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Fredric Jameson
Introduction to Isozaki Arata’s “City Demolition

Industry, Inc.” and “Rumor City”
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Isozaki Arata, one of the most distinguished
architects in the world today, is not normally
associated with nationalism or nativism in archi-
tecture. That his buildings project an interna-
tional public is testified by their geographical
range: from the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles to the Tsukuba Science City in
Japan, from the Palau Sant Jordi Sports Palace in
Barcelona to the Volksbank-Center in Potsdamer
Platz (Berlin), from the Team Disney Building at
Disneyworld (Orlando, Florida) to the Domus in
La Coruña (Spain). These buildings, with a variety
of programs, are often described in popular lan-
guage as “elegant,” “ironic,” or “cool,” words that
register their play of basic geometric figures—tri-
angle, cube, barrel vault, and the like—and also
react, perhaps, to a joyous process of construction
which is also an engagement with history, itself
inhabited by the serene melancholy of the decay
and death of such forms as well (and more insis-
tently haunted by the fate of Hiroshima). So it is
that for Isozaki ruins also express the same stark
and simple forms as they emerge from chaos;
ruins are also elemental building blocks—the
architect scarcely knows whether he is construct-
ing a building or the ruins of a building:
South Atlantic Quarterly 106:4, Fall 2007

DOI 10.1215/00382876-2007-049 © 2007 Duke University Press
850 Fredric Jameson
By ruminating on the images of Japanese cities bombarded in 1945,

I believed I might be able to construct a point of view with which to
confront world history. It was only from the springboard stance of a
return to that point where all human constructs were nullified that

future construction would again be possible, I thought. Ruins to me
were a source of imagination and in the 1960s it turned out that the
image of the future city was itself ruins. Professing faith in ruins was
equal to planning the future.1
He adds that “other times in history when the image of ruins was cher-
ished had to be recalled.” Thus 1945 follows the Kobe earthquake of 1995,
itself recalling the Tokyo disaster of 1923, and so forth. Characteristically,
Isozaki will in one of his earliest works compose a photomontage, Hiro-
shima Ruined Again in the Future, at the same time that he will participate
in the 1960s excitement of the new technology, whose “face . . . enabled us
to perceive the existence of another space at the heart of electronic media,
and, strangely, many of the images of the future city that appeared in cyber-
space were equally of ruins. The future city now reappeared as a virtual
image from within the ruins” (100).
Yet this fascination of Isozaki’s with ruins goes hand in hand with instal-
lations like his Electric Labyrinth of 1968 and the evanescent “festival plaza”
form (71), along with innumerable other experiments in technological
futurity. My own favorite, the so-called Responsive House of 1969, offers
a cube with two flexible weather-resistant walls alongside a third face into
which a mobile camper can be introduced (the truck thus momentarily
becoming part of the house), “playing the temporary living space against
the permanent” and allowing “residents to take off to the country and stop
overnight wherever they like with their own instant environment.” Robots
and an electronic media environment permit inner spaces to be remodeled
virtually at will. This is as utopian as anything you can imagine, at the same
time that its energies seem to stand at the antipodes of a melancholy con-
templation of ruins.
Indeed, the proposal to grasp ruins in terms of ancient Japanese space-
time concepts adds a key coordinate to the complex conjunctures of Iso-
zaki’s work. Is it merely a restless alternation as Isozaki sometimes seems
to suggest?
For Japanese modernists—and I include myself—it is impossible not
to begin with Western concepts. That is to say, we all begin with a modi-
Introduction 851
cum of alienation, but derive a curious satisfaction—as if things were

finally set in order—when Western logic is dismantled and returned to
ancient Japanese phonemes. After this we stop questioning. (65)
Or perhaps it is this very conjuncture—pure geometric shapes, ruins,

the electronic future, the ancient Japanese “phonemes”—which contains
the secret of Japanese modernity, of a modern Japanese culture, both
nonnational and national, an alternate modernity or an alternate path to
modernity.
Isozaki has written innumerable articles on theory and on architecture:
his latest book is Japan-ness in Architecture, which displaces the conven-
tional story of the struggle between Japanese traditions and Western influ-
ences by analyzing the ideological function of the various “national styles”
in the legitimation of the state. While opposing such culturalist readings,
he shows the way in which a specific Japanese practice of spacing—the so-
called ma or “gap” or “difference,” the interstitial—can be usefully distin-
guished from the conventional Western opposition of space and time.
With the ma we reach the theoretical heart of Isozaki’s historical architec-
tural investigation. It is a category in which he has had a lifelong interest,
having designed a Paris exhibition on the topic in 1978. It was an exhibit he
was characteristically unwilling to repeat in Japan itself for some twenty-
five years in the apprehension that it would give aid and comfort to a nativ-
ism or Japanness to which he was opposed and against which Japan-ness in
Architecture is an argument.
Still, the ma is clearly enough itself (literally), one of those “ancient Japa-
nese phonemes” which has no Western equivalent and which must there-
fore argue for the existence of precisely that East/West gap on which the
various culturalisms thrive. Indeed, we can ourselves convey it only nega-
tively: thus it is not nothingness, but it is not something either. Can the
notion of relationality, which has everywhere in the West begun to supplant
the old Aristotelian conceptions of substance, be of any use here? Yet rela-
tionality scarcely conveys the negative or destructive component of the ma,
which is for Isozaki, at least, partly associated with ruins and rubble, even
though by now the latter have become the negation of the negation: “calling
scenes of ruins to mind has itself faded, the very act of becoming a sort of
ruin in itself ” (97). The ma also designates for him a primordial unity of
time and space which we can only mystically approximate.
This revision of concepts of negation, emptiness, or nothingness plays
852 Fredric Jameson
its part in Isozaki’s pair of little fables, “City Demolition Industry, Inc.” and
“Rumor City,” which rejoin his lifelong reflection on history (and on the
haunting fact of Hiroshima) by way of the interplay of agency, conspiracy,
destruction, and construction. It is as though, with what Isozaki thinks of

as the “end of Utopia” in 1968—the end of the possibility of social revolu-
tion and of planning in general, from society to space and the city—the
apocalyptic Utopian manifestos of the 1960s were somehow implemented
and brought into being unconsciously by the very force of capitalist devel-
opment itself, if not by some secret far-flung underground conspiracy,
which ends up effacing the very subject itself, including the subjectivity of
the story’s ostensible author.
Note
1 Isozaki Arata, Japan-ness in Architecture, ed. David B. Stewart (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2006), 99–100. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.

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Fredric Jameson

Introduction to Isozaki Arata’s “City Demolition

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South Atlantic Quarterly 106:4, Fall 2007

By ruminating on the images of Japanese cities bombarded in 1945,

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cum of alienation, but derive a curious satisfaction—as if things were

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