“Once the buildings collapsed, the meaning that used to organize urban space instantly vanished, and the elements of both structure and symbol were reduced to sheer materiality. Signs disappeared and all became substance. The composition of buildings, whose substance had been carefully hidden in order to smooth the flow of urban activities, was now revealed in its bare materiality. As objects fell from the hierarchy of significance they occupied in the construction, debris formed everywhere, amorphously battleground, devoid of meaning. Forced out of the loop of urban signification, the buildings faced us, stripped naked.”
(Arata Isozaki)
In 1995, the Great Hanshin Earthquake caused the collapse of 200,000 buildings in Kobe. Never one for knee-jerk optimism, Arata Isozaki, as commissioner of the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale the following year, decided to represent the state of contemporary Japanese architecture by showing ruins:
The architect Katsuhiro Miyamoto (who lost his own home in the earthquake), had proposed to the city of Kobe that their monument to the catastrophe be made by piling up the rubble in the city centre. Responding to this idea, Isozaki shipped architectural debris from the actual disaster site to Venice, to be piled up in the Japan Pavilion. He also lined the walls with Ryuji Miyamoto’s photographs of destructed buildings in Kobe (some of them reproduced above) and said: “I thought that returning to the point at which all construction is nullified, and using such a reference as a springboard, could make possible the planning of future construction.”
Seven months have now passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake, the first major disaster since Kobe in ‘95 and the most powerful earthquake to have ever hit Japan. The tsunami that came after it flattened cities and towns along four hundred kilometres of Japan’s coast; sweeping away homes, schools, hospitals, highways, trains and airplanes, and leaving behind twenty-five million tons of debris that will take years to deal with. Reproduced below are eleven photographs I took around Kesennuma, Rikuzentakata and Ofunato in Tohoku last month.
All Isozaki quotes are from his essay ‘On Ruins’, which was distributed at the 1996 Venice Architecture Biennale and reprinted in Lotus International, June 1997. More in Isozaki’s ruins here and here.
