Architecture of Defeat

Kengo Kuma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429751202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

Kengo Kuma, one of Japan's leading architects, has been combining professional practice and academia for most of his career. In addition to creating many internationally recognized buildings all over the world, he has written extensively about the history and theory of architecture. Like his built work, his writings also reflect his profound personal philosophy.

Architecture of Defeat is no exception. Now available in English for the first time, the book explores events and architectural trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in both Japan and beyond. It brings together a collection of essays which Kuma wrote after disasters such as the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11 and the earthquake and tsunami that obliterated much of the built landscape on Japan's northern shore in a matter of minutes in 2011. Asking if we have been building in a manner that is too self-confident or arrogant, he examines architecture's intrinsic—and often problematic—relationship to the powerful forces of contemporary politics, economics, consumerism, and technology, as well as its vital ties to society.

Despite the title, Architecture of Defeat is an optimistic and hopeful book. Rather than anticipating the demise of architecture, Kuma envisages a different mode of conceiving architecture: guided and shaped by more modesty and with greater respect for the forces of our natural world.

Beautifully designed and illustrated, this is a fascinating insight into the thinking of one of the world's most influential architects.

Part One

Disconnection, criticism, form

Chapter 1

From disconnection to connection

Architecture itself may be the enemy of society. Public projects and the construction industry have become nearly synonymous with evil. How and since when did architecture come to be so hated? Does the problem lie with the environment surrounding architecture or architecture itself? I would like to begin with that simple question.

Architecture certainly possesses many negative aspects that make it easy to hate. First of all, it is big. Buildings are the biggest things with which we come into contact every day. Largeness is the fate and very definition of architecture. Things that large are inevitably an eyesore. Moreover, architecture becomes even bigger, or is made to seem bigger than it actually is, because in many cases those putting up buildings such as clients and architects intend those buildings to catch the eye. As a result, architecture becomes even more unpleasant to look at. It becomes even more hated.

The next reason it is hated is because it is an extravagant use of material. Naturally it requires large amounts of material to construct buildings because buildings are large. Incredible amounts of material are used. Earth’s resources, including sources of energy, are limited, and we are beginning to recognize the limits. Such extravagant use of resources is bound to be deplored today.

Another reason architecture is hated is because it is to all intents and purposes irreversible. Once constructed, a building is not easily modified or demolished. Things that are easily modified or demolished are not referred to as architecture to begin with. Once a building that we hate has been constructed, therefore, we must put up with it. A building is likely to have a longer life span than a human being; therefore, we must put up with it till the day we die. Actually, buildings constructed since the twentieth century have not had such long life spans, but it feels as if they do. Buildings seem to be sturdier and to last longer than the delicate and weak bodies of human beings. Buildings even seem to mock us for our short lives and transience. Architecture is thus hated even more. It is hated for its irreversibility and impudence.

Architecture has been fated to be these three things from the very beginning. When the absolute volume of architecture was negligible compared with the enormous volume of the world at large, these three characteristics were in fact regarded as virtues. Humankind created buildings because it sought immensity, extravagance and longevity. Of course not every member of society could create such symbols of privilege. Only the “strong” could create architecture; architecture was basically a thing of rarity. People overlooked its immensity, extravagance and longevity precisely because it was rare.

People became cautious of architecture when the volume of buildings passed a critical value. Even in ancient Greek and Roman times, there was a wariness of architecture, and regulations were established because of that wariness. However, it was at the start of the twentieth century that people began to look on architecture with definite suspicion. Regulations on architectural form were established for the first time anywhere in the world in 1784 in Paris. The prototype for today’s architectural regulations was the zoning system instituted in New York in 1916 in order to prevent the destruction of the townscape by high-rise buildings. However, the establishment of regulations on architectural form did not check acts of construction. On the contrary, buildings continued to be constructed in the twentieth century at an unparalleled rate. It would not be a gross error to call the twentieth century the “century of architecture”.

There was already a superabundance of architecture, but no control was exercised over it. Architectural ambition, in danger of flagging, continued to be forcibly reinvigorated by aphrodisiacal measures.

