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City Demolition Industry, lnc. Arata lsozaki, 1962

You must not laugh at this strange business. The company is reall in the very center of Tokyo, yes, floating in the air, it is trying to sneak into the cracks of your life – the life you spend in the megalopolis.

I first learned of the existence of this company when I looked at the name printed on the visiting card of my friend S. He was once a professional killer rather famous in the field, but he quit that job to become a founder of the City Demolition lndustry, lnc. I never knew why he chose murder for a profession, but he.always said he did so because it was the quickest way to make money, and I did not try to delve further into it. I regretted that he should present me with his new card, slowly, shrugging his shoulders, iust as I was about to consult him about an important matter I had particularly at heart. This is about annihilating all the editors of magazines in our country who are too timid to challenge the status quo in city planning and architecture. I asked him if things were going better. My friend S. then urged me to join his Company, the name of which sounded to me more like a secret society than that of company.

 There was a serious cause for his resignation from his job as a killer- a monster had emerged that kept hurting his professional pride day and night! He is a man of temperament, as any artist or artisan might be. Once he accepted an order to kill someone, he never spared any effort in the process of his work, whether that person was only a small boss with a dozen followers or a big figure in power such as a cabinet minister. The careful, long-term planning and scheming, the beauty of a murder well done, as well as the perfect disposal of the body! lt was just like an artist engaged in designing. Witholt the snobbery of Frank Lloyd Wright or the bluff oÍ Le Corbusier, he could produce a complicated vision in which, while extinction was coupled with existence, the concept of emptiness was caught in the very midst of action. He might have been one of the very, very few who could actually accomplish this. Then all of a sudden he changed his job.

 Naturally, I was very curious to know why. He said he had been utterly disappointed at the relatively insignificant situation into which his profession had been driven, and so, Íeeling the bitterness of hurt pride, he wished to break with it and to start a new one. But what was the direct motive? ln answer to my question he unfolded the newspaper at his side. “Yesterday’s Traffic Accidents– 5 Killed, 89 lnjured.” This meant that modern civilization had replaced the private enterprise of killing. The steady increase of such unintentional murders as traffic accidents, and moreover the low price attached to an individual life, usually less than one million yen, gradually nullified  his profession as a killer, lowered his wages, his sense of self-esteem. According mechanism called the city, which was the inevitable product and the physical supporter of modern civilization. The city therefore, was the killer of all killers and, worse still, being anonymous, it was a purious enterprise to which no responsabilities were attached: And he felt that in  order to create an age in which the killing profession would again be an art, and in which this human act could be performed with pleasure, ‘there was nothing more urgent than to destroy these inhuman cities. The aim of his company, therefore, was to destroy cities by all possible means. Tokyo, for him, especially easy to undermine. lt was like a building whose foundations had decayed, walls collapsing and water pipes getting thinner, structures barely standing, braced by numerous struts and supported by a jungle of props and buttresses, patches and  stains from the leaks in the roof. lts original elegance had vanished. lmagine such a deserted house – decorated gaudily on the surface, it goes on killing people goes on emitting a vigorous energy. A gigantic mon ster on the brink of extinction; a pig roasted whole, the ultimate evil of unintentional, inevitable mass massacre. … He said that such a city must be destroyed as soon as possible.

 This city makes people gradually forget the seriousness of death. Disappointed or rather infuriated by the depression of his own profession, my friend S., who decided to destroy the cities, may be an old-fashioned humanist. An admirer of artistic and humanistic murder, S. made up his mind to challenge the megalopolitan city.

 It seemed strange to me that the prospectus printed for the establishment of his company, which he gave to me to read, showed only the conceptual aim of destruction and the methods and the organization of the execution. Well, S. is a poet, and so it may be that he is proud that only poets can understand his true intention. Now, if one is of the opinion that only methods are of significance nowadays and that each individual can prove his identity only when he risks his life in executing these prescriptions, it might be said that the aim and the prospect are only ghost images and that the real image is present in the methods. A proíessional killer, in this sense does not display interest in anything other than method. More precisely, all that counts for him is the act of killing, because he must discount all other considerations.

Prospectus of the Establishment of the City Demolition lndustry, Inc. and the Content of lts Business

 Our company aims at the compiete destruction of large cities which have been repeatedly engaged in vicious mass murder, and at the construction of a civilization in which elegant, pleasant and humanistic murder can be carried out easily. We shall be engaged in any action necessary for achieving these aims.

We pratice our business as follows:

 1. Physical Destruction

 We shall destroy buildings, roads and other city facilities, using all possible means including human power, dynamite, alomic and hydrogen bombs.

 2. Functional Destruction

 The aggravation of traffic confusion through the systematic abolition of traffic signals, etc.; the encouragement of illegal construction; the dropping of poison into water reservoirs; the disturbance of communication networks; the total abolition of the house number system; the immediate and complete enforcement of all legal city planning provisions.

 3. Destruction of lmages

 The encouragement of proposals for Utopia city planning in the future; the enforcement of city improvement and a solution to the housing shortage by the mass-construction of public corporation-style residencies; the elimination of all calamities in the cities including traffic accidents.

Our company will energetically carry out the kinds of destruction stated above and will constantly endeavor to introduce new plans. Readers may laugh at the determination of my friend S. as expressed in the above prospectus. You are all well accustomed to this city, intoxicated with its familiar smiles. You go on producing beautiful buildings one after another. You have nothing to do with my friend S.‘s heroic resolve. He says that he does not feel any poetic sentiment before your beautiful accomplishments. He intends to continue the strange business of his company. He has nothing to do with you-nothing at all.

Not because I happen to be engaged in urban design but because S. is my friend I was finally persuaded to analyze and discuss the prospectus of his company. While discussing various aspects of the problem, his opinion and mine got so mingled together that we became unable to tell whose was whose. However, we finally reached certain conclusions. ls it really possible to carry out the physical destruction of modern cities?

