ANTI-OBJECT
Substituting: ELECTRONIC Memorial Space, Takasaki, Gumma, 1997–98 A certain corporation asked me to design a memorial to commemorate some 800 people who had worked for them during their 100-year history. Frankly, the project did not interest me much in the beginning. The only apparent solution was to design an object made of stone. I could not even be bothered to sketch ideas on paper. A memorial is an extension of the tomb, one of the two extreme forms of architecture. Its purpose is to endure, to intervene between subject and time. At the other extreme, the role of a building is to intervene between subject and space, that is, to shelter. Architecture alternates between these two extremes. Ordinarily, if we want to make something that will endure, we turn to a shape of cohesive force, believing it to be the only form that will impress itself on people’s memories. The word monument is derived from the Latin for ‘remind’. The function of a monument is also to last through time; thus it aspires to be a powerful, conspicuous object. Does this mean that objects are the only form to last through time? I was not so sure. Modern art was concerned with time. The cubists, for example, attempted to depict multiple moments in time on one canvas. Modernist architects were also interested for a while in manipulating and designing time. (Giedion’s seminal work on modern architecture, after all, was entitled Space, Time, and Architecture.) However, their attention ultimately shifted to the problem of universal space, which they defined as a space with movable partitions that allowed for adaptation to any change in use. Modernists saw this as a means of
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Substituting
dealing with multiple moments in time. It was not; it merely offered a possibility to alter space. The typical modernist method was to substitute space for time, disregarding all phenomena related to time, such as memory. That was why I thought of making memory and time the central issues in this project. But would it be possible to intervene in time without using an object? I gradually came to feel that the project had the potential to be an extremely interesting experiment. Two things provided me with useful hints. One was the Vietnam Veterans’ Maya Lin, Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. This Veterans’ Memorial, is extremely reserved by the standards Washington, DC, 1982 of the US capital, especially compared to the nearby Lincoln Memorial. It has an extremely low profile: nothing projects above the ground. The lawn dips down and the memorial serves as a retaining wall. The names of some 60,000 American soldiers who died in the war are all carved into the black granite that covers the wall. There are no objects here. Nevertheless, we are able to remember; we are able to capture time. Bruno Taut provided the second pointer, with his essay, ‘Honouring the War Dead and Wounded’,1 published in 1915. At this sensitive time just after the start of the Great War, architects and designers had to decide what stance to take towards war and death. Taut’s essay was sharply critical of monuments, arguing that they effectively denied the purity of the very ideals they were intended to commemorate. The alternative he proposed was quite eccentric: the remains of those who had died in war were to be transferred to a garden. There, amidst fountains, waterfalls and glass structures, plants would be nurtured by soil enriched by the remains, and a new spiritual garden would grow. According to Taut, what was needed was not a symbol of the dead but a place to remember the dead.2 Even though I had been asked to design a memorial, my first recommendation was that nothing monumental be built. I proposed creating a garden instead, just as Taut
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