Society needed architecture. More precisely, society needed acts of construction. That being the case, architecture, even though it already existed in excess, was not halted. The continued arousal of architecture was needed.

Two aphrodisiacs come immediately to mind. One was policies encouraging homeownership, and the other was the increased public spending advocated by John Maynard Keynes. Measures to encourage homeownership began to be taken in earnest in the United States, which was troubled by housing problems after World War I. Both Europe and the United States had serious housing problems after the Great War, but their responses were very different. Europe engaged in the systematic construction of public housing; five million units were constructed in the 1920s alone. In the United States, on the other hand, private construction of detached houses was encouraged through the institution of a preferential tax system and a housing loan system, administered by the Federal Housing Agency (FHA) newly established in 1934, which provided up to 80 percent of the total cost of construction at low interest rates. In Europe, buildings were provided from the top down, but in the United States the policy objective was to awaken and increase architectural ambition in private individuals. These were the aphrodisiacal measures administered to stimulate architecture (fig. 1).

What were the results of these contrasting measures? Housing provided at low rents and with no difficulty was by no means effective in increasing the desire to work among Europeans. To raise their ambition to work and stimulate consumption, other measures such as the forced introduction of long-term vacations proved necessary.

In the United States, on the other hand, measures to encourage homeownership were successful beyond all expectations. Americans began to work as diligently as serfs to pay back housing loans. Moreover, it became clear that people saddled with housing loans become politically more conservative; the system thus had the added bonus of contributing to the stabilization of politics. The measures were thus extremely effective both economically and politically. Society as a whole welcomed acts of housing construction. Le Corbusier closed his book, Vers une Architecture, published in 1923 (fig. 2), with the famous phrase “architecture or revolution”.¹ They are bold words, befitting the conclusion of a text that is harshly critical of the old, established architecture and declares the coming of a revolutionary, modernist architecture in its place. However, it was instead the housing loan system that most completely fulfilled his prophecy. No doubt, Le Corbusier, who became a star architect by affecting the revolutionary and making free use of antiestablishment statements, would angrily argue otherwise. Nevertheless, the middle class, having obtained “architecture” by means of housing loans, happily forgot its dream of revolution and began to take on a conservative character. The choice had indeed been “architecture or revolution”.

Figure 1 Advertisement for Levittown, Pennsylvania; Levittown was a successful residential development that targeted servicemen returning from World War II who wanted to build houses with FHA housing loans.

Figure 2 Pamphlet publicizing Vers une Architecture (1923); Le Corbusier succeeded in arousing the desire of readers by using the new advertising methods of the time that combined fragmentary photographic images and text.

The measures adopted in the United States produced immediate results. The number of housing units constructed increased. The number of housing starts, which had dropped to 93,000 units in 1933, soared to 603,000 units in 1940, thanks to the establishment of the FHA in 1934. This of course helped to boost the economy enormously. It was not simply that the amount of investment in construction increased; those who constructed their homes made large investments in accessories, from interiors such as curtains and furniture to home appliances and gardens. Once the desire for “architecture” was awakened, people began to make a mad dash to fulfill that desire, to a degree far in excess of their actual needs.

If American measures to promote homeownership were a response to the Depression, public investments advocated by Keynes were an even more massive dose of aphrodisiac prescribed to counter that shrinking of desire. If American measures to promote homeownership were a proposal for “small architecture”, Keynes’ proposal was for “large architecture”, that is, an aphrodisiac directed toward “large architecture”. In 1936, Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, suggesting the basic form of fiscal policy in the twentieth century. That was a policy to create effective demand through government investment in “large architecture”. The reasoning was that increased spending on public construction would boost the economy. Using the term “multiplier”, Keynes argued that fiscal stimulus would create effective demand many times that in magnitude, which in the long term would not only improve the economy but pay for itself by increasing tax revenues. Public construction had that sort of potential power. Keynes declared confidently to the world that this was a completely new way to overcome the recessions that were the structural failures of capitalism. His idea had enormous influence on subsequent economic policies of every kind in the twentieth century, especially the New Deal in the United States and economic policies in Japan after World War II.

