An open letter
by Stefanos Polyzoides

Dear Caribbean Colleagues,
I thought you may want to delete the words Japan and Japanese from this letter and insert the words that apply to your own geo/ cultural sphere.
The time for local action is now!
Stefanos Polyzoides

Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles
Introduction to the First Japanese Edition
By Elizabeth Moule & Stefanos Polyzoides
15 March 1996

An open letter to our Japanese colleagues:

The blurring of the boundaries between architecture and urbanism has been a source of profound cultural confusion in recent times. Modern city planning has been defined and practiced as the uncritical aggregation of uncoordinated, massive, public and private architectural projects at the scale of the city as a whole. The historical evolution of the difference between the two disciplines has been largely ignored.

The source of this calamity can be found in the ideas presented in the two most prominent modern urbanist written works of LeCorbusier: Urbanisme (1929) and La Ville Radieuse (1935); and in their codification and popularization through the pre-WW2 congresses of CIAM. Since 1945, these texts have provided the guiding principles for architectural & urbanist education and professional practice world-wide.

During the second half of this century, the cities and countryside of Japan have been ravaged by architects and urbanists to an extent unmatched by war. The three central premises of modern urbanism- concentration and separation of uses, separation of cars from public open space and organization of buildings according to universal types and excessive dimensions, have been in direct and irreversible conflict with the historic urbanist patrimony of your culture. Lacking the resources, will and popular support to demolish and rebuild Japanese cities from scratch you, like the rest of us, have resorted to building fragments of the great failed modern experiment and thrusting them violently into the soft and highly cultivated texture of your towns and nature.

The result has been the dilution of the visual character, the environmental quality and the unique millennial living culture of Japan. Because this process is also unfolding throughout the world, the places where you now live are being assimilated and homogenized to the point that they are indistinguishable from others elsewhere. Tokyo looks today more like Milan, Mexico City or New York, or less kindly, more like nowhere in particular.

There is no greater shock to the visitor to your great country than the juxtaposition of two contrasting experiences: That of people preserving and enjoying the refined, traditional form of Japanese objects, rituals and places at a scale proximate and intimate; and the total dissolution of this ancient order, beyond the scale of the human body and the boundaries of the single room into a violent, chaotic urban surroundings.

Is it the destiny of all civilization to be reduced to such a barbarous level of lowest common denominator urban form, the same for every place in the world? And if not, what is there to be done about it?

For the last seventy years, the great modern urbanist affliction has been a premeditated course of thought and action. It can, therefore, be reversed by equally resolute thought and action. In contrast to this exhausted way of urbanist thinking, we call the emerging one The New Urbanism. This book takes a very small step towards the enormous task of posing an alternative model to the Modern Urbanism of clearance and sprawl. One of its central premises is the clarification of the relationship between Architecture and Urbanism:

Urbanism is the design of an extensive hierarchy of voids and their landscape, a realm of streets, squares and parks that enable public life. The figure of these voids and their overlap with nature is the identity, the signature of human settlements.

Architecture is the design of individual building and garden projects that make the realm of the voids visible, memorable and ultimately, useful. Crucial to the making of any city is the clear distinction of such projects by scale and character. Firstly, the definition of buildings and landscape that build an urban collective form, a fabric. And secondly, civic and community buildings and gardens, physically distinguishable by their institutional purpose.

Architecture and Urbanism are bound into one another through the kinds of open space, buildings and landscape, the constituent parts that they hold in common. These are types of form as opposed to particular designs. Cities depend on the repetition of these types for the heterogeneity, the redundancy and the complexity of their structure. Specific architectural projects also depend on them for the deep continuity of their formal rules, and therefore the meaning, that underlay the seeming uniqueness of their style.

The study of typology promotes an understanding of the culture of the historic city and of nature as the essential subject matter of Architecture and Urbanism. It enables the careful categorization and analysis of formal precedents and their literal acceptance, their studied transformation or their rejection in the design of new types for a given problem. In all instances, a typological design orientation is historical but not historicist.

Awareness of regional precedents is a fundamental point of departure for all design in the spirit of the New Urbanism. Precedents, diverse as they are by region and by culture, need to be discovered, assessed and reused as necessary, in order to establish through new design the kind of cultural continuity that can create again cities of distinction and uniqueness.

Asian cultures are changing at a frightening pace, in the interest of rapid economic development on the western model of un sustainability. While there is still historic city fabric left to study, there is now a window of opportunity to examine and to value the places and objects that you dream about when you imagine Japan as a unique culture, and to use them as significant points of departure for further design.

Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles offers a modest example on how to go about this process: how to identify a significant historic building type, how to study its underlying rules and how to evaluate its significance as a source of fresh, new architectural and urbanist ideas.

Ultimately, the lessons of this book are of deep importance to Japan. Its message is not to build superficial American courtyard housing in Japan, nor to get involved in uncritical stylistic transferences. Instead, it is an urgent, desperate call to stop the devastation of Japanese cities and the ravaging of your countryside. It is a plea to build an architectural culture of renewal based on the unique social, physical and environmental endowment of your nation; It is a method for identifying and interpreting the essential typological and morphological precedents of your great historic cities and towns, whether they exist in the eye or in the memory of the architect and the public.

The Japanese nation, at this crucial time, does not need to behave, to look like, or to follow anymore the intellectual leads of the West in order to remain a vital and important culture. The easiest way to distinguish yourselves in the world is to categorically reject the model of corporate, rapacious growth that building by building has defiled the places where you live and work. You must espouse instead, a model of growth that is based
on respect for your history and your traditions, ancient and modern. And to trust your abilities to design within them the regeneration of a significant Japanese culture of place.

Stefanos Polyzoides
Moule & Polyzoides
Architects and Urbanists
523 West 6th Street Suite 1201
Los Angeles, CA 90014
213.624.3381 tel
213.624.6140 fax
E-Mail to:stefanos@bcf.usc.edu

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Mail to: c.jorge@codetel.net.do (Carlos Jorge)