To answer this question, it is enough to remember Tokyo or Hiroshima of seventeen years ago. The scene there was more than ruins. lt was next to nothing. Although Hiroshima at that time was sentenced to death and was expected to remain uninhabitable for the next seventy years, we have to concede that Hiroshima has come to possess a body even more substantial than it had before the war. No more Hiroshima! Resurrection like a phoenix! All right, at that time nobody dared to propose the destruction of cities. Nobody will at present, either. A city with physicai substance–perhaps it has never existed on earth.

Aren’t cities merely abstract ideas? Nothing but ghost images which have been built up by citizens through mutual agreement for their practical purposes? And, so far as such a mirage has been transmitted, only the process of transmission exists as the substance of the city. The force that can eliminate this transmission is not the destruction of cities, but the eclipse of a civilization.

lf you do not believe this, burn, your own house and dig up your land. You will not forget the scene, and somebody will probably make a record of it. Thus, you will still be possessed of some fragments of your house unless oblivion, death and the total eclipse of civilization wipe out everything. But I am not trying to justify nuclear war, which seems to contain the ability to annihilate both the substance and idea simultaneously. Certainly this will cause extinction.

My friend S.’s image of the mechanism of city may be too simple. Because it might be said that the city is maintained by a complicated feedback mechanism which its citizens have built up in order to protect themselves. This feedback is exquisitely intricate and so the functional destruction, as mentioned in Article 2 of the Prospectus, will be able to be immediately repaired.

 However, the immediate and complete execution of today’s city planning as drawn and legally authorized–if it were executed just as specified in the articles and maps-would bring about a drastic change. Such city planning has always ended in empty theory and that is why cities have been kept alive. But if any city planning would be put into practice just as it is blueprinted, the mayor would lose his job and the city assembly would be thrown into confusion. I had better say that city authorities have opposed city planning not because it is revolulionary, but because it is unrealistic and old-fashioned. lf you don’t believe me, put city plahning into practice, and you will find it an excellent means for throwing the city into turmoil and for stultifying its energy. My friend S.’s opinion seems to be a little matter-of-fact, for in Japan those who have devised the legal city plans have not dreamt even for a moment that their plans will be actually put into practice.

That is why they have legalized plans in a carefree manner. According to my friend S. the implementation of city plans would inevitably bring cities to destruction. He says, with a cynical smile, that as soon as I draw up a plan I should put it into practice. lt is inexcusable, he argues, for the professional to only make utopian plans. On the other hand the plan of his city demolition industry, if he executes it too hastily, will bring prosperity rather than destruction and, against his will, the circumstances that would satisfy his artistic aspirations will not be brought forth. However, when I think of the hollow sound of the slogans for building, renewing and improving cities — in reaiity the political propping-up of the metropolis — l come to think in terms of destruction as the only reality.

Since S. is not a city planner nor an architect but a killer, he can be active about the cities, and can have concrete ideas because he can deal with the abstraction and unreality in his mind. On the other hand, I am connected, in my profession, with the product of reality, and so while I make concrete proposals, concrete countermeasures, and improvements on them, I am made to feel ever more keenly the impossibility of putting my proposals into practice. My friend S. says that that is all the more reason for him to go ahead with his businqss and that in so doing, he will again have some connection with cities and will feel the impracticality of concrete plans. As for myself, l could continue to draw an unrealistic veil over my concrete prpposals as a staff member of his company.

Despite all these exchanges our discussions broke up, He called me a Stalinist coward and I called him an inexperlenced Trotskyite. Thus, pasting the labels of the long past on each other, we both felt some satisfaction.

 P.S. His name is SIN and mine is ARATA as it is written on the first page of this article. lt is however, a sheer coincidence that SIN is a Chinese phonetic reading of the character of my name, while ARATA is the Japanese reading. I don’t know if my friend’s business will ever prosper.

 Note: I wrote this story in 1962 when Tokyo was on the first wave of rapid economic growth, blending the reality and dream (fantasy( that I then saw.

 - Arata Isozaki.

(Translated by Richard Gage)

Filed under: Architecture, Thoughts by csxlab on Thursday, May 3, 2012
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They were both critically acclaimed writers who were ahead of their time, creating imaginative visions of the future in their novels. But an enlightening letter sent by Aldous Huxley to his fellow author George Orwell more than 60 years ago reveals that the two men had very different ideas of how the world would change. Huxley’s 1949 letter – the latest addition to a website that collects fascinating missives from the past – praises Orwell for the novel 1984, which offers a terrifying portrayal of a future totalitarian society.

But the late California-based author – who had coincidentally taught Orwell more than three decades earlier – went on to focus on the differences between Orwell’s vision and that revealed in his own masterpiece. His novel Brave New World, published 17 years before Orwell’s, had foreseen a society characterised by medicated contentment, a widely accepted, eugenics-supported caste system, and a government-enforced obsession with consumerism. But Orwell’s novel presented a nightmarish vision and gave birth to the phrases ‘Big Brother’, ‘thought crime’ and ‘double think’, all now commonly used to describe increasing state control. The book was later made into a film starring John Hurt, Richard Burton and Suzanna Hamilton.

In the letter Huxley began by echoing the positive reviews for 1984, telling Orwell ‘how fine and how profoundly important the book is’. Going on to focus on the differences between their predictions, however, Huxley wrote: ‘The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.

‘Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful.‘My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.’ The letter was written at Huxley’s California home in October 1949, a few months after the release of Orwell’s book.

It has been added to the website Letters of Note, which gathers and posts fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. The relationship between the two authors began in 1917, while Huxley was a tutor at Eton and Orwell was a pupil. Huxley taught French. Huxley’s other students at Eton included the writer and scholar, Harold Acton.

Full letter written by Mr Aldous Huxley to George Orwell:

Wrightwood. California.
21 October, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book.

It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is.

May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution?

The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf.

The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.

Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful.

My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers
and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government.

Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations.

Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism.

This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years.

But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.

The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.

Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sincerely,

Aldous Huxley

Article by Rob King, at the Dailymail.co.uk. click here for the original article.

