P N Y XWEEKLY COMMENTARY, RESEARCH, AND REVIEW

Edited by Adolfo Del Valle & Oskar Johanson. Printed by Two Press, London for the Architectural Association. // pnyx.aaschool.ac.uk © PNYX 2015

June 1 2015 ISSUE 4

Artificial ground as prosthesis: Agricultural City

bobbed back to the surface with the architec-ture of the Metabolists, who developed in the wake of the war.

The Metabolist project was catalysed following the meeting of a group of young Japanese architects with established Western modernists in the course of the 1960 Tokyo World Design Conference. The Metabolists co-opted ideas from their guests, in particular those of Alison and Peter Smithson, whose departure from CIAM doctrine had recently manifested itself in the low-rise, ‘streets in the sky’ of the Golden Lane proposal. This tendency towards the raised street first appeared in Japan in 1960 in Kisho Kurokawe’s ‘Agricultural City’. The scheme was planned for the Amagun region in Aichi Prefecture, which in 1959 had been devastated by the Ise Bay typhoon. It effectively reconstructed a new ‘artificial ground’ above the old, flood-prone fields, splitting the agricultural ‘datum’ from the domestic. It was architecture permanently configured to anticipate and mitigate future crises in the form of natural disasters, a defensive prosthesis attached to the ‘hostile host’ of the land of Japan.

The Metabolists applied their prostheses to a post-war nation facing manifold crises, of which the above was but one type. Another was housing. In 1968, Masato Otaka’s project ‘Sakaide Artificial Ground’ claimed

Giant robot as prosthesis: an Evangelion (EVA)

to respond to the slums that had formed in the wake of the collapse of salt production in Kagawa Prefecture by building a new urban platform nine metres above the chaos below. In 1972, Kiyonori Kitutake proposed cyclopean A-frame structures named ‘Stratiform Structure Modules’ that would make it possible to]’create ground’ over congested urban areas or ‘weak’ earth.

As well as projecting upwards, the Metabolists prostheticised laterally, over the sea, investing decades of research into seaborne housing units. Already afloat, and unlimited by the deficiencies of a densely populated, seismically-active archipelago, the marine architecture of the Metabolists could defend against almost any crisis the country faced. Kitutake began in 1958 with ‘Marine City’ and continued with ‘Ocean City’ in 1959 and ‘Disaster Prevention City’ in 1961, the latter of which relocated the urban grid into the air and then out over Tokyo Bay. At the same time, Kenzo Tange presented his ‘Plan for Tokyo’, which similarly expanded the capital out into the bay by means of a megastructural prosthesis.

A few years later, Tange presented the ‘Tokaido Megalopolis’, a project which united urban centres from Tokyo to Osaka into a single urban corridor 600 km long. This corridor would function as a ‘central nervous system’, allowing Japan to both better distrib-

ARCHIITECTURE & ANNIHILATIONOskar Johanson

THE GEOFRONT reads like Boullée’s Cenotaph squared. It is architecture multiplied by the function of its own already preposterous scale. Formally, it is a dome-shaped void almost a kilometre from base to apex. Where its oculus should be are instead the basements of a cluster of skyscrapers forming the downtown of a city above. Each skyscraper sits on vertical rollers, allowing it to sink from the above world to hang pendulously over the void and form an inverted skyline.

At the base of the dome is a verdant landscape replete with a shimmering lake. In the centre squats a colossal pyramid, offset only by a colossal square-plan reservoir with which it shares a corner. Funiculars shunt up and down at opposite ends of the dome.

This is the architecture of defense as it exists in science fiction, a literary genre whose power draws from the single question ‘what if?’. What if we ran out of water? What if we could teleport to the Moon? What if the Metabolist project had been completed?

In 1931, the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria. Six months later the puppet state Manchuko had been established. Japan’s leading architects, such as Hideto Kishida, were involved in the building of mass housing in the occupied state for the 100,000 Japanese workers who had begun to emigrate from the impoverished north of Japan. As Koolhaas and Obrist have observed, whereas Japan was a ‘mostly uninhabitable 330,000 square km, Manchuko was]a flat 1,300,000’. The annexed territory was a tabula rasa. But as many tabulae rasae are, this supposed emptiness was an artificial application to an existing ground.

Japan’s strategy would eventually backfire. By the end of the war its empire had been seized and its home territories razed. But the notion of an ‘artificial ground’, that is, a prosthesis on which to build,

-ute its population and multiply economic growth. Tange imagined highways connect-ing other cities to the spine as ‘arms and legs’. In this vision, the nation became an organic entity, cyborgised with the application of human infrastructure. It was architecture as prosthetic, grafted onto the soft body of the motherland.

Metabolist ambition waned in the cyborg nation after the country steeped to the one catastrophe architecture could not counter: the 1973 oil crisis. However, in spite of having worked in a self-imposed isolation from Japan’s wider cultural field, in the following decades Metabolist projects began to reappear. What was for the most part a paper architecture was easily transcribed into Japan’s graphic arts, such as manga and anime. In some cases, projects were directly lifted from the pages of Metabolist manifestos and placed within the worlds depicted by manga artists. It was fiction that finally provided the space in which Metabolism at the scale at which it had imagined itself could finally be realised.

