His legacy seems to be one building in Tokyo. But most of the country’s Modernism can be traced back to him
...and the struggle to place his ideas into Japanese identity.
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In 1929, a monthly Japanese architecture magazine, Kokusai Kenchiku (International Architecture), devoted two entire issues to the work of Le Corbusier. Its May issue contained 15 articles on the architect; its June issue presented 11 more, among them translations from English-speaking critics and from the master himself. He was then an emerging Modernist, possibly as known for his writing ....
What was it about Le Corbusier’s Modernism that appealed to Japanese architects, who had, behind them, a virtually unbroken tradition of architecture, developed over thousands of years largely in isolation from Europe? In truth, Modernism, whether European or Japanese, developed roots in countries in which the political and economic structures of so-called modernity were felt unevenly, mitigated by the resilience of older, feudal traditions. In his 1981 book “The Persistence of the Old Regime,” the historian Arno Mayer revealed that, despite the “creative destruction” wrought by capitalism, most Western European nations were, until the successive catastrophes of World War I, the revolutions that followed and World War II, largely agrarian and saddled with aristocratic landowning classes that controlled much of the country’s wealth. Artistic Modernism of all kinds took root in this soil, anxious about the disappearance of the past as well as, paradoxically enough, its unyielding grip. Modernist techniques did not express the spirit of a new confidence, but the violent struggle to displace the aesthetics of the old regime. Dissonance was built into the project from the outset.
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