In his novel The Ruined Map, Kobo Abe gives a good picture of the sterility of the modernized human space.
Born in 1924, Abe grew up in Manchuria, and returned to Japan in his early twenties. Being confronted with the harsh circumstances of colonized Manchuria, coming back to Japan, he was confused with the illusionary reality of the urban development proceeding around the metropolitan areas.
In the Ruined Map, Abe describes the reality of suburbia, which is the locus of exemplary modernized space. In his narrative, the reality of suburbia is figured out in terms of the overwhelming yet bleak quality of space:
Suddenly the scenery changed, and a straight, white line of road stretched to a sky daubed with white. It was some thirty feet wide. Between it and the footpaths on either side lay a belt of withered lawn, contained by a knee-high fence. The perspective was strangely exaggerated, perhaps because the grass had withered unevenly, and I was struck with an optical illusion. It was as if I were looking at some patterned infinity: the four-storied buildings, identical in height, each floor with six doors, were lined up in rows of six to the right and left. Only the fronts of the buildings, facing the road, were painted white, and the color stood out against the darkish green of the sides, emphasizing even more the geometric character of the view. With the roadway as an axis, the housing development extended in two great wings, somewhat greater in width then in depth. Perhaps in was for the lighting, but as the buildings were laid out in staggered lines, on both sides one’s view met only white walls supporting a milk-white dome of sky.
An unattended child swathed in blankets in a red baby carriage was crying shrilly. A young boy on a bicycle made of some light alloy, which had a glittering transmission, gave a deliberate, boisterous laugh as he sped by, his cheeks rosy with the cold. It was all ordinary enough at first glance, but when one focused on the distant landscape, people seemed like fanciful reflections (p. 7).
Concerning to this imagery of the artificial city scape, Abe describes thus; “Spatially there was no doubt that the town existed, but temporally it was the same as a vacuum”
In this state of the temporal vacuum, it is felt that no event would happen. It is the eventless space, filled with a dull and bleak sterility. This space is the architecturally planned space in such a way that urban planner has deliberately constructed it.
In this space, the realness of human existence would be impacted by it. Inside of the temporal vacuum, one has the rarefied bodily feelings to be surrounded and supported by the inertia of realness. The feeling of desertedness is spreading. And concomitant with this feeling, one feels that the sense of reality is evaporating.
How do we think of this deserted space?
One would argue that it concerns with the problem of the urban planning. It is the problem of the modern style planning, which builds and constructs human dwellings, using scientific, quantifiable method. Moreover, the problem is its indifference to the reality of human activity. From the planner’s point of view, the real human life is not significant. It is conceived to be the controllable object, which is devoid of the capacity of autonomous action.
Fumihiko Maki, who is an architect and urban planner, argues that most of the mega-structural modern style construction have been done “at the expense of human scale and human functional needs.” Maki’s concern is directed to the misfit between the spatial form and the real scale and needs of modern human life. In his view, "we must now see our urban society as a dynamic field of interrelated forces.” Because of the spatial form's irrelevance to the actual life field of interrelations and interconnections, urban form is not appropriate to the fluidity of human existence. Instead of subtending the fluidity of human life, it has become the obstruction for it.
Maki assumes that human space can be imagined to be the spatial form which is constructed by the urban planner. Its task is to construct the picture of spatial form in the semantic and quantifiable manner. In his understanding, the space is conceived to be the object which is controllable by the semantic operation.
Contrary to Maki’s understanding, Abe’s delineation of the deserted space is concerned with the invisible, non-quantifiable dimension of human space.
Amid the formalized spatial units, there is another aspect of space, qualitative and immersive aspect of it. What is evacuated in the temporal vacuum would something to do with this aspect. Even though it would be the non-quantifiable element, it surrounds and overwhelms us in the sensual manner. In this realm, we may feel to be surrounded by something like an ether or atmosphere, invisible yet real element. As Alphonso Lingis argues, we can call it the “sustaining medium.” (p. 16)
In this book, I would like to argue that the sense of unreal, which is specific to the totally planned urban space, is congruent with the sense of desertedness.
The spatial desertedness caused by the modernization is the main concern of this book. It is felt that any action of human and non-human beings wouldn’t happen inside each of these spatial units. The sense of freezing and stasis is pervading there.
In any case, the frail feeling of reality concerning to the clone space resides in the fact that it is the man-made construct, which means that the clone like space exists as the too much human social space.
This book is tries to provide a response to this problem by the philosophical exploration of the actually existing planned urban space. As far as it is the result of the spatial modernization, it is also the philosophical exploration of the architectural thinking.
Similar to Grosz’s book, Architecture from the outside,
germansingergirl
pixelskylines
romaincrisis
gummygunk
tangentwithtanner
annaxmalina