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Critics’ Notebook
The world’s elite athletes would have been in Tokyo right now without the coronavirus pandemic. When they went there a century ago, they discovered a capital city remodeled through design.
By Jason Farago
This weekend has been the focus of the Tokyo Summer Olympics, which would have brought together runners, jumpers, pitchers, weightlifters and, for the first time, top-productivity skaters in the world’s most populous city. Simone Biles’s fan club forgives me, but the occasion that excited me the most was handball.
Not for the sport, but for the stadium: handball matches were to take place at Yoyogi National Gymnasium, a monument of fashionable Japanese architecture designed through Kenzo Tange. The stadium is explained through its solid and sunken roof, formed by two catenary – metal cables stretched between concrete pillars, such as a suspension bridge – and the perpendicular ribs that descend from those axes to the ground. Years ago, while cycling through Yoyogi Park, I set on the side of the soldier panels on the roof of the gym, amazed by its metal awnings. It was perhaps the most glamorous venue of this year’s Olympics, although it was built more than a century ago.
The coronavirus pandemic has forced the first postponement of the Olympic Games: Tokyo 2020, its call unchanged, will now take place in July 2021 if it takes place. However, the entire Japanese capital is the legacy of some other Olympic Games: the 1964 Summer Games, which crowned Tokyo’s 20-year transformation from a burning ruin to a megalopolis. (In fact, the “Summer Games” took place in the fall; organizers think October in Tokyo would be smarter than the sweltering July.) These first Tokyo Olympic Games served as an amateur dance in post-war democratic Japan, which was reintroduced to the global not only through play but also through design.
Preparations have made Tokyo a city-wide building. Author Robert Whiting, who was stationed in the United States Air Force in Tokyo in 1962, describes stake hitters and pneumatic hammers that introduced an “overwhelming attack on the senses.” Pedestrians moved with masks and earplugs, and workers drank at bars through dust-proof plastic sheets. Japan was only a few years away from fitting into the world’s largest economy, and the 1964 Olympics were to be a show of economic renaissance and a new honor.
More roads came in. The city has a new sewer system, a new port, two new subway lines and severe pollution. Slums and their population were ruthlessly allowed to give rise to new constructions, some of them grandiose, such as the exquisite Hotel Okura, designed in 1962 through Yoshiro Taniguchi (father of MoMA architect Yoshio Taniguchi), and well forgettable. The new shinkansen, or high-speed train, ran between Tokyo and Osaka for the first time just a week before the opening ceremony. It was not until 2008, when the Beijing Games opened, that the Olympic Games so deeply replaced a city and a country.
Tokyo had already hosted the Games once; he was to host the cancelled 1940 Olympic Games, succeeding the Nazi exhibition in Berlin in 1936. The architects and designers of the 1964 Games had to meet a transparent ideological objective: it was a showcase of New Japan, pacifist and avant-garde. at dawn, largely away from classic Japanese aesthetics or classic national symbols. No Fuji, no cherry blossoms and no calligraphy. And any expression of national pride had to be delivered as much as you can imagine of old imperial militarism.
The Tokyo 64 look design was entrusted to Yusaku Kamekura, the dean of Japanese graphic designers, who had been imbued with the fashion design of Bauhaus-trained professors at the Tokyo Institute of New Architecture and Industrial Arts. Where the posters of the Olympic Games from the afterlife were based on figurative, explicitly Greco-Roman images, Kamekura distilled Tokyo’s ambitions into the simplest of emblems: the five intertwined rings, all in gold, topped by a huge red disc, the emerging Dom.
The Kamekura cartel has not only rejected western expectations of the “exotic” East of a harsh, blank modernity. More impressive than that, he restarted the Japanese flag, which was practically banned in the early years of the American profession, as a symbol of a democratic state. The same ambitious aesthetic would also characterize the poster of the time of the Kamekura Olympic Games (and, by 1964, technically intimidating), with a photograph of runner on a black background at a fractional moment.
