HYPOSPACE
JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE


TOKYU-LINE, SHIBUYA STATION

This segmented ellipsoid that is explained by Ando as a “hypogenous spaceship buried underground” is of an iconic shape that has been presented to us as new to Japanese architecture after WW2. A shape that has entered the psyche of Japan as the rebirth of the rising sun in a nuclear blast. It is placed here as the setting for the daily commute, a time when people are moving through space with the unfocused focus that is attained while doing something that is done every day. Ando is encouraging these commuters to be mindful, as if this were a walking meditation and the egg, a visual and spatial koan. This is a cyclical process that is more important than any outcome. It is a way of contemplating the world without judgement or what Western rationalism would call synthesis. It is Kurokawa’s symbiosis and Isozaki’s polysemy. This idea is ubiquitous in Japanese artistic tradition: Sen no Rikyu’s wabi, the intentionally flattened presentation of the landscapes in the stroll garden at Katsura, the empty site along side the shrine at Ise. The egg was placed here, not to focus on its form or enigmatic construction, but as a catalyst for reflection upon the modern existence of the Japanese. Is it the bizarre relationship between space and time in modern transit? Or, is it the lives of the Japanese viewed through the specter of a moment frozen in time that has defined the course of their nation; a technology of destruction embraced by its victim as an energy source to fuel progress; the reliance on which has recently caused yet another nuclear disaster? Again, the answer is not important, it is the process of reflection that is of value. The expression of tradition in modern Japanese architecture is constantly shad- owed by the rethinking of itself and is itself this rethinking. As the teahouse and its ceremony was meant as a form of meditation for the common people, Ando has offered this station to Tokyo, a democratization of contemplative space in the least likely of places.

HISTORY OF JAPANESE
+ THE ARCHITECTURE
SHOJI SLIDES

SHIBUYA STATION
EGG SLICES

 

ABSTRACT MODEL

HYPOSPACE