PRESENTER:

This arresting table-top piece is by acclaimed Japanese architect Isozaki Arata. Since his debut in the 1960s, Isozaki has arguably been the most important connection between the architectural communities of Japan and the wider world.

Thomas Daniell, a professor of architecture at Kyoto University, told us how, like so many of his generation, Isozaki was shaped by the destruction of Japanese cities during the Second World War.

THOMAS DANIELL:

Isozaki was fourteen years old when his hometown Oita was firebombed in the final months of World War II. And he survived obviously, but, in his own words, it was standing in the ashes of his family home the next morning, seeing around him an entire town that had been destroyed, was the moment he first became aware of architecture itself. And the darkness ruin and loss of that night has tinged everything he's ever done since then, by his own admission.

PRESENTER:

We asked Thomas about this piece, titled ‘Incubation Process’.

THOMAS DANIELL:

It's obviously not a work of architecture or of city design. You could think of it as an artwork, but in fact, what it really is, is the aftermath of a performance.

PRESENTER:

Though this is a later version, that original performance took place in 1962 at an exhibition of Japanese urban design called ‘This Will Be Your City’. There, Isozaki sought to demonstrate that for city design to be successful, no single individual could impose their own idea of order, but instead, should enable participation by many other people.

THOMAS DANIELL:

He set up an installation that comprised a wooden trestle table covered with an aerial photograph of Tokyo. Beside it, he placed hammers, nails, and coloured wires with a sign inviting visitors to hammer in the nails and connect them with the wires, wherever they wished. And this was intended as a demonstration of the bottom-up participation of many people. But the gallery visitors put nails and wires everywhere: the table, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, turning the whole room into a giant spider web. Isozaki visited halfway through the exhibition run and cut most of them away, but they had reappeared by the final day of the exhibition, when Isozaki returned and poured liquid plaster over the tabletop. He was admittedly inspired by the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, but it was also his representation of the chaos and energy of a city and reminding us of the necessity for occasional destruction as a basis for ongoing creation.

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