The main ceremonies and sporting events took place in a stadium nothing special that has since been demolished. At Komazawa Olympic Park in Setagaya, a tower designed through Yoshinobu Ashihara took the form of a 165-foot-tall concrete tree; still standing, though his brutalist frankness has softened through a layer of white paint. However, it was the slightly smaller Yoyogi Stadium, designed through Tange, which would then build Tokyo’s imposing City Hall and its Sofia Coppola-approved Park Hyatt hotel, which specifically expressed what Kamekura and the other designers did on paper.
In 1964, Tange Stadium hosted swimming, nailing and basketball events, and its union of strength and dynamism extended more strongly than any other that Japan had been restored or even reborn. From the outside, it looks like two poorly assembled halves of a pair of slices, made of metal and concrete, its real innovation was the ceiling. Its tense design is fostered through Eero Saarinen’s newly completed hockey rink at Yale University and, most importantly, the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, designed in 1958 through its hero Le Corbusier.
Quieterly, the gym nods to Tange’s most significant paintings to date: the arch of Hiroshima’s Cenotaph, some other reinforced concrete curve. In Hiroshima, tangeanino arc concrete has a mausoleum for Japan’s darkest moment; in Tokyo, a festival of a new national life closed. (Hiroshima’s legacy also impeded the opening ceremony, where sprinter Yoshinori Sakai, born August 6, 1945, the day the first atomic bomb fell, lit the cauldron.)
The 1964 Olympic Games were the first to be broadcast worldwide, via the first geostationary advertising satellite, and Japanese families with a growing circle of family budgets can even watch the Games in color. However, the enduring maximum photographs of Tokyo 64 gave the impression in the cinema, in director Kon Ichikawa’s three-hour documentary “Tokyo Olympics”. Filmed in CinemaScope of a giant format, in vivid colors, with new telephoto lenses, “Tokyo Olympics” is, in several sections of the track, the most giant film ever made about the Olympic Games. (You can stream it, as well as much more horrific films from the Games from 1912 to 2012, on Criterion Channel).
Unlike Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympics,” which preceded the Berlin Games with Aryan athlete gods in Greek drag, “Tokyo Olympics” immerses us in modernity from its initial sequence: a glowing white sun in a red sky – the Japanese flag, inverted – crushes – Cut into a wrecking ball that crashes into pylons. The facades of the buildings fall into dust, the excavators remove the debris. We see Tange Stadium in the fog, then the torch relay, then the crowds are pushed to see the young foreigners arrive at Haneda airport. Inside the stadiums, the telephoto lens allowed Ishikawa to take beautiful close-ups of the sweat of sprinters and the hens’ skin of swimmers, while filming almost summed sequences of shooters and cyclists scrambled in colored currents.
There are champions and records at the Tokyo Olympics, but with this last percentage of screen time. Gold medal matches are interspersed with the main points overlooked over the attendees sweeping the triple jump track or the officers throwing weights away from the steel balls. The Japanese Olympic Committee hated the film and ordered another; nationalist drivers have called it unpariotic or worse. But distilling Ichikawa’s national ambition into a summary shapes the Tokyo 64 brand, and the “Tokyo Olympics” has become Japan’s greatest success in the workplace, a record that would last 4 decades.
Whether they take position in 2021 or not, the upcoming Tokyo Games will actually have a quieter cultural effect than their predecessors. The first Tokyo 2020 logo was discarded for alleged plagiarism. The first level too: Zaha Hadid’s initial design was abandoned and repositioned through a more serene and much less expensive wooden stadium, designed by architect Kengo Kuma.
If Tange’s metal and concrete expressed Japanese ambitions in 1964, it is now herb-based fabrics that evoke the long-term vision whose bets are both ecological and economical. But Kuma, who attended the 1964 Games as a child, attributes to Tange’s dive stadium the cause of his own architectural career. “Tange treated herbs gently like a magician,” Kuma told The Times two years ago, recalling his discovery of years of training at Yoyogi National Gymnasium. “From that day on, I sought to be an architect.”
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