In his recent book, “Dogs and Demons,” long-time Japan resident Alex Kerr passionately rips into his adopted country, excoriating it for, among other things, diverting huge amounts of money to constructing monstrous-and monstrously expensive-“monuments” that have no connection to the Japanese character and often serve no reasonable purpose at all except enriching insiders and proving a misguided civic boost to its host locality. After reading Kerr’s book and listening to his rants over dinner in Tokyo a few weeks ago, I’ve been looking at the country through his eyes and finding plenty of examples. When I visited the shiny year-old Winter Sports Museum in Sapporo last week-a spacious, opulent facility with terrific interactive simulations of ski-jumping and bobsled runs and totally skipable commemorations of the run-the-mill 1972 Winter Olympiad-I had little doubt that Kerr would howl at the fact that my son and I had almost the whole place to ourselves (not counting the dozens of people paid to maintain the joint).
The Mediatheque story has its similarities, but is a bit more complicated. It began around 1993 when the city of Sendai decided to replace one of its seven district libraries with a building that would house diverse functions like an art gallery, an audiovisual facility with a screening room and auditorium and an information center for the disabled. “Japan is very centralized around Tokyo, and Sendai people wanted their own intellectual resource,” says Yasuaki Onoda, a self-described “architectural programmer” based at Tokyo University who was involved in the project early on. “They wanted cutting-edge space that Tokyo didn’t have, something that would make the people of Sendai feel proud.”
The situation was reminiscent of Kurosawa’s movie “The Seven Samurai,” where a small town unaccustomed to warfare hires experienced fighters to defend them-and gets more than it bargains for. Like the townies in the movie, the Sendai officials were forced to recruit outsiders to provide what they could never produce internally-the cachet of a cutting-edge facility. Like Kurosawa’s townspeople, they had to pay a steep financial price-the Sendai Mediatheque cost 13 billion yen to construct (about $100 million). And just as the Kurosawa locals were unprepared for the ways of the warrior, the Sendai people were taken aback by the ways of the avant-garde designers and architects who took charge of the project.
Onoda proposed to “disorganize the conventional schema that consisted of four existing institutions.” He was part of the selection committee that in 1995 chose the architect after an elaborate public design competition. The winner was Toyo Ito, who wowed the intellectuals with a sketch that looked like seaweed was coursing through the building. Ito is the avatar of something called “blurred architecture,” and his building disposed of prosaic concepts like “rooms.” Not one of the seven floors would have the same color scheme, lighting scheme or ceiling height. Boundaries would be shifting, spaces fluid. The most distinctive feature of the building, though, were the series of columns-“trees made of metal mesh”-that ran from top to bottom. These had to be shelved after a structural engineer discovered, as Ito later wrote, “meshlike columns could exist only in the imagination.” But they were replaced by fantastic “tubes” which now hold staircases, elevators, and in some cases, nothing. “As the building underwent construction,” writes Ito, “I finally came to recognize the tubes for what they are: things, nothing more, nothing less.”
This kind of art talk plays well with the architectural cognoscenti, but was unnerving to the Sendai people, who were paying for the building and would have to figure out how to use it. Town meetings, fueled by a critical newspaper article, became heated. The architects grudgingly made some compromises, among them the agreement that the crucial library portion of the building would not be “blurred” into other functions. Meanwhile, the construction continued for years, finally culminating in its January 2001 opening.
I visited the building last week and would have to say there is much to arouse the ire of Alex Kerr. He would undoubtedly say that the cost is ludicrous for a facility that essentially remains a district library with some art galleries and performance spaces added. And he would be outraged at its lack of connection to the cultural heritage of the region. But I got a kick out the Mediatheque. It seemed like a fun place to hang out in. And in contrast to the Sapporo sports museum, I saw plenty of people there. Emiko Okuyama, the executive director, reports that 3,000 visitors a day come to the center, 4,000 on weekends. Most, however, are library visitors, and the most popular area is the second-floor periodicals room, where people sit and read magazines and sleep, just as they do in crummy old conventional buildings. But I have no problem with that-if you’re going to lounge around reading magazines in a public space, it’s nicer to do it in a public space that stretches your mind a bit.
My own criticism of the Mediatheque is that for a facility that professes to focus on cutting-edge information delivery, the digital offerings seem rather mundane. There are Ethernet connections and computer stations and video-viewing booths, but nothing that’s technologically jaw-dropping or innovative outside of the building itself. All the imagination seems to have been channeled into making an architectural statement. But then, the architectural statement was the reason for hiring the art-world samurai, and in a sense, the point of the Mediatheque itself: creating a walk-in conversation piece to win the attention and respect of outsiders. It seemed like a great idea back in 1993, before the Japan economic bubble popped. And even now, Sendai seems entranced with its shiny new object, which draws raves in architectural magazines and hosts programs like the upcoming forum on the history of videogames. But as its own architect now writes, “many people are no doubt wondering what its purpose is or how different it is from a conventional library or gallery.” Even Ito and his colleagues haven’t decided the answer to that one. While they sort it out, the city of Sendai will spend 1.4 billion yen a year to maintain its hip new landmark.
