Incubated cities are destined to self-destruct
Ruins are the style of our future cities
Future cities are themselves ruins
Our contemporary cities, for this reason,
are destined to live only a fleeting moment
Give up their energy and return to inert material
All our proposals and efforts will be buried
And once again the incubation mechanism is reconstituted
That will be the future
On show at the new Misa Shin Gallery in Tokyo until the end of this month are early works by Arata Isozaki, including a series of etchings, his Incubation Process model of Tokyo (1962) (below), and a large-scale silkscreen print of his Re-ruined Hiroshima (1968) (above). Also on the wall in the first image below is the model of the inflatable concert hall he is currently working on with Anish Kapoor for Tohoku.
My two previous posts were about Isozaki’s compulsive fascination with destruction and decay. In the early 1960s he had pictured layered cities with platforms for living suspended above classical ruins and highways weaving between crumbling Doric columns. When Incubation Process was shown in the 1962 Metabolism exhibition This Will Be Your City, it was captioned with the less-than-utopian poem cited above. He was weary of the Metabolists’ optimism about the future and recalls (in an interview with Rem Koolhaas in his new book Project Japan), “they had no skepticism towards their utopia; they represented only a form of progressivism.”
Also in 1962, Isozaki published his infamous text City Demolition Industry, Inc. in Japan Architect magazine, where he constructed a schizophrenic split between being a city planner/architect, and being a killer. The article (which is reprinted in Project Japan, where Koolhaas says he considers it one of the most interesting texts ever written by an architect) is an enigmatic rumination on the running theme that construction in its full sense is always destruction as well …
“The movement called modernity relies on the faith that the wave can go on forever. Often a telos (utopia) is constituted in order to speed up the wave. But it ends when the telos is fulfilled—an accomplishment in itself, but also thermodynamic death. Therefore, construction, if it is simply aimed at a certain telos or design, will subside. Any move toward design is brought back to a macro equilibrium upon its completion, that is, termination and death. In order to maintain a city as a living entity, construction and destruction should be performed together, at the same time. A living organism is sustained by the systematic death of molecules, though such an organic procedure cannot be applied to a city. Instead, violent blows, like an earthquake, or gradual destruction like the spread of pollution—things which cause much pain to living organisms—are inherent in the life processes of a city. In the context of urbanism, it is time for us to face this inevitable aspect of the becoming of a city. After all, construction in its full sense is always destruction as well. […] In the realm of construction, the dynamic process should include not only building but also constant decomposition and dissolution, just as the mechanism of sustaining life includes the programmed self destruction of genes as its sine qua non.” (Arata Isozaki, “On Ruins”, Lotus International n.93, June 1997)
Images ©MISA SHIN GALLERY