Dave Beynon, Superflat Architecture: Culture and Dimensionality Interspaces: Art + Architectural Exchanges from East to West

Takashi Murakami’s notion of ‘superflat’ art has specific roots in the western-influenced woodblock prints of nineteenth-century Edo and contemporary applications in the popular culture media of manga and anime. As applied to architecture, ‘superflatness’ is suggestive of a sensibility that derives its aesthetic qualities from a mixture of Japanese traditions and western architectural lineages. More intriguingly, the idea of superflat architecture implies a way of perceiving space and dimensionality that is distinctive to contemporary Japanese architects. Superflat Architecture: Culture and Dimensionality The world of the future might be like Japan is today — super flat. In his article ‘Superflat Architecture and Japanese Subculture’, architectural critic Taro Igarashi describes the work of architects such as Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, Hitoshi Abe, Atelier Bow-Wow, Jun Aoki and Kengo Kuma as ‘superflat’, alluding to a twodimensionality in their buildings that is based on a particular history of cultural interaction within Japan. This paper will explore this contention in reference to the 21 Century Museum of Contemporary Art by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) and the Tama Art University Library by Toyo Ito. The physical and spatial qualities of these buildings will be related to the notion of ‘superflatness’. As will be discussed, in contemporary Japanese art ‘superflat’ can arguably refer to both a perceived condition of contemporary Japanese culture, and a culturally specific way of seeing and representing space. As both a cultural and a spatial medium, architecture provides a way of exploring this dual definition, and conversely, the consideration of architecture as superflat suggests a way of understanding what might be distinctive about Japanese contemporary architecture beyond the use of readily identifiable motifs and forms. Igarashi borrows the term ‘superflat’ from the artist Takashi Murakami, who makes the assertion that ‘Super flatness is an original concept of Japanese who have been completely Westernised’. This intriguing statement by Murakami references the history of Western influence on Japan; from the formal borrowings of eighteenth-century artists, through the rapid modernisations of the Meiji Restoration and the traumas of the Second World War, to the globalised present. Murakami writes: ‘Society, customs, art, culture: all are extremely two-dimensional. It is particularly apparent in the arts that this sensibility has been flowing steadily beneath the surface of Japanese history.’ In such cultural and formal two-dimensionality, Murakami defines an aesthetic that is not just two-dimensional, but which emphasises its intrinsic flatness instead of alluding to depth. As Michael Darling puts it, ‘Artistically, Murakami is interested in the formal 1. Murakami, 2000, p. 5. 2. Igarashi, 2000, p. 98. 3. Murakami, 2000, p. 5. 4. Murakami, 2000, p. 5. Dave Beynon, Superflat Architecture: Culture and Dimensionality Interspaces: Art + Architectural Exchanges from East to West 2 connections between the new and the old — stylisation, pictorial flatness, all-over composition.’ One of Murakami’s points of reference are the Edo-era woodcuts known popularly as ukiyo-e. Translated as ‘a composite term: uki (floating), yo (world), and e (pictures)’, of which ukiyo refers to the Buddhist concept of the illusory nature of the experiential world, ukiyo-e art was the product of an eighteenth-century Japan that was beginning to take notice of the West. It was an art that was developed in order to be massproduced, most popularly as woodblock prints; not for the Tokugawa Shogunate or the Imperial court, but for a growing merchant class, whose wealth was increasing but remained unsubstantiated by status or land tenure. Traditionally, Japanese artists worked in a Chinese-derived tradition, where isometry had been developed to simulate depth. They drew on particular representational conventions, in which landscape elements of similar size were taken closer to the viewer if they were lower in the composition. This was effective in elongated, vertical scroll paintings, where distant mountains at the top of the image were equal in size to closer ones below. It was also effective in landscapes portrayed on byobu, Japanese folding screens. An isometric view meant that the viewer could perceive whatever was illustrated; pavilions, natural features, courtyards, castles, equally, without having to stand in a particular position. In fact, the image was best experienced by moving in front of the screen, with the image (literally) unfolding as one did so. Emaki, narrative handscrolls, developed this use of pictorial narrative more extensively, allowing for the viewer’s gaze to move across a progression of connected images and text. Murakami argues that this kind of art ‘controls the speed of its observer’s gaze’. He connects this perceptual device with that used by contemporary Japanese media, such as manga, anime and his own ‘superflat’ art. In portraying landscapes within the truncated proportions of the woodblock print (34 x 22 cm), this method was less effective and ukiyo-e artists began to use new methods, combining traditional methods with new techniques from the West. In terms of landscape depiction, the foremost amongst these was the use of single-point perspective, the first examples of which appear in the midto late-1700s in the work of Okumara Masanobu and Utagawa Toyoharu. By the eighteenth century, Karushika Hokusai and Hiroshige Ando and other ukiyo-e artists were commonly using single-point perspective in their landscape views. With the viewer’s eye unable to drift upwards or sideways for any distance, western perspective was much more effective in representing background depth. However in the foreground, isometric methods of projecting buildings and interiors maintained a level of immediacy and familiarity. Hokusai’s A Treasury of Loyalty series illustrates this combination of isometric and perspectival projection in several examples. In Act 6, an outdoor background is depicted in western perspective while, in the foreground, the interior is done in isometric projection. In Act 10, Hokusai combines two perspectival forms: an outdoor scene in western perspective, and an indoor scene, which is shown with its walls and roof removed — a traditional way of viewing detail from 5. Darling, 2001, p. 79. 6. Woodson, 1998, p. 32.