Japan’s second major post-war economic crunch was less forgiving than the first. Precipitated domestically, it was the result of the Bank of Japan’s decision to ratchet up interest rates in 1991 in order to ‘deflate’ the asset price bubble that had been building throughout the 1980s. The aftermath was the ‘Lost Decade’, ten years of “growth recession” in which the country failed to return to the high production years of the ‘Japanese Miracle’. By 2000, Japanese industrial produc-tion had been cut in half. Although the country’s GDP only actually fell for the first two years following the crisis, there was only one year in the 1990s during which the economy grew as fast as the average year in the boom years of the 1980s.

In Janurary 1995, four years into the Lost Decade, more than six thousand people were killed during the Kobe earthquake. Two months later, 13 people were killed, 50 injured, and a thousand temporarily blinded during Tokyo subway sarin attack. Haruki Murakami wrote of the aftermath of the subway attack:

The Japanese were shocked […] from every mouth it was the same outcry: “The sheer lunacy of it all! What on earth’s become of Japan, when such mass insanity walks among us?” Where were the police? According to Murakami, the combination

of these two otherwise unrelated ‘major cataclysms’, in the longer context of a dragging post-bubble economy, catalysed a ‘period of critical enquiry into the very roots

of the Japanese state’. As a constituent part of this enquiry we can look to the anime series Neon Genesis: Evangelion, first broadcast on TV Tokyo in October, seven months after the subway attack.

Evangelion pits two forces against one another: the first, colossal alien creatures of inexplicable origin hellbent on ending the world; the second, humanity augmented by prostheses in the form of both giant robots and a defensive architecture that suggests a world in which the Metabolist project was realised after all. Within the series, these aliens are referred to as ‘Angels’, though they bear little resemblance any Western conception of the word, in some instances appearing as pure geometry. The robots, controlled by pilots, are referred to as ‘Evangelion’, or ‘EVAs’.

Above: Tange’s 1960 Tokyo Bay SchemeBelow: Opening scene of 1988 anime film Akira

Each Evangelion episode unfolds according to a rough formula in which an Angel appears and tries to destroy humanity’s last bastion of defense, a city named ‘Tokyo-3’. Crucially, it begins with the resumption of Angel attacks. It is a world in which Tokyo has already been ruined twice, each time reduced to a tabula rasa, each time rebuilt to better resist it. It is one in which disaster is the status quo. The series differs from contemporary Western depictions of catastrophe, such as Independence Day (1996), in which an alien force interrupts an America at peace. Evangelion instead echoes Japan’s history of recurrent devastation, whether by its own hands, those of the West, or, more dependably, the inclement forces of nature.

Japan’s response in the world of Evangelion is an architecture as defensive prosthetic. We learn as the series progresses that Tokyo-3 is

just the tip of the Boulléen compound known as the ‘Geofront’. It’s surface-level streets, from which the city’s office blocks can sink to safety, constitute a kind of ‘artificial ground’, the very same the Metabolists envisioned so often as a permanent solution to disaster.

Controlled by a young pilot, each EVA can only function when attached by an umbilical cable to a power supply sequestered deep within the Geofront. Just as the EVAs are prosthetic extensions of the pilot, they are plug-in extensions of the overall defensive architecture of the city. Similarly, when in Episode 3 faced with an indefatigable Angel, a blue, airborne tetrahedron dubbed ‘Ramiel’, Japan’s response recalls Metabolism at its most fervent. Japan’s entire power grid is rerouted via long lines of transformers into a single weapon operated by an EVA. The archipelago is seen from orbit, blacking out one prefecture at a time as the weapon is charged. The EVA fires, Ramiel is dispatched, and Tange’s vision of a cyborg nation, a united, organic body augmented by an infrastructural network, returns to TV for the first time since the architect’s public presentation of the Megalopolis scheme in the 1960s.

Towards the end of the series Tokyo-3’s artificial ground is blown open, not by Angels but at the hands of a human organisation armed with a nuclear bomb. Still, the hero of Evangelion survives inside his prosthesis, finding hope for himself even against the backdrop of total cataclysm. In a Japan paralysed by the Lost Decade, somehow both accustomed to and resigned to crisis, this is perhaps the thrust of the writers: that sometimes the country’s best defensive prosthetic is not only technocracy but robust optimism too.

We imagine EVAs not that we might build them but because we can imagine them at all. Boulléen robots through which the spirit of Metabolism survives, they underscore architecture’s relation to fiction, in particular during times of crisis.

Today, when the most incremental quarterly growth is declared a triumph by the government, it is more pertinent than ever to re-examine this relationship. Where the discipline carves out a fictional terrain only that it might better justify itself, we should be wary. But we should also remember that it is only ever in the space of fiction that architects will see their projects pursued to their logical extreme, as one of the answers to a ‘what if?’. In this way, we can read fiction as the incubator of the discipline’s most earnest hopes, the idea of architecture as humanity’s final defense against an inclement earth and Angels.

Edited by Adolfo Del Valle & Oskar Johanson. Printed by Two Press, London for the Architectural Association. // pnyx.aaschool.ac.uk © PNYX 2015