Graham Morrison recalls a talk by Kisho Kurokawa that resonates in the work of Allies & Morrison
I consider myself fortunate to have been a Cambridge architecture student in the early 1970s under the watchful professorial eye of Leslie Martin. We may have taken for granted the seemingly endless queue of prominent architects willing to subject themselves to the naive scrutiny of such young idealists barely out of school, but those were the moments that would have a profound influence on open minds that were hungry for knowledge.
One such architect was Kisho Kurokawa. Introduced as a ‘Metabolist’ and already with a notable body of built work, he was simultaneously the subject of both suspicion and admiration as he proceeded to give us the longest lecture of our architectural education. The four-hour address was given in two seemingly unconnected halves.
The second part was dominated by an array of dramatic slides of Kurokawa’s undeniably powerful and contemporary architectural work. But it was the first part, his response to the centuries of preceding Japanese culture, which captured my interest and to which I still refer.
“As the calligrapher is placing the bold and heavy brushstroke on the page, he is thinking less of the figure being formed than the white space that is contained”
He talked of pottery and tea ceremonies, of paper screens and kimonos, and of buildings and gardens. He talked of that moment just before the ordinary becomes extraordinary and he talked of the interdependency of things. But perhaps most significantly for me, he talked of the space between things; the notion of ‘Ma’ and the idea of interval and how this finds shape in music and calligraphy. He talked of the strength of the relationship between a space and an event.
It was his description of the calligrapher that has particularly stuck with me. I had always loved Japanese calligraphy, those brushes, those dense inks and that unerring confidence in placing such a bold figure on paper or cloth. I had watched every Akira Kurosawa movie and always looked forward to such scenes. I loved the confident beauty that calligraphers extracted from their art and, as Kurokawa talked about calligraphy, I thought he was telling me what I already knew.
But then he said something I didn’t expect. He said that as the calligrapher is placing the bold and heavy brushstroke on the page, he is thinking less of the figure being formed than the white space that is contained. He was describing a very much more complex visual process than I could ever have imagined. This was something so completely balanced. He was suggesting that the existence of one thing was not just the consequence of another, but that the value of an object or a gesture was given meaning and beauty by the very space it created.
This resonated with what I had learned in drawing classes at school. My art teacher, Gordon Taylor, taught us the difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘recognising’. Recognising is what you do when your reaction to taking a photograph is to then look away. Seeing, he would tell us, is drawing and he taught us to draw not just the object we were recording but also the shapes of all the spaces in between. He told us you couldn’t have one without the other. Such an enjoyable and complete ambiguity was surely just what Kisho Kurokawa’s calligrapher must have felt.
The architectural lessons may not be universal but they are obvious. First, the object or building should be beautiful in itself. Second, the space a new building makes should be rewarding. And third, the intended presence of the two together should make the city a better place than it would have been without them. And I remember, when our restoration of the Royal Festival Hall won the Mayor’s inaugural award for London’s best new public space, I reflected on that lecture all those years before by Mr Kurokawa.
