Clocks, Clouds, Cameras - Shinohara, Taki, their so-called school, and the immateriality of architecture.

Abstract

The thesis explores the relationship between rational thought and the practice of architecture, as illustrated by the trajectories of a few Japanese architects from the mid 1960s until the mid 1980s. This period is characterized as that of the advent of the immaterial, or what Jean-François Lyotard described as a rapprochement or a mingling between matter and the thinking mind. Within this condition, the question is raised of architecture's capacity for free determination, and a crucial clue is taken from Karl R. Popper's « clocks and clouds », an image suggesting that physical determinism and indeterminism are both insufficient to explain the existence of human rationality and freedom. The thesis unfolds chronologically around three exhibitions which took place in three continents, and that inform a reading of the studied architectures. The first one opens in a Tokyo department store in 1964 and coincides with the first meeting of two figures of central importance for thesis: architect Kazuo Shinohara (1925- 2006), and photographer and critic Koji Taki (1928-2011). The former defended his projects to be « fictions » stemming from a « subjectivity of the house designer », while the latter experimented with avant-garde texts, edition, and photography, both of architecture and of quotidian scenes. The exchanges and collaborations between these two practices are reconstructed to outline the tensions in their approaches to the immaterial. The progression into the 1970s unveils a generation of architects born in the 1940s, for whom Shinohara and Taki were unavoidable influences, even if describing them as a « school » would be reductive. Among them are Teruaki Ohashi (1938- 1996), Itsuko Hasegawa, (1941-), Toyo Ito (1941-), Kazunari Sakamoto (1943-), and Hironori Shirasawa (1943-). Their trajectories are described around the publication in 1976 of Taki's seminal essay The Lived House, and an exhibition about Shinjuku that he co-curated in New York's Museum of Modern Art. This era witnesses an evolving discourse on reason and matter, marked by multiplicity and a dialectical approach to rational and irrational elements within architectural design, foregrounding the tensions and contradictions inherent in modern inhabitation. The 1980s are characterized by an often-ambiguous engagement with modernism's legacy, as architects grapple with the latent presence of modernist rationalism within contemporary urban fabric. This period also sees the advent of computer imagery in architecture, emphasizing the visualization of architecture as a thought process observable beyond the opacity of matter. Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput's exhibition Les Immatériaux, which took place in 1985 in Paris' Centre Pompidou, sheds light on the endeavours of the studied architects in this period, within an increasingly globalized scene. The conclusion advocates for a reorganization of knowledge that embraces the « incomplete indeterminism » described by Popper, proposing an understanding of architecture that mirrors the complexity and unpredictability of human thought, as a prerequisite for more sustainable outcomes for architecture in the foreseeable future. The studied Japanese architectures are debated not as mere stylistic exercises but as profound inquiries into the nexus between thinking and architectural form, which grounds their capacity to build an intelligible, and therefore shareable environment. keywords: Architecture, Rationality, Immateriality, Fiction, Indeterminacy, Subjectivity, Objectivity, Japanese Architecture (1960s-1980s), Architectural Thought Process, Architectural Critique and Theory, Koji Taki, Kazuo Shinohara, Itsuko Hasegawa, Toyo Ito, Teruaki Ohashi, Kazunari Sakamoto, Hironori Shirasawa.