Itsuko Hasegawa stands virtually alone among Japanese architects in her attempts to develop a critical practice. From her earliest work, Hasegawa addressed the manner in which public buildings are designed and programmed, eschewing bureaucratic directives in favor of a public process. As she matured, other themes also emerged, especially a concern for the environment and for the disenfranchised: women, children, the elderly, the disabled, and the homeless. Although some of these issues remain incompletely realized in her work, their introduction into professional discourse in Japan is significant.
Ironically, Hasegawa was educated by one of the nation's leading formalists, Kazuo Shinohara. In 1969, she entered his graduate studio at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and she remained with him as his assistant until 1978. Many of Japan's critics note today that their understanding of the master prevented them from initially understanding Hasegawa's approach.
Furthermore, Hasegawa often used building materials as a tool to achieve her agenda, drawing attention to the materials rather than their purpose. This is most apparent in her debut project, the widely acclaimed Shonandai Culture Center, won by competition in 1986 and built just outside Tokyo. Hasegawa's earlier projects were almost exclusively residential, and she brought to Shonandai the same concern for client input and attention to detail. The 14,315-square-meter complex (which includes a children's museum) remains highly accessible through the use of tiles embedded with animals' footprints, constellations of mirrored fragments implanted in walls, and marbles scattered across punched-metal ceilings.
Punched metal was also significant in framing her initial reputation. She first used it in the House at Kuwahara (1980), designed for a metals supplier, and the commodity quickly became ubiquitous in the arsenal of Tokyo's trendiest designers. She followed this with explorations of various transparent and translucent surfaces in the late 1980s, anticipating trends that would emerge internationally ten years later by stretching fabric into bulbous shapes, projecting light onto frosted glass, layering polycarbonate skins, and choreographing reflected light. Hasegawa's position as an iconoclast may be rooted in difference. She was one of only a handful of women architects in Japan and stood virtually alone in her international acclaim and her alliance with the small cadre of architects shaping the profession. Although she exploited this status, using her position as a bully pulpit, a heavy schedule of lecturing and teaching abroad has also prevented her from engaging fully with the opportunities of Japan's construction process. As a result, her buildings lack the refinement and attention to detail found in much of the work from Japan. Although it may be that Hasegawa felt liberated by the deliberately rough detailing found in Shinohara's architecture from the late 1980s, her own approach is less clearly committed to one position or the other, having areas of refinement and delicacy juxtaposed with roughly executed components.
Hasegawa calls the materials and form of architecture "hardware" and feels that this side has been overemphasized to the detriment of architectural "software." In particular, her efforts lie in developing a richly rendered set of sensory experiences, apprehended by moving along multiple pathways. In publications, her descriptions often attempt to deliver something that photography cannot, calling attention to rising tides and flickering light or to the sound of the wind, the cool touch of water, and the emergence of a view along a rising path.
For Hasegawa, architecture essentially acts as a constructed form of landscape or, in her words, "a new nature." With Toyo Ito's red cube jarring cityscape as a form of nature, to be celebrated. She often refers to her buildings as hills, and in her most recent large-scale work, the Niigata City Performing Arts Center (1998), she established the roof as a city park. At a smaller scale, Hasegawa introduces the texture of landscape in her work by mixing soil into mortar finishes or setting stones and shells in the surfaces of walkways and pools.
This is not done arbitrarily. Hasegawa strives to awaken what she sees as the latent memories of nature possessed by each site, embracing accidental or dormant qualities over rational exposition. Botond Bognar quotes Hasegawa as saying that she wants to "accept those things that had been rejected by the spirit of rationalism—the translucent world of emotions and the supple and comfortable space woven by nature—and to create a landscape filled with a new form of nature where devices enable one to hear the strange music of the universe" (Bognar, 157). This gives her work an instinctual character that is particularly uncommon in public works, the bulk of her output.
Since completing the Shonandai Culture Center in 1990, Hasegawa's office also produced the Sumida Culture Factory (1994), the Oshima Machi Picture Book Museum in Imizu (1994), the Museum of Fruit (1995) in Yamanashi, the Himi Seaside Botanical Garden (1996), and the previously mentioned Niigata City Performing Arts Center—extraordinary output for her tiny office. Hasegawa has also taken on several underfunded typologies, designing public housing—the Takuma Housing Project (1992), the Namekawa Housing Project (1998), and Imai Newtown Housing (1998)—and two small, rural elementary schools—Busshouji Elementary (1994) and Kaiho Elementary (1996).
In her most recent discussions, it is clear that Hasegawa feels frustrated in her attempts to reshape the character of Japan's public architecture. In particular, she has begun to question the scale and underutilization of museums, performing arts centers, and other large-scale facilities intended by government authorities as chic urban outposts, attempts to staunch population losses from small communities to the more dynamic Tokyo. Hasegawa has come to believe that these structures are rarely embraced by the local community despite her best efforts to reshape the buildings' programming. Instead, she has begun to call for integrated efforts drawn from local traditions and the rhythm of the community. If she is able to cajole local governments into considering this approach, she will have considerable effect on the life and texture of Japan's smaller cities.
Dana BUNTROCK
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
