The interval forms of decay

The living moment of spatial experience is projecting the past and future utopias as well as dystopias.

Spending working times of writing and reading in a studio this winter that is just near to Arata Isozaki’s building dated 1974, Public Library (Kitakyushu) awaken my inevitable interest to dwell deeper in the current and future heritage of Metabolism and other utopian ideas in architecture in our current time of anthropocene.

Following artist Emre Hüner’s preparation for his exhibition that consists of a constellation of multiple forms and materials of sculptures installed in the space of the gallery at CCA Kitakyushu brings together several layers of intertwined forms of subtle experiences of timeless architecture, settlements and dwellings. Kitakyushu city that also has the contemporary art museum building by Isozaki, is a former steel industry city with a past steel worker class society in Yahata area that was under threat of atomic bomb before Hiroshima city in 1944.

The capital and production of this city has transformed since the last century, and the infrastructure too. As a hometown of Nippon Steel Cooperation or Zenrin company and many others formed the city as an industrial spatial environment. Highways, tubes, industrial areas as urban trash zones, Space World, the worker class history and it traces in the neighborhoods… Kitakyushu is also currently re-promoted as an eco-model city against Japan’s disposal of radioactive Tsunami debris. The process of Anthropocene informs Hüner’s research of utopian forms that is questioning it as a process of decay of interval objects.

In his several visits to Japan, Hüner has integrated his spatial experience of few Japanese cities and his ongoing research on the miscellaneous ideas of form and design by architects of Metabolism, Cedric Price, Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi in the search of past and future forms of settlements and dwellings. Although it contains heterogeneous but parallel visions of their design; these architects from the 20th century unfold wide references of past and future imaginable habitats. However, the artist’s search of utopian/dystopian forms that is related mostly to 20th century avant-gardes architects and designers doesn’t aim to meet a “visionary” utopian world.

I assume, the most what Hüner gets influenced in this research is more the inter-relation between these thinkers: the parallel worlds, the interaction of mind-sets and conversation between Price and Isozaki since 1960s or Fuller and Isamu Noguchi in the 1930s (the Dymaxion Car Model), or Fuller’s floating city Triton City proposal for Tokyo Bay (1960) lead to a common imagination of future forms that we do relate in our everyday life and relation to bodily spatiality. Inspired by Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Future, Italo Calvino’s Memos for the Next Millenium, Kiyonori Kutake’s Marne City, Kisho Kurokawa’s Capsule Tower and Tower of the Sun by artist Taro Okamoto, Hüner has been developing for couple of years his sculptures for a future imaginative settlement.

Lets us reread through Hüner’s sculptures: in his text written in 1960, Isozaki describes his aim in comparison based on his interest of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace: “…Direction towards dissolving and breaking down existing architectural concepts”. [1] Although the implicit inspiration is the decay of objects of an imagined settlement or a dwelling, Hüner’s sculptures borrow the feeling of spatial thinking of dissolving architectural concept as models. In the interview when Rem Koolhaas asks about the word Metabolism to Isozaki, he answers about utopia: “…Time is linear and grows or progresses…it’s a linear progression from the beginning to become a utopia in the end. It’s a linear progression with no…” [2] Isozaki continues with his feeling in the 1945 that actually reflects very well in our current time of wars and ecological disasters: “…there was a sense of complete stillness, from which maybe another time or another history could start.” [3] The forms and objects last from the end and beginning of another histories.

In the exhibition at CCA Kitakyushu, the artist created a set of interrelational references that illuminate both the future post-apocalyptic forms of habitats and moments of architecture of decay. Icons as wall drawings appears with a spatial installation of models and sculptures from different materials. Keirin (racing wheels) founded in 1948 in Kitakyushu for gambling purposes; a sport of professional cycling race in a stadium with special uniforms. Thus, the figures on the walls drew like uniforms as icons that represent the abstraction of speed, gambling and life in Japan in an unknown time.

“The process of decay generates differential forms by limitropically subtracting from the rotten object.” [4] writes Reza Negarestani in defining the architecture and politics of decay that can be read through the constellation of objects and models that the artist created. Warfare, ecological disaster and technological collapse have deep impacts in our everyday life and designate our future spatial infrastructure. Ecological disasters are core reasons for governments to create policies of further demolishment of ecological landscape and inhabitants. This phase of anthropocene leads to co-production of governmental and other actors in order to control more the ecological landscape. Technological collapse appears in drone realities in where non-human pixel driven leads to catastrophes of demolishment of cities and habitats. When Isozaki compares his intention with Cedric Price, he acknowledges “My own interest run in to the Japanese concept of ma, “interval”, which makes no distinction between time or space. Thus, non-irreversible time sustains life in our thinking.” [5] The ambivalence of experiencing Hüner’s sculptures is also about questioning the fetishization of the forms and process of rotten lived models that invite us to focus and dwell more on the discourse of object centered ontology and timeless terrestrial experience as a human in relation to our current everyday life. Traces of the artist’s abstraction of Floating City by Fuller, poems of Matsuo Basho and Japanese Neolithical jomon pottery appear as a multitude of anachronistic forms.

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Until 27 March 2015
Emre Hüner. Floating Cabin Rider Capsule Reactor Cycle
CCA Kitakyushu Project Gallery

Notes:
1. Arata Isozaki, Erasing Architecture into the System, p. 25–47, in Re: CP Edt. by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Birkhauser Architecture, 1999.
2. p. 27, conv. between Arata Isozaki and Rem Koolhaas, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks…by Koolhass and Obrist, Edts Kayoko Ota, James Westcott, Taschen, 2011, Köln.
3. p. 27, conv. between Arata Isozaki and Rem Koolhaas, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks…by Koolhaas and Obrist, Edts Kayoko Ota, James Westcott, Taschen, 2011, Köln.
4. p. 386, Reza Negarestani, Undercover Softness: An Introduction to the Architecture and Politics of Decay, COLLAPSE VI: Geo/Philosophy (January 2010): 382 [379–430].
5. p. 46, Arata Isozaki, Erasing Architecture into the System, p. 25–47, in Re: CP , ed. by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Birkhauser Architecture, 1999.