The possibilities of Urban Planning and Architecture

 

My neighbor said, "Open up."

 

The sun is setting beyond the gentle and smoothly curving contour.  This curve is what everyone calls "the new horizon" .  On this side of "the new horizon", there is a wood, a pond and glass cubes.  This is the space for the daytime. Vis-a-vis a valley on the other side of "the new horizon", beneath the place where I stand, the space for the night spreads out.  The construction of "the new horizon" continues now and will continue in the future.  Through the creation of "the new horizon", people can sense and express the interaction between the world and themselves, and between nature and themselves.

The aforementioned world, described in an SF-like manner, could come true and we might be able to see it someday in the future.  This is an example of a future landform.  Here, writing science fiction is not my primary intention, so a specific form or a description of a future landform is not very important.  Rather, the primary purpose is to envision oneself who stands on the future landform.  Suppose that the future self looks back at the year 1995 when the Triennale Nara, World Architecture Exposition is being held.

 

In 1995, Europe was devastated by wars erupting in many places, especially in formerly Communist countries.  Emotional antagonism between different ethnic groups, and the malice against heathens, which was almost intentionally agitated, aroused a narrow minded nationalism.  Bloc economy mystified the concept of state and the mystification in turn intensified nationalism, thus forming a vicious circle.  It was the same situation experienced a hundred years ago, that is, at the opening of the so-called modern age.  after 1995, we witnessed the same development in the Asia as well.

Why did these events, which took place at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, reappear at the end of the twentieth century?  Because people failed to express a new idea about space.  They didn't have the will to design a new landform.  They didn't thy to renew spatial ideas about the concept of the state, for example.  Many people believed that an ethnic group could possess national borders, and that local landscapes were hallowed by tradition.  It is not too much to say that they not only possessed a conservative concept of space but also were infected with a criminal way of thinking about space.

Mies van der Rohe advocated "Universal Space".  Abandoning "shape", he headed for transparent, naked space, so to say.  Mies even chased structure out of space.  he envisaged space in which nothing hampered freedom.  His idea was, however, engulfed by the capitalism which has grown on a larger scale than economists could predict in the twentieth century.  The free space seemed to guarantee partially the freedom of capitalist movement.  The Communist states, which were tried and experimented with during the twentieth century, were based on a certain into the spatial ideas of Marx.  Marx envisaged spatial blueprints, that is, he anticipated the demise of states.  But Communist countries made a lot of mistakes.

Under these circumstances, the people in 1995 may be said to have forgotten the possibilities of spatial ideas.  To review the events taking place in social frameworks, such as states or ethnic groups, or in common human relations such as memories of a family or each individual: that is to question fundamentally and restructure the scenery which the people in 1995 saw and felt without any doubt.  People have to go back to the drawing board and design a landform which will create landscapes for the twenty-first century.

But this kind of designing is just hard work.  the rekindling of the ethnic conflicts mentioned before seemed to have blown away both the championing of modernism and the discussion of post-modernism.  It declared the abrogation of all the isms, from Puritan idealism to trivial Epicureanism.

 

Let's go back to the SF-like description.  The sun is setting beyond the gentle curve.  Beyond "the new horizon", there is a valley.  Vis-a-vis the valley, there are spaces for night life, that is, spaces for people who have finished the day's work.  Private rooms and various other rooms -- actually the private room was twentieth century's greatest invention in terms of space.  Other spaces were all newly-planned ones.  Accordingly, the concept of social relations which have existed until the twentieth century, such as a family centering on a husband and a wife, has become exitinct.

I also return to a private room under "the new horizon".  I am watching a monitor screen which shows a historic picture of the twentieth century, when the communication system activates and there is the voice of my neighbor.  "What are you doing?  open up the window and look outside.  Construction of a new landform is about to start!"