Filed under: Uncategorized by csxlab on Monday, March 19, 2012
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THE BONSAI OF ARCHITECTURE

Book presentation and exhibition

@photo: Francisco c.p. Vasconcelos

Modelling cards in miniature
In the presence of the Japanese architect Naoki Terada the Cultural Embassy of Lloyd Hotel presents the exhibition 1/100 x 100, with miniature scenes of daily live on a small scale. These are rooted in architectural modelling where they were introduced by this Japanese architect and designer. Architectural journalist Cathelijne Nuijsink has followed the work of Terada for years and published about it. At the opening of the exhibition the launch of her book ‘How to Make a Japanese House?’ takes place. The publication gives the lowdown on the freestanding house in Japan, also examples of the refined small scale.

Architectural models of daily life
For architects it is a side-issue: the mock-up of people, trees, dogs and street furniture they use in their scale models. Earlier, these accessories were made by hand for each commission. In 2009 the Japanese architect and designer Naoki Terada introduced an industrially produced version of the scale models. The miniature figures are produced on a card. They are cut-out, folded into shape and put down. Terada’s ‘modelling cards’ became a quick hit, not so much with the architects but as a design gadget with the public.

The 1/100 Architectural Model Kit is produced by the TERADA MOKEI in Tokyo.
By now a range of kits is available, like Zoo, New York, Tokyo Office, and Tokyo Train.
In the Netherlands the first sets are available at OPTIONS!, the new design store at Damrak 49.
OPTIONS! has opened recently together with Hotel The Exchange and daily restaurant Stock, a new initiative by the founders of Lloyd Hotel & Cultural Embassy.
Especially for OPTIONS! Naoki Terada will design an Amsterdam street scene.

Naoki Terada
The architect and designer Naoki Terada lives and works in Tokyo. He studied at the Meiji University Tokyo and the Architectural Association’s School of Architecture in London. In 2003 he founded the architect agency Terada Design, and in 2011 Terada Mokei (it means Terada Models), dedicated to architectural models. Next to architecture and interior design, he also designs furniture, products and graphics.

Naoki Terada:
“Designing architecture is not only about creating a space, but designing how people experience the space and how they feel in that space. That’s what I believe in as being an architect. To put it in an extreme way, our work is not only the design of buildings but the design of mood.
What I think is nice about this product is that the “the design of mood” is perfectly expressed by simply folding the cut-outs without designing buildings. This concept was widely accepted by the general public rather than by architects.
The 1/100 Architecture Model Kit is supposed to be an attachment to the model but I realized that the “attachment” actually takes on the main leading role.”

ARCHITECTURE MODEL KIT NR. 6 NEW YORK

Lloyd Hotel & Culturele Ambassade & Japan
In 2010 Lloyd Hotel & Cultural Embassy initiated the LLOVE Hotel in Tokyo. This was a temporary hotel which was set up with the input of Dutch and Japanese top designers.
The idea is based on the Love hotels of metropolitan Japan; a solution for lovers and a characteristic phenomenon of the Japanese culture where on the whole people have small living accommodation.

http://www.llove.jp/

In 2009 the Japanese artist Chikako Watanabe made her installation ‘Lloyd Life’, the result of her research into the emigration history of Lloyd Hotel. The installation is permanently on show in the restaurant of Lloyd Hotel.
www.lloydhotel.com

Programme
Lloyd Hotel & Culturele Ambassade
Thursday 10 May, 20.00 hrs
Bookpresentation ‘How to Make a Japanese House?’
and opening exhibition ‘1/100 x 100’
WIth lectures in English by Cathelijne Nuijsink and Naoki Terada
The book is published by NAI Publishers and will be for sale at the evening.
ISBN 978-90-5662-850-5

Exhibtion  ‘1/100 x 100’
Friday 11 to Thursday 31 May
Open daily from 09.00 – 01.00 hrs
Free admission

Filed under: Architecture by csxlab on Saturday, February 25, 2012
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I have found an interesting article, at the Italian Architectural publication, Lotus nº6 from 1969. The publication Lotus, intended to be “A Review of Contemporary Architecture”, by the editor Bruno Alfieri. In addition to founding “Lotus” (1963-1973), Bruno Alfieri was also behind the reviews “Quadrum,” “Zodiac” (with Adriano Olivetti), “Metro,” and “Pagina.” He is one of the founders of the Compasso d’Oro Award and he organized the 2002 New York Exhibition “The Italian Avant-garde in Car Design” (exhibit design by Massimo Vignelli).

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RON HERRON - JAPAN’S ARATA ISOZAKI

The architectural scene today, more than ever, is dominated by so-called intellectual commentary. The Architectural magazines, because of their nature, give credence to, this phenomenon by giving so much space to the architectural critics, philosophers, theorists and others and their verbosity, non-involvement and navel glazing. The discussion of architecture in nineteenth century terms continues. Form, scale, composition with the addition of worlds such as imagery, iconography and technology are the terms used, strung together in any permutation. The ‘tell it like it is’ notion not having yet hit the architectural scene. Consequently the dichotomy between theory and performance, in architectural activity, is as prevalent as it ever was, until the theorists have the opportunity to perform and, test out ideas, if they have the mind to, this will remains so. Theory and experiment go hand in hand or as Buckminster Fullers puts it ‘include and refine, include and refine’.

Arata Isozaki is one of those Japanese architects, graduated since World War II, who have been given the opportunity to test out some ideas in real terms. In 1962, as a recent graduate, he produced a scheme for a ‘Space City’, which is one of the key projects of the Japanese Metabolist Group, a group which in the early 1960?s produced, psychologically, a shot in the arm for other experiments outside of Japan. Although not a member of the Metabolist Group, Isozaki-is very much associated with them, certainly in western eyes. ‘Space City’, a project for rebuilding a subsection of Tokyo using slim concrete ‘joint core’ towers, linked by bridges containing offices, apartments etc., spanning high above traffic ways. A proto-typical Megacity.

This idea was tested out to some extent, by Kenzo Tange and his team (of which Isozaki was a member), on both the Yamanashi Communications Centre and the Shizuoka Tower in Tokyo. The first being nothing more than an large building, the cores are small scale versions of the ‘joint cores’, containing staircases, restrooms and the like and are on a very much smaller dimensional grid than that envisaged in ‘Space City’. The second, which has been described as a folly, is much like the ‘joint cores’ but stands rather lonely in the urban chaos that surrounds it. Since opening his own office in 1963, Isozaki has built a number of projects in the tough concrete idiom that characterises so much of recent Japanese architecture.

