Background: Katsura Villa was conceived as rural retreat in 1615 and commissioned by two members of the imperial family: Prince Toshihito and his son Toshitada; it consists of a shoin, gardens, a pond, and several teahouses. Katsura is a fine example of a prince’s villa of the Tokugawa period. The shoin is made up of three parts: the Old Shoin, the Middle Shoin, and the New Palace. A number of different theories have been developed regarding the manner in which the different elements came into existence and how they were altered over time. The villa has no dominant style. In early 17th century Japan, two styles of residential architecture coexisted. One was the “virile and authoritarian” shoin-zukuri style that had developed since the medieval period – “mainly in residences of the samurai class and in abbots’ living quarters within temples.” The other, the sukiya-zukuri style, “came to be used for the residences of the commoners and […] in sōan-style tea houses”.1 The shoin style was founded on the work of the great master carpenters and the kiwari proportional system. The sukiya is less formal and more flexible. “During the 17th century it rapidly spread to townhouses for merchants as well as to the secondary residences of the samurai. […] Conceived in an epoch when the two styles still overlapped, Katsura shared characteristics of both.”2 A period of war had just ended and the political conditions of the time played an important role: “In the early years of the Tokugawa shogunate, the prince of the Hachijō Imperial Family was one of the members of the imperial court who insisted on keeping up an anti-Tokugawa position.” Because the prince disliked the samurai aesthetic and appreciated the taste of the urban populace, he tended toward the sukiya-zukuri style.3
Nearly a quarter century after Ishimoto’s initial work on Katsura, he published his second book, “Katsura Villa: Space and Form”.4 In it, Isozaki declares declares, “If we compare the two works, the difference is so radical that it is nearly impossible to believe that we are seeing the same Katsura.” In the first book, Ishimoto “virtually decomposed the buildings into black-and-white planar patterns” and was determined to “disassemble Katsura into fragments”.5 To achieve this effect he omitted many elements. This visual restraint went hand in hand with Tange’s intention, as he described in his foreword: “This book does not tell everything there is to tell about the Katsura Palace. It is a visual record of the living Katsura as it exists in the minds of an architect and a photographer.”6 While many pictures were included of the shoin’s facades, the elegantly cambered roofs integral to Katsura were largely omitted.7 Indeed, Isozaki states that “the goal was to extract Mondrianesque patterns, such as those created by the lines of the shoji and the wooden beams”.8 The elements that were disregarded were those that “had contributed over time to Katsura’s fame as the expression of quintessential sukiya-style architecture”.9 That was related to the modernist goals of the 1950s. In contrast to the 1960 book, the images produced for the second book introduce thoroughly different features of Katsura. The new color shots convey more data, but more to the point, Ishimoto “sought to construct a totally different device for reading Katsura. This Katsura no longer strikes us with its sense of transparency. On the contrary, it stresses ambiguous and even kitschlike aspects of the ensemble. Though the camera eye still focuses on detail, it is no longer so exclusionary; it pulls back slightly from the motifs in order to encourage a broader interpretation. Objects are now woven into the tissue of a background context.”10
The three protagonists: First we turn to Bruno Taut, a “refugee” from the Soviet Union who arrived in Japan via Siberia. On the very day after his arrival, Isaburo Ueno, representing the architectural association that had invited Taut, took Taut to see the Katsura Villa, which was closed to the general public. The strong impression made by that first visit caused Taut to write repeatedly about Katsura during his stay in Japan.11 Taut described the villa in 1933 and saw in it the point of departure for modernism. Through him the villa’s significance first came to be recognized in Japan. But Isozaki maintains that Taut’s appraisal of Katsura must also be read in light of the political conditions facing prewar Japanese modernists. “It was in the mid-1920s that the modernist architectural movement began in Japan. Its protagonists sought to import modern design […]. By the beginning of the 1930s, however, there were serious obstacles. Modernism had a strong adversary in the revived eclecticism based upon imperialist ideology.”12 This so-called teikan style involved, for example, topping a simple box with so-called Asian tiled roofs. Such an approach recalls the situation in both the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the 1930s, where modernism was forced to yield to a monumental architectural style. “In Japan, the mandate for large state-sponsored competitions now all too frequently read: ‘the style must be Eastern, that is, based upon Japanese taste.’ The teikan style had become the sole government-approved manner of design.”13 Horiguchi wrote two essays for the Anthology of Architectural Styles (1932); they were a critique of the teikan style as the one and only expression of Japanese “taste”. He analyzed the tearoom with the intent of appraising it from a modernist stance.14
