- 28 Sep, 2020
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Architecture Essay
Read Hajime Yatsuka’s article entitled ‘Internationalism versus Regionalism’. Provide a short written commentary, explanation or question as a response to each of the following five quotes from the article. Responses should be no more than three (3) sentences.
- In politics, “region” is a concept that had been established prior to modernism and precedes the notion of internationalism. When architecture is described in terms of regionalism, however, the order is reversed: internationalism or universalism becomes the prerequisite for understanding this opposing notion. (Yatsuka-pp 2)
- Before being pushed into the periphery by the development of internationalism – which is (or at least pretends to be) based on anti-historicism – classicism functioned as a language for modernizing individual countries and regions, a phenomenon one saw more clearly in Northern and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe, where such language had already permeated the region. (Yatsuka-pp. 2)
- Historically, the rigidness of classicism’s “grammar” is also related to a type of rationalism that developed in Europe during the Renaissance. When rational “reforms” derive from a hierarchy imposed from a cultural center upon surrounding countries, then a regional reaction
– a romantic nationalism – is aroused. (Yatsuka- pp. 4)
- …Tange was forthrightly symbolistic and romantic from the beginning. The overwhelming expression of technology in his postwar-era works – especially around the 1960s ,- seemed to be an inheritance from modernism but had nothing to do with functionalism based on the straightforward aspirations for an egalitarian society. (Yatsuka- pp. 12)
- Perhaps then we can answer the rhetorical question raised above,
“How does a person become a functionalist and a regionalist at the same time?”
in the following way: by pretending to believe it is possible, even if one knows it is not true. (Yatsuka- pp. 25)