The Iwata Gakuen High School for Girls (1963-64) is the first stage of a larger building complex. A concrete structure, heavily buttressed to withstand earthquakes, consisting of two pairs of classroom towers, each separated by a staircase and linked together by a wing of specialist and administrative spaces.

The Oita Prefectural Library at Oita City 1962-66) was Isozaki’s first major commission, although a comparatively small building it gives the impression of being much larger because of the manner in which each component part is separated out. The structure ancd services are combined as one component and form the armature, around and through which the people spaces are threaded.

The Fukuoka Mutual Bank at Oita City (1966-68), his most recent building, is in the main business district of Oita, very near the Library, building. One cannot resist the comparison with Stirling & Gowan’s Leicester Engineering building, but this is”bound to occur whenever someone builds a tower and clips the corners. The interior is something else, full of exuberance and mind blowing color, a great experience.

These schemes do no more than pursue a path that is the mainstream of modern architecture. Playing the game of unexpected and impressive spaces, contrasts in height, change of level, complexity, order, inventive forms, color and light, in a very skillful and virtuoso series of performances. Currently Isozaki is working on a project for the Festival Plaza in the Theme Pavilion at Osaka for Expo 70.

Prior to this he had worked with Kenzo Tange on the master plan for the Expo 70 site. The Festival Plaza project is where Isozaki has found the opportunity to put into being ideas-that cut across the mainstream work of recent years, and conceptually breaks new ground, an opportunity that I am very envious of.

Within the huge space frame of the Theme Pavilion he was asked to design the space in which various stage, film, theatre, light-sound and happening performances are to take place, as well as traditional pageants and displays of water and fire. This area is called the Festival Plaza.

Out of this complex program has come the need for an ever changing configuration of the basic elements involved, seating, staging, lighting, sound equipment, flooring and screens. The audience, onlookers, passers-by and participants will also vary considerably in number and disposition, depending on the event or events taking place in or around the Festival Plaza at any one time. Isozaki has designed a serie of mechanisms or robots. Two very large robots, some 60? high, which incorporate staging, lighting, audio-visual equipment and changing spaces for performers, and a number of robots that operate from a ceiling grid incorporating, lighting, projection, sound equipment and screening devices.

The robots-mechanisms are controlled by microswitches and sensors that respond to the audience, and have the intelligence of a real time on line computer to relay information, so that they come into service at the moment when they are needed and where they are needed.

The rest of the hardware – seating, screening, variable enclosures etc., is also mobile, so that the environment is in a state where it is a series of operations acting as necessary for the inhabitants, a indeterminate, responsive environment in every sense.

I believe that Isozaki has made for himself a situation where theory and performance, idea and experiment, for once are one and the same thing. I for one, look forward to seeing, hearing, feeling and smelling his Festival Plaza in operation.

Three Laws of Robotics. By Isaac Asimov.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law.

3. A robot must protect lts own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with either the first or the second law.

Filed under: Architecture by csxlab on Friday, February 10, 2012
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INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS

Text: Thomas Daniell

Photo: Francisco c.p. vasconcelos

“Kiyokazu Arai started his career in the USA, returned to Japan and is now building in Russia and China”

What brought you to architecture?

K.A.: Actually, I first studied to be a certified public accountant. My father was a well known accountant with is own firm, and as the eldest son I was expected to follow in his footsteps. Like most high school students, I didn’t know what i wanted to do, so I enrolled in an accountancy course at university. By the third year of the course, I knewit wasn’t for me. I told my father, and he advised me to finish the course anyway. Then history intervened. Student riots closed down all universities in Japan.

This was 1968?

Right. My university was locked up and I couldn’t have studied even if I’d wanted to. It was a chance to do something else, so I enrolled in a design school and studied there for three years. I got a job in a small office designing houses, and stayed there for two and a half years. I must have designed over a hundred houses, but all typical Japanese post-and-beam houses. I was bored, and I didn’t see anything changing in the future. I wanted to learn more about architecture. Then a friend told me about a new school that had recently been founded in Los Angeles, called SCI-Arc. It sounded great. My wife and I moved to Los Angeles in 1978 so I could enter the postgraduate program there. At that time, SCI-Arc didn’t even have accreditation for their masters program. I was truly just going for the education, not the qualification. My interview was with Michael Rotondi, but i hardly spoke a word of English then. He told me I should go back to Japan and study English. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I enrolled in a language course at UCLA, and applied to SCI-Arc again the following year. I did the undergraduate course for two semesters, and then shifted to the postgraduate course. After one studio taught by Michael, he asked me to join Morphosis. I didn’t even know what that was. Thom Mayne was away at Harvard at that point, so Michael was alone in the office. Thom returned a few months later.

How many people were working there?

There was always SCI-Arc students working as interns. For a while it was just me, Thom, and Michael. I was working full-time at Morphosis while studying full-time at SCI-Arc. I don’t know how I survived. It was difficult but fun. After i graduated, I applied for a green card and stayed at Morphosis.

Thom Mayne describes you as the unofficial third partner during the 1980?s. What was your role?

Thom and Michael were spending half of their week away teaching. They made concept sketches, but the drawings and models were mainly produced by the staff. I was project architect for a lot of the designs, and I guess I influenced some of the people working under me. But i was never consciously  teaching them, just showing them how iI did things. The problem was that I find it hard to delegate. I always want to make all the models and drawings myself. This was in the days before computers. It was important to always have well resolved drawings and models, so it wasn’t necessary to have deep discusions for everyone to understand. We could all just see what had been done, and what should be done next.

What are the sources of your design language?

I don’t think of design as personal, emotive thing. It’s always based on fundamental human principles, on relating behaviors to forms. It’s like music. If you want to embrace people with a building, for example, you make an embracing form. It’s really a case of visualizing these kinds of systems. Axis, hierarchy, datum … these are the kind of keywords that underlie the designs.

