ArchiteXt: The Readable, Playable and Edible Architecture of Japanese New Wave

Abstract

After the downfall of Metabolism in the 1970s, Japanese architecture dissolved from its previous pyramidal structure (paralleling Japanese society) into a horizontal expansion of powers. The <italic>Japan Architect</italic> entitled this phenomenon &ldquo;New Wave&rdquo; and depicted it graphically with an adaptation of Tawaraya Sotatsu's legendary folding screen <italic>Fujin Raijin</italic> wherein, under two dominant Metabolist figures&mdash;Kisho Kurokawa (the Wind God) and Arata Isozaki (the Thunder God)&mdash;thirty-four New Wave architects (represented by cumulonimbus clouds) emerged, overshadowing the skyscape (i.e., Japanese architecture). Notwithstanding the vivid depiction, New Wave remains a cloudy phenomenon; the power structure&mdash;who's in, who's out, and who defines it&mdash;continues to shift.

Neither to dismiss New Wave as infinitely haphazard, nor to fabricate a unifying view (as the movement has thus far been treated), this dissertation argues that the logic of the amorphous &ldquo;clouds&rdquo; resides in the local and the details, from the heterogeneous works emerging from a changing constituency of individuals. By focusing on the archetypical New Wave group ArchiteXt&mdash;including rebuilding the hitherto lost ephemera ArchiteXt, uncovering archival materials, and interviewing the architects&mdash;the dissertation brings to light the elusive functioning of this non-group (and the New Wave movement itself). Like morphing clouds or flowing waves, ArchiteXt's individualist works extend freely between non-architecture and architecture, with one form presaging and inspiring the other: magazines, maps, signs, encephalograms, masks, toys, puzzles, pastas, and buildings.

Evoking the spirit of Japanese <italic>non-art</italic> predicated upon <italic>acushon</italic>, yet in their uniquely lighthearted fashion, ArchiteXt redefines architecture as action, and realigns it with Japanese culture at the grassroots (which Metabolism had disposed of), via disjointed actions in reading, writing, mapping, masking, playing, jesting, cooking and eating. Joining forces amidst disjointedness, the clouds eventually instigated a paradigm shift, transforming Japanese architecture into an egalitarian system of New Wave.