Gazing and Being Gazed in the Mediterranea: Japanese Architect Ito Chuta(1867-1954)’s Perception of the Mediterranean Environment (original) (raw)
Related papers
“A Red Cloud on the Bosphorous: The Ottoman Empire and Its Capital through the Eyes of Itō Chūta (1867-1954)”, Selçuk Esenbel, Miyuki Aoki Girardelli, Erdal Küçükyalçın (eds.), The Crescent and the Sun Three Japanese in İstanbul: Yamada Torajirō, Itō Chūta, Ōtani Kōzui, İstanbul, İstanbul Araştırmalar Enstitüsü, 2010, pp. 89-128 (In English and Turkish)
Ito Chuta and the narrative structure of Chinese architectural history
The Journal of Architecture, 2015
This article examines the intellectual and political environment that gave rise to the basic narrative structure in the writing of Chinese architectural history during the formative stage of the discipline through the career and works of the Japanese architectural scholar Ito Chuta (1867–1954). The author argues that the heavy emphasis on pre-Tang history in the early literature on Chinese architecture was a result of the power shift in late-nineteenth to early-twentieth-century East Asia, namely, the decline of China and the rise of Japan. By analysing the textual and visual information in Ito's major scholarly works, this article reveals the political agenda behind the methodological discrepancy between Shina kenchikushi and Shina kenchiku soshoku: the former is more historical and the latter is more anthropological, which echoes the cultural contradictions in Japanese colonialism, and shows how Ito's scholarships on Horyuji helped to identify such a shift in the mantle of East Asian tradition from ancient China to modern Japan.
Reduction to Japan-ness? Katsura Villa as a Discursive Phenomenon
From the Things Themselves: Architecture and Phenomenology
The Imperial villa of Katsura (1615-1662) is considered as one of the most refined examples of Japanese residential architecture. Since the thirties and Bruno Taut’s sojourn in Japan, the literature on Katsura villa has flourished and since the end of the Second World War, Katsura villa has been at the center of discourses on the Japanese tradition and “Japan-ness.” Considering the architectural discourses of three generations of architects: Kishida Hideto (1929), Bruno Taut (1936), Horiguchi Sutemi (1952), Tange Kenzō and Walter Gropius (1960), Isozaki Arata (1983), we will focus on the presentation of Katsura villa as a model of Japanese architecture. Why, in architectural discourses, Katsura villa does represent “Japan-ness”? How has the complex architecture of Katsura villa been reduced to a representation of the essence of Japan, its tradition and modernity? From both the perspectives of modern history and philosophy, this paper will try to answer the issue of the “Japan-ness” of Katsura villa. The construction of a discourse on the “Japan-ness” is the result of a crossed history (created by both Japanese and Foreign architects) since the time when architects have tried to define what is Japanese architecture. The need to define a Japanese architecture was prompted by the importation of Japanese modern architecture. From the thirties, and moreover in the forties, the debate within Japanese architecture centered in the relation to Occidentalism and the desire to overcome the western modernity. After the war, during the controversy on Tradition, Katsura villa has been eventually promoted as a model for the creation of Modern Japanese architecture. Phenomenological approaches of Japanese architecture have insisted on the specific relation to nature – especially in the case of religious (Buddhist and Shintō) architecture – and the thought of Watsuji Tetsurō and Nishida Kitarō have been advocated for the analysis of the Japanese architectural culture. However, in Husserl’s philosophy, the starting point of his Phenomenology is the Transcendental Reduction. The Reduction "brackets" all ideas that are unrelated to our perception of the object as it is in itself. Thus the Reduction is a precondition for the fundamental purpose of phenomenology, that of a study of the essence of objects as they appear to consciousness. By investigating the idea of Transcendental Reduction, what it means both within Husserl’s philosophy and how it relates to the discourse on Katsura villa, we can see how the “Japan-ness” which has often been taken to be an “essence” of that particular building, is in fact a misrepresentation of the term "essence" and just another example of the "natural attitude," which phenomenology must attempt to avoid. The discourse of “Japan-ness” mirrors Husserl's concept of “sedimentation”: the addition of layers of meaning beyond the originary vision of the object.