Word: modernization
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Japan has one of the world's most admired architectural traditions, one that has influenced Western artists and architects from the mid-19th century to the present. But at home Japanese architects have long found themselves faced with a dilemma: how to be modern and still remain Japanese. When the modern movement was brought back from Europe by early Japanese students of Germany's Bauhaus and France's Le Corbusier (see below), the results were often merely derivative cubist modern...
...architectural rebirth was defeat in World War II. The B-29s flattened Japanese cities, and the U.S. occupation knocked into limbo the oppressive remnants of autocracy and feudalism that had saddled Japan for centuries. And up from the ashes rose a new Japanese architecture that is attempting to blend modern technology with traditional Japanese needs and feeling for structure. Best of this new generation intent on making "something new of tradition" is Kenzo Tange, 46, who stands today at the crossroads where Japanese tradition and contemporary architecture meet...
...Roof. With success, Tange found himself growing restless with the international modern style he had inherited from the West, increasingly probed into Japan's deep architectural past. There he found heavy beams and posts (necessary in an earthquake-plagued country), a love of structural expression, and at the most primitive level, ancient pit houses with thatched roofs that heavily emphasize weight and volume (as opposed to the elegantly simple floating structures with shoji screens familiar to most Westerners...
...satisfying Tange's new ideal is his Kagawa Prefectural Office, completed last year. With its massive exposed beams rising in tiers, ceramic Zen symbols emblazoned on its walls, and a rock garden in the tradition of the Ryoanji Temple, it strikes an unmistakably Japanese note in the modern idiom of reinforced concrete. As well as recalling the past, Tange believes his building must also "make an image of our new social structure." For Tange this means the new democracy in which citizens are now invited to become part of the government. To welcome them, he has left the garden...
Skeptic Russell also speaks far more respectfully of medieval scholastics such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam than he does of the modern West's fashionable philosophers, most of whom, in their different ways, have abdicated man's proudest aspiration, which is to know what is what. Marxist and pragmatist agree that truth depends not on what is said, but on who says it-and why and when and with what results-so that for Americans who have accepted the notions of William James and John Dewey, no less than for Nikita Khrushchev, truth...