Taut’s hosts had similar goals, and his subsequent behaviour “seems to have been scripted by the Japanese modernists, and [he] effectively performed the role.”15 In a number of his writings, Taut defined Katsura as the eternal classical Japanese building. “Taut’s enthusiasm made Katsura’s buildings and its garden a new focus of attention, and publications of Katsura began to multiply.”16 His interpretation that Katsura is “real” Japanese, imperial art – in contrast to the “fake” art of the Tōshō-gū in Nikkō – was indeed a simplification. The Architects’ Association of Japan fostered modernism in Japan, but the political situation made this position increasingly difficult to maintain. Crucial for them was the fact that Taut was a pioneer of modernist architecture, and, above all else, that he had links with the socialist revolution, and had even been invited to Soviet Russia to take part in government-sponsored projects.” He had left Nazi Germany, only to land in imperialist Japan. “[But] Japanese architects […] used his comments to escape the cul-de-sac they were being herded into.” For modernists, “Taut’s account of Katsura functioned as a battle-cry against their opponent, the nationalist teikan style.”17
During World War II, Sutemi Horiguchi “worked to transform Taut’s observations into […] a viable design method. In the end it was the work of Kenzō Tange in the late war and postwar periods that brought this tendency to fruition.”18 Significantly, both wrote extensively of Katsura. In one essay written in 1934, Hiroguchi identified those elements of Japanese architecture that were directly influenced by the Chinese; he pointed to “Japan-ness” in such buildings as Todai-ji, Ise Shrine, and various tea ceremony rooms. For whatever reason he did not name Katsura. Around 1938, he posited a theory: “Architecture comes into being when a material need occurs that can be solved and fulfilled by empathy accompanied by engineering. Before designing a building, there is no such thing as style. Yet after erection, the form of a building may be said to have a certain style. In this sense, architecture possesses style without style. In other words, this might be a contemporary wooden style, a contemporary reinforced-concrete style, and so on. Style in this sense expresses the whole of contemporary engineering, charged with the nature of epoch, place, and material.”19 In 1952, Horiguchi published Katsura Rikyu. His text had been written in wartime, when Horiguchi did research on historical buildings in Kyoto and Nara. In the book’s epilogue, he offers a telling analysis of the European modernists’ appreciation of Katsura: “Even before Taut, some foreign architects must have seen Katsura. But none had been much impressed, because modern architecture was not yet mature, even in Europe. It was several years after WW I, at the time Gustav Prattz wrote that European modern architecture was derived from Japanese residences and Taut was active as an expressionist architect in Germany, that a modern view of architecture matured and permeated the world. Only after accustoming oneself to the beauties of asymmetrical composition and the novelty of steel frame and reinforced concrete structure can one be affected by this architecture. The aesthetic of asymmetry had been mastered in the world of the tea ceremony from early times; therefore, the practitioners of tea [ceremonies] must always have understood the beauty of Katsura. […] Bridging modern and national styles had become the overarching objective of Japanese architects during the 1930s and 1940s.”20
“It was Tange near the end of the war who brought closure to the efforts of Horiguchi and others to juxtapose modern and Japanese currents and in the postwar period melded them into a single approach to contemporary architectural design.”21 In 1942 and 1943, Kenzō Tange won two official competitions with projects in shinden-zukuri style: the designs have capacious roofs and symmetrical floor plans, but steer clear of teikan elements. Tange’s revival of the shinden-zukuri style quotes its clear, refined method of construction. This was referred to as a Japanese national style, based on construction employing columns and beams. After the end of the war, “all nationalist discourse was abruptly discarded”, and the style was never realized. Tange’s work up until around 1960 – when he wrote on Katsura – was a direct extension of the methodology he established in the prewar years.22
