Jingu)
Bharne wonders about the event’s sustainability due to woodland management
practice and land use planning. “While the two shrine complexes, the Ise Geku
and the Ise Naiku, are meticulously preserved, the original five kilometer
pilgrimage path that connects them and their surrounding towns, have been
compromised by rapacious sprawl over the past few decades. Additionally, the sengu itself faces many economic and environmental dilemmas
such as timber paucity, soil pollution and forest depletion, raising complex
questions on its future.” Bharne writes more about this on the website of his private practice.
A prominent feature of
Bharne’s book is his explanation of how public and private spaces, interiors
and exteriors, collectively influence and are shaped by human activities within
them. The “street is the fundamental element of Japanese urbanism,” he states,
contrasting it with Western European cities developed around central public
squares, usually with houses of worship. “It is as if traditional Western
architecture used time to experience space, while traditional Japanese
architecture created space to celebrate time,” He concludes.
His chapter comparing life in
Kyoto and Rome, each the historic epicenter of its respective culture, is an
attempt to discuss ruin and resurrection. Here he explores cartographic
depictions of social and geographic features, such as gardens (Kyoto) and
piazzas (Rome) and situates each in relationship to and impact of hills (Rome)
and mountains (Kyoto).
Lastly, Bharne jumps to the
ongoing evolution of Tokyo as the “modern” international capital and how, along
with the restoration of the imperial government, Japan‘s economic and cultural
leaders suffered bouts of bipolar identity from the Meiji period. On one hand,
Japan was learning to know itself anew after a long period of isolation, and at
the same time it sought to explain itself to the West. Renowned European and
American architects were invited to create the new seats of commercial and
eventual civic power, despite the efforts of local architects – some of whom
studied in the West – to win commissions. Simultaneously, each of the gaijin (foreign) architects projected what they thought would be pleasing and practical along Japanese
standards, not the least of which is to survive fires and earthquakes. Despite
good intentions, sometimes they missed the mark, like the designer of the book
cover who felt it would be attractive to link the word “Zen” with a graphic of
a Shinto torii gate.
At the same time, Japanese
architectural and artistic “genomes” (Bharne’s term) were making their way
Westward figuring prominently in the work of such American luminaries as the
organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the craftsman style of the Greene
brothers. Bharne also surveys the internationally acclaimed work of Japan’s
contemporary master architects, such as Arata Isozaki, Tadao Ando, Keno Tange,
Fumikiko Maki and Shigeru Ban.
The flow of people’s ordinary
lives—from work to festival when concentrated in urban environments is always
at the core of his inquiry. While Bharne does mention contemporary capsule and
love hotels, what’s definitely missing in this book is a discussion of the characteristics
of the shitamachi, the “lower
city”, as one might observe, for example, south of Kyoto Eki. Here one sees
“discarded”, the impoverished, and the disabled. A mention of the challenges facing
burakumin, and the relation
between social class and geography, would also be welcome.