But your work with Morphosis and since is very complex, or at least very densely articulated. An embracing form could also be single uninflected line, but you structures often have a kind of Rube Goldberg redundancy to them. Why all the small components? Does it come out of an interest in machines?

Yes, I like machines, because their functioning is visible. The processes at work are revealed in the interactions and connections between the parts. I think that’s a fundamental way of thinking about forms and materials.

When did you come back to Japan?

Around 1990, but it’s hard to say exactly when. In the late 1980?s, Morphosis received a couple of important commissions in Japan: the Chiba Golf Club and the Higashi Azabu Office Building. I started commuting back and forth every month. At some point I wasn’t living in Los Angeles and visiting Tokyo for work, but the other way around. I gradually began to create some relationships back in Japan. After a ten-year absence, I was like a foreigner. But around the time I was thinking of leaving, Thom and Michaels’s partnership was also disintegrating. It was tough for me. Those two guys are like my older brothers, even now. I was totally loyal to them, and i just didn’t know which one to choose. Moving back to Japan was also a way of avoiding the decision.

Were the projects still going on that point?

Yes, I was still officially employed by Morphosis, but my mind was focused on establishing my own office. I received the commission to design the Tsukamoto House in Tokyo while I was still with Morphosis.

The language of the house is very similar to some of the morphosis projects you were in charge of, such as the Crawford House and the Chiba Golf Club.

Yes, it’s a very Morphosis-influenced design. I t was my first house, but too big, too expensive!

What happened to the Morphosis projects in Japan?

They were all cancelled.

Due to the collapse of the buble economy? Did the clients go bankrupt?

No, they just changed their minds. Those designs were incredibly expensive. If they had built them, they would probably be bankrupt.

Did you find work easily after that?

No. I took some teaching positions, and entered competitions. I received plenty of second and third prizes. Arata Isozaki invited me to design a small bridge as part of the Kumamoto Artpolis program. I also entered the SD Review competition [an annual open competition for unbuilt projects by up-and-coming architects]. I remember my Tsukamoto House was selected in the same year as a house by Kazuyo Sejima. I was amazed by her presentation. It was just a few simple models made of thin sheets of painted cardboard, no detail at all. My own model had taken so much time, like a sculpture in its own right.

A sign that the architectural world was undergoing some big changes. Did your own design work start to change?

I don’t think my style has undergone radical changes, just tiny adaptations to the Japanese context. My designs became simpler, I guess. Morphosis-type work is just too expensive, with every joint a work of art. They are artists, often fabricating their own components. You can make small projects in California like that, but here is impossible.

Yet the Japanese construction industry is able to achieve very sophisticated, complex, precise assemblages. It seems that Japan would be a good country for producing that type of work.

True, but there are also problems due to the climate. It rains a lot in Japan, unlike southern California. More articulation means more leaks and drafts.

Tell me about a-bands.

I’ve always thought that architecture is not only buildings, but all the items needed for daily life: clothes, furniture, cutlery and so on. I wanted to create a brand that didn’t include my own name. So a-bands is a separate company from Arai Architects. It does everything apart from buildings. I have two a-bands buildings, one in Kyoto that I designed and built, the other in Tokyo that is a renovation of an existing building. They both contain my architecture office and product showroom. The one in Kyoto includes a café, restaurant and salon. I wanted to make it easy for ordinary people to visit an architects office, so the café or salon is like an interface with the public.

Why the two locations?

I originally founded Arai Architects in Tokyo, but my primary base has been Kyoto ever since I became head of the architecture school here at Kyoto Seika University. I commute back and forth each week.

How did you become involved in Russia and China?

One of my former students from Russia now has a large practice in Moscow, and he asked me to collaborate him on a competition for a large cultural project in Ufa [a city in west Urals]. We won, and that led to a series of other projects, such as the international hall in Ufa for the 450th anniversary of Bashkortostan Republic joining Russia. Some of the projects have been very fast. I only had three days to design the Azkbuzat Racecourse building in Ufa. Of course, in cases like that, you can use formal idea that was already in your mind but unrelated to the project. The audience seating is a straight element with one side facing the track, so I thought it would be interesting to curve the rear wall in cross section, then slice away the ends in diagonal. It’s very simple. The amazing thing is that before we even started the design they already poured the foundation, because they can’t pour concrete in winter. It’s so cold that they can only work on site for five or six months out of the year. I became involved in China through university relationships and a series of invited competitions, some of which I won, like the Dalian Medical University campus.

It’s huge. In a case like this, do you just make the basic sketches, and they produce the construction documents?

Yes, it’s always that way in other countries. All of the code issues related to structure, disabled access, emergency exits … It’s too much to learn, so you have to surrender control. Sometimes you can check the construction documents, but not always.

You have worked in America, Japan, China and Russia. They must be very different, not only in the struggles to deal with clients and administrators  but in the quality of construction and the way things are built.

Yes. In the USA, architects must produce everything, because the subcontractors don’t have the ability to invent components or solve details. In Japan the subcontractors and the manufacturers always can be trusted to produce innovative, perfect details. China is very difficult. For example, there isn’t much architectural hardware available, so sometimes instead of metal parts you must use an alternative, like wood. there are some advantages in China. For example, stone is cheaper than tile, because labour costs are low.

But in China you can’t control the details?

As an architect, I’m always fighting for good details. For instance, here in the Dalian Project I wanted to have a kind of mesh cage structure, but they kept saying no. They didn’t want to delay the project and insisted on vertical columns. We ended up bringing a structural engineer over to China from Japan. He explained the calculations and the construction method, and finally we got it built correctly.

You paid the engineer’s expenses yourself?

Yes. I don’t think I made any money on that project.

Your career began with Morphosis, where you worked on very small things and you were able to make almost everything yourself. Now you are working at a very big scale, and losing some control. Is it frustrating?

Yes, sure. I wish I could speak Chinese and Russian. Maybe they wouldn’t listen, but I could try. That’s why I tell my students to learn other languages. English of course, but then Chinese or Russian. But you shouldn’t stay in one country too long. You can’t achieve much.

