The Just So of the Swerve and Line

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Architecture and design combine traditional skill with inventive daring

The Chinese invented paper lanterns.

The Japanese redesigned them so that they could be folded flat to save space, and enable the candles inside to be lighted easily and safely. The pleats also add beauty.

This combination of cleverness, skill and shibusa, rather than originality, accounts for the excellence of Japanese design. Its continuity extends from the 17th century Katsura Imperial Villa, whose sparse, shoji-screened rooms influenced modern architecture, to the just completed Keio University library; from tatami mats to Sony's new Flamingo record players.

The art of making things compact is a matter of survival on an island where usable space is as precious as water in the desert. Skill accounts for much of Japan's commercial success. But shibusa (the adjective is shibui), an untranslatable part of the Japanese mystique, gives Japanese designers an edge over their U.S., Italian and Scandinavian colleagues. It means not just beauty, but the beauty of calm understatement; not just perfection, but perfection emphasized by some slight flaw. It means both flair and simplicity. Yasumo Kuroko, Sony's chief product designer, offers a definition: "It's the just so of the swerve of a pagoda or the sword of a samurai."

Much as shibusa informs the eye of the cutler or potter or flower arranger, it must have informed the eyes of the designers of the Flamingo. This record player plays the disc as it stands upright, and thus becomes a source not only of sound but also of sculptural beauty.

Not all Japan is shibui. The urge for vulgar kitsch and mawkish cutesiness seems just as strong on the Ginza as on Main Street. Japan's rapidly high-rising cityscape and industrializing landscape are a visual cacophony. Modern Japan is coated with a gaudy layer of advertising, turning nights into flaming neon.

The cacophony is exciting, but it defies rational design. Frustrating land-use laws and real estate prices--as much as ten times as high as those in the U.S.--have defeated the planners. Even the houses along a street are not numbered in sequence, but follow the dictates of tradition.

For a brief moment in the 1960s, a group of architects inspired by Kenzo Tange and calling themselves Metabolists schemed to escape the mess with Utopian megastructures built into the sky or the sea. Having come back to earth, ex-Metabolists Fumihiko Maki, 54, and Arata Isozaki, 52, Japan's leading architects today, now seek to harmonize and integrate new and old architecture. In spirit, the old and the new have never been far apart. "We never saw the conflict that still seems to bother people in the West," says Nobaki Furuya, an architecture student at Waseda University. "We never saw Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe as revolutionaries. For us, they always represented

Western thought and technology, which we imported, adopted and must now integrate with our own culture."

This reciprocal inspiration was replayed in the 1950s, when the Japanese resurrected their industry and invited such leading American industrial designers as Russel Wright and Jay Doblin to teach them modern design. Now Japanese architects and designers are returning the visit.

Nobuo Hozumi, who taught at Harvard and is now with Waseda's architecture department, said, "Technology may not be the triumph we thought it would be. More than ever, we need the warm touch of the human hand." Maki studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., as well as at Harvard, which he frequently visits. The interior of his new Keio University library has a richness of architectural effects--the views, the progression of spaces, the staircase, furniture that doubles as sculpture--that are more palatial than academic but echo traditional Japanese motives. The most unabashedly Japanese of Maki's designs to date, however, are in his 18-bedroom guesthouse for foreign trainees of the YKK zipper-manufacturing concern near Komatsu. Here, shoji, entrance hall, crossbeam and other elements of ancient Japanese architecture are reinterpreted in ways that are at once both strange and familiar.

In contrast to Maki's rational restraint, Isozaki's new civic center in Tsukuba, "science city," looks, positively baroque in its exuberance. It consists of a 1,200-seat symphony hall, convention facilities and a 15-story hotel tower, circling a sunken court lined with shops. The rock garden and waterfall are stylized Japanese. The architecture is playful postmodern with the now standard affectations and allusions to Palladian renaissance. But Isozaki's stylishness is not random. Only a Japanese architect and his craftsmen could use materials as diverse as titanium-glazed tile, glass terrazzo, onyx, inlaid marble of different colors, and gold and silver doorknobs to create an effect of subtlety and restraint.

"The craftsmen here enjoy the challenge of new technologies as much as their own crafts," explains Maki. "So do contractors, who are mostly graduates of architecture school. They'd rather lose money on a job than their reputation. Lawsuits are unheard of."

Architecture and design training is tough by American standards. "We have long ago abandoned Bauhaus theorizing," says Hozumi, "and replaced it with art exercises and hard drill. We have little time and much to learn. It takes humility, discipline and sweat."

This rigorous training in adaptation is now beginning to free their creativity. Michitaka Yoshioka, 59, who also studied at Cranbrook, teaches product design at Tsukuba University and lectures in India and China, says much the same about schoolwork. He also says: "Industrial design is no longer a matter of form giving, sketching pretty forms on paper. The definition of design incorporates thinking and inventing. We must, for instance, think about ways to recycle appliances. Consumers should be able to dismantle big things like refrigerators into small, disposable parts, rather than leave them in the alley."

"First the concept," says Kuroko, who heads the staff of 75 designers at Sony. "You must create in your mind before you create with a pencil. We pick young designers for their ideas and their ability to invent new products. When we think we have something worth developing, many different specialists work together to see if it is producible, marketable and beautiful. All three are equally important."

After a pause Kuroko adds, "But beauty is where we put our heart." -- By Wolf Von Eckardt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.