Imagined Katsura: Kenzo Tange and the photographic mediation of the debate on tradition

Abstract

Photography atomizes, it brings distant things closer and it estranges all familiar things; changing their uses and transforming their meanings. By using this simple mechanism, and by recovering some of the techniques explored by New Vision, modern Japanese architecture after Second World War manage to rebuild its links with memory and tradition. During the second half of 1950s decade, and through procedures close to those of the cinematic montage, Kenzo Tange and Yasuhiro Ishimoto crop, disassemble and recompose Katsura Imperial Villa. Thus, the building appears to us light, fuzzy and ever-changing, oscillating ambiguously between abstraction and concreteness, and showing a mode of dense and stratified transparency that, even today, we recognize again in certain contemporary Japanese architecture. Katsura is a fundamental referent for twentieth century Japanese architecture; but we might wonder: Are we speaking about that physical Katsura, built in wood and paper in Kyoto at the beginning of seventeenth century? Or perhaps we speaking about a different Katsura: a virtual one imagined by Tange and Ishimoto at mid twentieth century, still circulating by the same channels where images, books and magazines circulate today.