Where will you go next?

Throughout my life, I’ve never stayed anywhere for mor than about ten years, and I’ve already been here in kyoto longer than that. It’s okay, I’m comfortable, I enjoy teaching. But if I move now, I might be able to make . And when I’m making something new, I forget about everything else.a fresh start. Maybe Russia. Anyway, I’ve had a happy life so far. I just keep doing what i can. But i still like to make objects with my own hands

::: www.aa-archi.com :::    ::: www.a-bands.com :::

Filed under: Architecture by csxlab on Friday, February 10, 2012
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Kurokawa : When I launched the movement called ´Metabolism´ with the cooperation of friends more than ten years ago, our main self-imposed theme to pursue was to take a renewed look at cultural originality and reassess locality, although, in reality, much against our will, only the technical aspect of our movement was given disproportionate publicity …

Yamazaki : Yes, I have always felt sympathy with your Metabolist movement. Thought, science and technology of the west are today considered normative as universal values, but in fact they represent but one example of locality. Then came the metabolists committed to the attainment  of a value that was local per se but was at the same time universal. In the western cultural context, as we see it reflected in western drama, only one of the two faces that intrinsically  inhere in humanity and life in general is chosen and given disproportionate attention at the sacrifice of each other, In the japanese cultural context, on the other hand, there prevails the thinking that there are two sides to everything. To push to the fore ideas such as this one, I think, is a valid self-assertion of original japanese culture which is certain to lead universality in the ultimate analysis.

Kurokawa : Ever since the days of the Meiji, modernization has been synonymous with westernization in Japan. But around the year 1960 the weight of Europe began to lose in relative importance in the context of overall world culture, which has made the recognition possible that European civilization has in fact  been nothing but one of several local cultures. This development made it possible for other cultural spheres of the world to claim a status of equality with Europe. Thus, modernization has come to mean the process of struggling through which local culture searches its way to universality.

Yamazaki : The space-consciousness of the Japanese has very little to share in common with that of the westerners which is characterized by the awareness of limitless spatial expanse. The Japanese, I feel, have traditionally looked upon closed space units, for example basins surrounded by mountains , as units of their living space. This will explain the concept of ‘borrowed landscape’. Surrounding mountains  are looked upon as edifices, which surround real houses and other buildings. Of course we hear today of the loss of such sources of landscape-borrowing, or boundaries,which would have corresponded to the role played by mountains traditionally, but since what I mean by closed space is one perceived as a mental image, it is still valid even without the physical boundary.

Kurokawa : I  think that from now on the city itself will begin to provide the physical boundary. In pre-modern towns we find surrounding mountains acting as a large architectural formation housing buildings which act as the interior. Roads, as looked at from inside a house, make up external space, but function as internal space within the context of a town. There is always this relationship of role reversal. In fact, I have been asserting the validity of this thinking under the theme of ‘street space’.

Yamazaki: I feel tempted to propose an applied method derived from the concept of ‘renga’ (a kind of ‘verse-linking’) in building up a city. When you proceed to compose a renga collection, you have many people contribute their lines inspired by the tail end of their immediate predecessor but without the awareness of the whole or of the framework. Thus, the lines are linked one after another to form the whole. In a city, when you build a building, you will take into account only its relationship to the immediately neighboring structures, and the accumulation of such houses is what makes up the whole as a city. Couldn’t this way of thinking be practical?

Kurokawa:  l’m all for it. Modern architectural movements in Europe have presupposed spatial hierarchy. Under this system, you have the infrastructure and the substructure, and the synthesis of these two makes up architecture, or city-planning. By contrast, the ‘renga’ method you just mentioned establishes spatial order without the medium oÍ infrastructure, and this is precisely what we have been asserting-

Yamazaki: In the context of Japanese culture, the contraposition of the universal and the individual has never been sharply defined. When a Japanese says ‘you’ and ‘l’ he doesn’t mean by ‘you’ what is implied by M. Buber’s ‘Du’ as contrasted against ‘lch’. The Japanese ‘you’ neveÌ refers to the universal, limiting itself strictly to the second-person individual. A look at the history oÍ literature makes it plain that ego-awareness established itself at a very early stage oÍ Japanese history. This came so early in fact that ever since then the primary concern of the ego has been directed at coordinating its relationship to the neighbors as individuals. The Japanese ego was never critically confronted with the universal.

Kurokawa: When you are dealing with the universal as your partner, the sharper the difference between you and your partner, the clearer the mutual relationship will be outlined, but when adjustment of interests with your neighbor comes into the picture as the predominant theme, opposition must be avoided by all means. This makes it necessary to create a structure of relationship based on ambiguity. That’s what I mean by ‘media space.’ That’s what I propose to search for in contemporary architecture,

Yamazaki: The approach oÍ not asserting oneself against the universal but rather accepting as real the relativity oÍ position, or the space occupied by ties of relationship is familiar to us through go, and the idea oÍ city-making based on the concept of ‘renga’ is basically of like background.

Kurokawa: Since the Japanese have a long tradition of preserving existing relations through adjustment of mutual interaction of human bonds with neighbors, I feel we have something here we can fall back on for a clue to some working theory to guide Japan’s contemporary architecture, which has come to a blind alley.

Yamazaki: According to the orthodox theory of drama, if there are two mutually counterposed personalities, the theme establishes itself where the two are integrated. But my stand regarding this question is to keep the two counterposed ones where they are so that the whole they make up will prove ambivalent, and to expose them to various situations. The ‘drama’ I have in mind will clearly come out here in the light of how these two behave under given circumstances. There’s no need for synthesis.

Kurokawa: ln architecture, too, there are some who take a similar stand. C. Jenks, for instance, does highly evaluate spaces with ambivalent, or multivalent, values. l, too, am in complete agreement with you there.

Yamazaki: ln Europe, I think there is a force gaining weight to approve the presence oÍ ambivalent values which it has been traditionally customary with Europeans to critically screen to single out one aspect for adoption at the sacrifice of the other aspect. Modern Western civilization may be compared to the standard language of a nation. But it is my feeling that the Japanese approach to thinking, as symbolized by the Metabolist movement, shelters within it the possibility of proposing another standard language as valid as the first one.

