Impermanence is permanent. Reconstruction, reconstitution and transformation are understood as the fundamental expressions of Japanese space and time. Hallucinatory fragments of memory and history coexist and allow for the spirits of the past, present, and future to be interpreted and translated into today’s matter. Anarchic visionary projects of utopian futures remain strangely familiar while existing cities stand precariously resigned to earthquakes and tsunamis that threaten devastation. Accepting impermanence allows architecture to search for solutions to existence in whatever form necessary and natural at the time.
The Japanese city is a young and culturally imbued production structured upon the simultaneity of rewritten histories. The Japanese building is a tool that is recognizably born from tradition yet transforms in relation to the ever-changing ways in which culture interfaces with space. Existence is the revolutionary content of architecture’s ambitions where transformation is always imminent and implicit. Architecture is the intent of the process and not the end-product. Architecture the same as us: perishable and immortal.