THE PECULIAR ARCHITECTURAL SCENE OF 1970S JAPAN : THE SMALL EXPERIMENTS OF SENSATIONS.

Abstract

The end of the Modern Movement and the Metabolism Movement after Osaka Expo 1970 marked the start of a new crisis for architects of Japan. As described in Hajime Yatsuka’s 1981 article “Architecture in the Urban Desert: A Critical Introduction to Japanese Architecture After Modernism”, the unavailability of a central issue to symbolize plagued 1970s Japan. Young rising architects who just started their professional career were stuck in this semantic universe around them, the world which had lost its centre. Due to this loss of centre, works produced by them in the 1970s presented themselves as diverse and factionalized both stylistically and conceptually, and seemingly contradicting each other. Many, in their works, incorporated many peculiar yet differentiating traits in each house: introduction of the feeling of the outside in the interior, an internal street within a house, collage of experiences within the house which reminded of the experiences in the outside city street were some examples of it. Prior to the 1970s, the young architects saw how the Modernists and Metabolists attempted to bring about progress in the physical planning of the city; however it seemed that the progress was more caught up in its own wave of metropolitan development, mainly a continuation of pre-war population trends and highly influenced by economic conditions. No matter how the Modernists and Metabolists attempted to create order in the city, the city grew more and more out of control. Together with the failure of student movements against the renewal of the United States-Japan Security Pact in the 1960s which many of the young architects were part of, it seemed that it was impossible to do anything concrete or bring about any change in Japan in the 1970s. The young architects were stuck in an era of powerlessness. Within this condition, many peculiar small houses designs were produced. Through the analysis of these works, I hope to tease out new viewpoints on these small house designs, and the young architects behind them, particularly questioning their own viewpoints of being diverse and individualistic due to the circumstances around them. By attempting to search for common traits among their works, I seek to find out if their works were truly diverse, or were actually moving towards some common tangents.