Kurokawa: lf I may put it in my own way, what you’ve just said precisely corresponds to the discovery of the media space, Those parts of Japan’s historically endorsed cultural assets which would be classified under the category oÍ what I call media space are in reality in a tenable, forsaken state today, and I feel strongly the need to restore and preserve this precious legacy from Japan’s past.

Filed under: Architecture by csxlab on Saturday, January 28, 2012
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I would like to talk about the European impact to Japan from the viewpoint of culture and civilization, in other word, the particular and the universal. I will give a talk by both in Japanese and in English, so the interpreters there, please take a rest for a while from your hard work.

Since the Meiji Restoration, Japan has learned a great deal from European civilization. In short, this has been an attempt to convert culture into civilization. In this case, I consider culture to be being particular and local, and civilization to be universal and global. As an example of Japanese culture, you may come up with Noh-drama, Kabuki, Tea ceremony, Sumo, and the Japanese language. As for civilization, you may image photography, television, cinema, automobiles, trains, airplanes, computers, soccer, and the English language. The difference between Sumo and Soccer can be seen not only from the viewpoint of their dissemination and popularity among the public, but from whether they are strongly controlled by the particular cultural rules or they are widely open to business and the media. Of course, business, or we can say money, is not a matter of culture but of civilization, and the media and transportation today are included in civilization, as they serve to connect different cultures.

The English language was civilization rather than culture for Japanese. There even was a Minister of Education and Culture in Meiji Period who tried to change our national language to English. As civilization is a pursuit of convenience, it is easy for most people to accept. On the other hand, culture is a sophistication of inconvenience. So it is difficult for us to understand and appreciate it unless we belong to the same cultural background and possess the similar sense of value. Now, I just used the two terms: “understand” and “appreciate”. I regard “understand” as the mental action operated by reason and intelligence, and “appreciate” as the sensitivity in which we feel through our whole body and emotions. Therefore, we can say that “civilization” is accepted by reason and intelligence, and on the other hand, “culture” can only be accepted by activating all of our sensitivity and emotion. That is why culture is difficult to share, and we sometimes find it exclusive.

Since the Meiji Restoration, Japan has been tending to forsake our original sensitivity and emotion, and exerted her utmost efforts to find a way to communicate and deal with the European countries with European reason and intelligence. That is because Japan, in 19th.century, considered reason and intelligence were the very things which Japan lacked of and which the European countries possessed. Japan has left her own culture behind and ran after European civilization, which we call it “Bunmei-Kaika” in Japanese. During the Meiji Period, Japanese people used to say that when you tap your head after cutting of the topknot, it sounds like “Bunmei-Kaika” which means civilization and enlightenment. The topknot, “chonmage” in Japanese, was not civilization but culture. It was a particular cultural characteristic until Edo Period, which now only remains in Sumo tradition. You may find them in Kabuki, but they are wigs. When we take a hard look at ourselves and learn from these 140 years since the Meiji Restoration, We now find we should not have thrown away our own culture, but rather connected our culture closer to civilization. The modern world requires reason and intelligence to organize social and civil life, but we also need sensitivity and emotion to enjoy and enrich our lives.

Now, we Japanese have begun to reexamine our own culture, not in self-righteous exclusive way but from the global point of view, maintaining and respecting its locality. Also, at the same time, we are eager to appreciate the European sensitivity and emotion especially through its contemporary art, photography, music and architecture. About 18 million tourists are traveling abroad from Japan every year, and approximately 3 million of them are visiting the European countries. Nowadays, Japanese students often take graduation trips to the European countries and visit the world famous architecture, enjoying Greek, Italian and German wine and cuisine. In such an age of globalization, I believe that architecture and various artistic genres shall and will be created not from the civilization, “understanding by the mind”, but from the culture, “appreciation by the sensitivity”. This is because we have come to share the sensibility to find the universal in the particular.

Now, this is a photo of the Ise-Shrine*1, which was taken in 1993, at the age of removal. The installation of the Great Goddess in a new shrine is performed at Ise once every 20 years. In this picture we can see the old shrine before taken apart to pieces and the new shrine. The next removal will be conducted in 2013. This cycle is well known in international architectural circles. European architects are interested in this removal as it reveals the Japanese mentality favoring the ephemeral and the vulnerable. Does this mean there is no yearning for eternity? No, I do not think so. We do not seek for physical eternity. However, we see the vision of eternity through the death and rebirth of materials. Then, is this a kind of scrap-and-build way of construction? No, these materials once used in the Ise -Shrine will be reused in other shrines. They will survive, so to speak, in new lives. This synchronizes with natural cycles. Human beings are in nature and together with nature. Nature is not for human beings but together with human beings.

Herackleitos, the ancient Greek philosopher in Ephesos, stated “listen to the logos”. According to Heidegger, who was an enthusiastic researcher of Herakleitos, the logos meant the voice of nature rather than the words of God. Generally the logos is understood as reason, which was the key concept of Herakleitos who remarked “everything is integrated”. However, interestingly, he also stated the famous word, “Panta rhei” which means that “all things are in flux”. I believe that Herakleitos had deeply apprehended the cycle of nature. This is the same way of thinking as Ise Shrine, and the culture of wood that Japanese people have cultivated for a long time. I assume that it influences the Japanese philosophy of life.

We also find a different but exquisite philosophy in the Parthenon. It is another vision of eternity in which physical beauty is pursued through its proportion and design. Human beings have been yearning for strong civilizations, yet on the other hand they have paid their respects to beautiful cultures. That is because culture is the joy of living. Economy, politics and civilization just exist to preserve and cherish culture. Now we are living in an era wherein we can understand and appreciate both differences and identities. The contemporary art and culture are created from this common ground, where each one can create its own beauty stimulated by others. We respect for the different and desire to share common points, we call this “Love”. Human beings selected the mode of life to attain their partners and friends through this “Love”. This “Love” does not remain at the stage of desire to get lovers but is enhanced to the stage of rejoicing in feeling a commonality with the world and other cultures through its experession, and finally it attains the power to live. We found our way to cultivate the culture and civilization with “Love”. Culture can be interacted and appreciated with each other, because we already know it, understand it and feel it.

essay written by Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama

[amorphe office]

Filed under: Architecture by csxlab on Monday, January 16, 2012
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This is for me one of the most powerful architectural & individual statements I’ve read. Only wish I could write like this, but has I can’t, I make his words, my words.

“Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no “sacred and primordial site.” I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then “melt into air.” I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor you can know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.”

- Lebbeus Woods

=====================================================================================================================
20 January 1995

From each according to ability. To each according to need. What is needed is not the revolution’s “New Man,” but a new conception of space for the person who already exists. There is nothing for architecture to express anymore, but only the expressive modes of its actions. There must be more walls, more separations that at the same time bring things closer together. This is precisely architecture’s domain. Decay is reformation without desire. Reformation without decay is desire’s final incarnation. Individuality is attained only within community. Without community, there is only isolation. All cities are neighborhoods of one city. What is good or bad for one is good or bad for all. Intervention? For good reason it is a duty, not a right. We are all travelers today, strangers away from home, from any place of origin. Home is today a concept of movement, and origin is only in the mind. We are originals, all of us who live today, within today. We are our own origin, our own point of beginning. Architecture must be original, too. It must always begin again…within itself. Architecture must always be a struggle against–always against–its creators. Only in this way can it affirm the necessity to create. There can be no more types or stereotypes. Nothing that is alive can be typical. For architecture this means the abolition of typologies, and the direct institution of actions. The architecture most needed today is the architecture of crisis. This is what is meant by the term “critical architecture.” Architecture does not solve problems. Its distinction, if any, lies in the quality of problems it creates. The revolution never created an architecture. Now it is architecture’s turn…to create a revolution. (end)

-in Lebbeus woods

Filed under: Architecture by csxlab on Saturday, January 14, 2012
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First Public Talk given by J. Krishnamurti, Brockwood Park, England, September 5, 1970

Filed under: Thoughts by csxlab on Sunday, December 25, 2011
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I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I’ll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it’s true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don’t want people to wonder why I did this. Since I’ve never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.

My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I couldn’t use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior. The damage that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally, but now it’s less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.

This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It’s the same thing I do now, but instead of legos it’s surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.

At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug. But the darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less of a refuge.

The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me. I feel like I’m trapped in a contimated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can’t concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I’m exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.

Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I’m reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my life.

I’ve never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and then be interrupted by someone saying “Hi” or making small talk, unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.

Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of the darkness. Obviously I’m responsible for every decision and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do.

Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven’t touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There’s no future here. The darkness will always be with me.

I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of my problems instead of something that I’ll never be able to change. I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling. I’m not sure why I ever thought that would change anything.

I didn’t realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships
and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn’t stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions.

Relationships always started out fine and I’d be able to ignore him for a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and every night it’d be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.

Relationships didn’t work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn’t help, so I became interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I thought I was gay. I convinced myself that it wasn’t the darkness at all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn’t feel “right”. The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn’t attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls. Because if being gay wasn’t the
answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I’m straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will never leave.

Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren’t so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn’t matter because I couldn’t be alone with her. It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I’d feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn’t stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of all of our interactions. I will never be able to be at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It’s likely that things wouldn’t have worked out with her and we would have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do) even if I didn’t have this problem, since we only dated for a short time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough. Nothing is enough. There’s no way I can fix this or even push the darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy feasible.

So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn’t last because of the darkness and didn’t want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I’ve ever been able to talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have. This wasn’t apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with anyone. She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the circumstances. I’ll never forget how much happiness she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She’s just one more person in a long list of people I’ve hurt.

I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I’ve had that were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I’ve hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.

I’ve spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.

I’ve told different people a lot of things, but I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don’t care about their word or what they’ve promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you. I don’t blame anyone in particular, I guess it’s just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don’t care who knows.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don’t kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don’t know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I’m capable of.

So I’ve realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others.

I’m just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the monster I am and there’s nothing I can do to escape it. I don’t know any other existence. I don’t know what life feels like where I’m apart from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures it doesn’t understand and can’t connect with.

I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give. I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly.

There’s no point in identifying who molested me, so I’m just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.

You may wonder why I didn’t just talk to a professional about this. I’ve seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I’m positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn’t help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we’d hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it’s her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the “friends” who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I’d be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I realise this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they’re based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.

People say suicide is selfish. I think it’s selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won’t feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it’s also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.

Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have it worse than I do, and maybe I’m just not a strong person, but I really did try to deal with this. I’ve tried to deal with this every day for the last 23 years and I just can’t fucking take it anymore.

I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery. I wonder who I’d be if things had been different or if I were a stronger person. It sounds pretty great.

I’m prepared for death. I’m prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.

—

I’d also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they’re dead–one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they’ve constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don’t understand that good and decent people exist all around us, ”saved” or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.

A random example:

“I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist.” – George Zeller, August 24, 2010.

If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molesters go to Heaven (as long as they were “saved” at some point), that’s your choice, but it’s fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.

Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.

I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she’s Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds of other examples, but it’s tiring.

Since being kicked out, I’ve interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what’s been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it’s not real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this reconnection to happen.

I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn’t “saved”, since she believes I’m going to Hell, which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn’t deserve to live. All I know is that I can’t deal with this pain any longer and I’m am truly sorry I couldn’t wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be done without hurting anyone. For years I’ve wished that I’d be hit by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more acceptable, but I was never so lucky.

—

To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far.

I’m sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can’t understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.

Bill Feller

—

Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don’t want people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I might have otherwise because I’m worried that my family might try to restrict access to it. I don’t mind if this letter is made public. In fact, I’d prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and drawing their own conclusions.

Feel free to republish this letter, but only if it is reproduced in its entirety.

Filed under: Thoughts by csxlab on Tuesday, December 20, 2011
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