Design and Visual Culture From the Bauhaus to Contemporary Art by Edit Tóth

Author:Edit Tóth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

5“Taking Apart” the Sukiya

The Yamawakis’ Postwar Tokyo Homes

Iwao Yamawaki, an accomplished architect, photographer, and educator, and Michiko Yamawaki, an acknowledged textile and interior designer, popularized Bauhaus ideas in Japan through their works, teaching, publications, and exhibition designs.1 After completing his architectural degree in Japan at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, Iwao Yamawaki studied photography and architecture at the Bauhaus in Germany between 1930 and 1932—at that time under the direction of Mies van der Rohe—while his wife, Michiko Yamawaki, specialized in weaving. Later, as an educator Iwao Yamawaki applied the Bauhaus principles of uniting art and technology and advocated hands-on experimentation with modern materials and photographic techniques.2 A photograph of Yamawaki’s own Bauhaus-style living room (c. 1935, Figure 5.2) was included in the exhibition catalog accompanying the 1938 Bauhaus show at MoMA in New York, organized by Walter and Ise Gropius and Herbert Bayer, to demonstrate the international scope of the institution, furthering the “International Style” movement.3 Yamawaki’s role in organizing the exhibition “Gropius and the Bauhaus” in 1954 at the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, his Japanese Pavilion designed for the 1951 Constructa Siedlung in Hanover, Germany, and written reminiscences—for instance naming Gropius as his most important influence—further support his continued endorsement of Bauhaus practices.4 One might be surprised, then, to encounter in the photographic book Japanese Houses Today (1958) co-edited by Yamawaki, a color reproduction of a Japanese style-living room (Figure 5.1), designed with Michiko, from a house in Roppongi, Tokyo, which displays a more “traditional” and decorative approach.5 The seeming gulf between the two interiors reminds one of the changed historical context and cultural climate that favored regionalism in architecture. Yet aspects of the prewar Bauhaus practice, including interest in inter-media references, abstraction, and optical deconstruction, remain. Why would he want to call attention to a window alcove with a still (at the time) expensive color photograph, one of the very few such images in the entire photographic book, which was composed of more than three hundred photographs? In this chapter, it will be argued that Yamawaki’s domestic interiors appearing in Japanese Houses Today intertwine Eastern and Western practices, traditional and modern values to address the changing notions of self, place, and emptiness in postwar Japan by installing past temporalities within modernism relating to materials, images, spaces, and modes of encounter, issues that functionalism could not properly articulate. His featured interiors stand out in the book with their careful photographic imaging and finely tuned optical effects applied to surfaces and architectural room design. They help reinvent traditional sukiya architecture as a type of modernism, an endeavor begun in the prewar era, to test its potential for conditioning the self—including the female self—through a continued presence of Zen-inspired practices.

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