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By Cathleen McGuigan
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If you stroll down the chic boulevard of Omotesando in Tokyo, you'll find plenty to catch your eye. Nearly every major fashion house has a boutique here, and the hip kids in fabulous outfits who amble along the leafy avenue compete with the lavish shop windows. But what really makes Omotesando the epicenter of Japanese style is the architecture. Prada's famous new store by the Swiss team of Herzog & de Meuron--a luminous box of crisscrossed glass--is at one end of the street, but beyond that is an amazing assemblage of cool buildings by some of the best contemporary designers in Japan. From Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa's diaphanous Dior building--as elegant and sexy as a silk slip--to Jun Aoki's silver-mesh Louis Vuitton store to Kengo Kuma's wood-slatted headquarters for LVMH, Omotesando is a design buff's street of dreams.
Now a number of these architects, well known inside Japan, are beginning to export their distinctive work. They're following the influential older generation--architects such as Arata Isozaki, Fumihiko Maki and Tadao Ando, who've been building in the United States and Europe for years. One such revered figure, 67-year-old Yoshio Taniguchi, designed the new expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York--his first project overseas--which opens next month (box). But the global ambitions of the emerging generation are becoming urgent. In the economic boom of the '80s and ' 90s, the Japanese government spent so lavishly on new museums and other buildings that young talents could cut their teeth-- and shoot to stardom--on high-profile public works. Then the bubble burst. "It's hard for experienced architects like Sejima and Aoki to find projects in Japan ," says critic Taro Igarashi.
Igarashi characterizes the work of some of these designers as "alternative modern": though rooted in classic modernism, they also question its fundamentals. And though the best architects have their own unique design language, some essence of Japanese culture suffuses their work. "These architects are being pursued abroad for specifically Japanese sensibilities," says Naomi Pollock, a Tokyo-based architect and critic. "There's an attention to craft and to detail, and a delicacy about how they approach a design project." Here are half a dozen architects--each very different from the others--whose work is beginning to enrich the wider world.
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In the city of Kanazawa, crowds eagerly waited two weeks ago for the opening of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. The stunning circular glass building by Sejima and her design partner, Nishizawa (their firm is called SANAA), won a Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale in September, as did their scheme to wrap a museum and plaza in Valencia, Spain, in a perforated steel skin. "We're always trying to create something new," explained Nishizawa, 38, as he and Sejima, 48, tucked into plates of bacon and eggs one morning in New York, where they're building the New Museum for Contemporary Art. A vertical structure on a tight downtown site (surely the architects borrowed from lessons learned in Tokyo), the museum will rise like an uneven stack of boxes--deftly planned to let in daylight, with floors cantilevering out or set back. "Sejima wants to be as pure and simple as possible," notes architect and scholar Dana Buntrock. "It's more about immateriality and abstraction."
For Shigeru Ban, 47, the lightness of architecture is essential: he often builds impermanent designs, yet with a clear, refined sense of structure. Best known for his innovative temporary shelters for refugees, he designed dwellings for survivors of the 1995 Kobe earthquake with walls made of cardboard tubes, set on foundations of plastic beer crates. Ban has longstanding ties to the United States, where he studied architecture at Cooper Union in New York. There, his most influential professor forced the students to write poetry. "First you think about structure," he recalls. "Then you use simple words to describe many things. It's very similar to architecture." He's designed witty, experimental houses, as well as an Akita gymnasium, in Japan, but now most of his work is abroad. His biggest project yet: designing a new Pompidou center in Metz, France.
Modern architecture is no longer about expansively creating new worlds. In overbuilt Japan, says Jun Aoki, who turns 48 this week, "I reinterpret what's already there." That means bringing unexpected texture to the urban fabric, as he's done with his stores for Louis Vuitton. The designs are cutting edge but inspired by such Japanese traditions as sudare, meaning bamboo blind or screen. In the Vuitton store on Omotesando, he used silver mesh with a mirrored bronze-like wall behind it for a more elusive golden glow. For the new Vuitton store in New York, Aoki wrapped the existing Fifth Avenue stone building in layers of lightly etched glass: the effect is translucent but shimmery. He's still designing for Vuitton--he just finished a new store in Shanghai--and working on an apartment tower in Taipei and a new university in Central Asia.
"I think my generation is the first to consider West and East as a flat world," says Kengo Kuma, "not the West as the center of culture." Kuma, 50, who studied at Columbia University in New York in the 1980s, mixes modernism with traditional Japanese ideas of space and materials. Take his LVMH building on Omotesando, with its screen of wooden louvers. Or the new building he did for the oldest temple in Tokyo, next to his office, with its use of grass cloth and, again, vertical wood slats. Kuma's temple-like Bamboo House is part of a development of villas near the Great Wall in China, and he's building a pavilion in Finland to showcase award-winning designs in wood--his own included.
But where East and West meet most eloquently may be in the serenely lyrical small-scale work of Kyoto architect Waro Kishi, 54. Kishi has always been a modernist but with a clear debt to his own culture. He uses velvet-smooth concrete, glass and pools of water with great elegance in his houses, and considers the "height of the eye" (will people be sitting or standing?) and "the sequential movement of my spaces, like a movie" when he designs. One of his gems is a shop in Kyoto, with goods for Buddhist monks, which exquisitely employs unusual contemporary materials (burnished steel, a wall made of perfectly stacked roof tiles) in a space as subtly layered as a teahouse. Whether they're cutting edge or consciously exploring their roots, the emerging generation of Japanese architects bring a unique tradition to their ideas of space, details and materials. It's in their design DNA, and the results, almost always, are beautiful.
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