Why did Keynes’ idea meet with such widespread and powerful support? Just as America’s policies to promote homeownership made maximum use of the power of attraction of architecture, that is, houses, Keynes was thoroughly familiar with and employed the special nature and magical power of architecture. Indeed, his policy testified to that magical power. The two major policies on which twentieth century-type authority was based—the promotion of homeownership and public projects—both depended on the magical power of architecture. In that sense too, the twentieth century must be called the century of architecture. Why then did authority and architecture enter into collusion?

First of all, architecture is large and highly visible. What else is as large and as visible as architecture? Land, for one, is incomparably larger than architecture but too spread out to be as clearly identifiable. Architecture is an enormous, highly visible presence, a medium that can exert great influence, even through the mere publication of projects that have yet to be constructed. It can raise expectations, inspire delusions and promise what Keynes called the multiplier effect. Most importantly, given the scale of national economies at the time, the ripple effect of public construction had an impact that could not be ignored.

As I have already explained, its large size, visibility and extravagance are the biggest reasons people hate architecture. Keynes showed how these negatives could be regarded (from the perspective of economic effect) as positives. He accomplished a magnificent, almost magical feat of transmutation. This was not extravagance, he argued, but sound, responsible behavior promoting economic development. He believed it was worthy of praise. That was why he made his famous proposal, only half in jest, that the British government should pay people to bury pound notes in the ground and then dig them up again. That would not only create jobs but, through the use of the notes, generate demand. Keynes had no concept of the limited nature of material or energy. In the early twentieth century, even a person of his great intellect had little grasp of the idea that environmental resources were limited. Neither did he have any concept of extravagance.

Wild hypotheses based on abstractions divorced from reality led to crude calculations, whose results were applied to reality without a second thought—that was the true nature of what was referred to as scholarship and science in the twentieth century. The enormous buildings that are the fruits of Keynesian policies remind us of the crudeness of that method of calculation. Large public buildings such as cultural centers are commonly referred to in Japan as hakomono (literally “box things”), a term that captures the incongruous nature of such crude calculations—the dreariness of those direct translations of the results of infantile calculations into matter that are then scattered like accidents over actual, delicate reality.

Keynesian policy turns the negatives of architecture into positives, or rather, cons people into believing that those negatives are positives. The problems of scale and the extravagant use of materials and energy are left unresolved. By positing an architecture that is entirely divorced from reality and through a sleight of hand that suddenly turns a thing into its complete opposite, those who adopt Keynesian policy make it appear they have solved all problems generated by the act of disconnection called architecture.

Even more ingenious is the implication that this trick produces an architecture for the underprivileged or the have-nots. It is implied that public projects are undertaken for the benefit of the weaker members of society. Something similar to this is also implied in policies encouraging homeownership. Houses must be constructed for those without their own homes. Countering this rhetoric is by no means easy. Keynesian policy too is made virtually unassailable by the implication that it is intended to benefit the weak. The assertion that a public project must be undertaken because the district in question is impoverished and without roads is difficult to oppose. The argument that weaker members of society such as seniors require a welfare facility of this or that size not infrequently provides architecture with limitless justification.

The “weak” is something else that is divorced from reality. It is a concept as divorced from reality as architecture. There is no one who is absolutely weak.

No matter how weak a person may be, he or she can become “strong”, depending on the relationship. The “weak” is a concept, removed from all the subtleties and complexities of reality, that has been fabricated to serve as an excuse, a cloak of virtue in which to wrap architecture. Politicians made magnificent use of this justification in the twentieth century. Painting themselves as representatives of the “weak”, politicians adopted the logic of the weak to push through construction and thus promote their own interests.

Its large scale made construction activity extremely attractive to politicians dependent on the modern election system. Large amounts of money including election funding could be diverted from such activity, and the many persons involved in the activity represented a potential pool of support for politicians. Here too, the negatives of architecture became positives. At the hands of politicians armed with the logic of the weak, the volume of public projects continued to grow—their economic ripple effect or multiplier effect, if any, was by this time beside the point—and bud...