THE FUTURE LAY IN RUINS

This is one of my favourite images of Arata Isozaki. This collage was done 22 years after Hiroshima was bombed. The megastructures of Isozaki are superposed to a landscape of the devastated Hiroshima.  Everything are ruins, his futuristic constructions are also falling apart.  The future is reduced to ruins. Isozaki has constantly been working on the idea of “ruins”. In his words, "They are dead architecture. Their total image has been lost. The remaining fragments require the operation of the imagination if they are to be restored." Now, let’s look at this image more attentively.

In 1960, the future of Japan was rosy.  Nothing was more important than developing the plans for the future of the city. Japan was utopia. The metabolists dreamed more than ever that architecture could change society. But Isozaki didn’t feel that way. For him, ruins were the inevitable fate of all cities. Hiroshima was still burning in front of his eyes; he could never escape it. “I could not get away from the past when I saw cities, great complex urban structures destroyed in an instant, transformed into mountains of rubble and trash.” For him, future lay in ruins.

With this image Isozaki was deeply critizing utopia. Utopia was misunderstood because it only relied in the absolute time. Usually facts of the past are arranged along a single axis, but we can run our imagination along the line of the past also. Japanese utopia forgot the imaginative past; focused only in the future, it forgot that past has the power to stimulate fantasies, visions, reveries…”Ruins lie in the future of our city, and the future city itself will lie in ruins”. The future formed amidst the ruins.

Architects we should never forget temporality as a pre-condition. I try to keep in my mind that, at the very end, we are designing ruins. Time has always fascinated me. I started this term posting John Soane’s work in ruins and I wanted to end this term with Arata Isozaki. In my thesis, I will get into depth into the issues of time and memory. I will keep you posted!