I
Encounters with virtual reality are no longer an unusual occurrence.We have become used to fly-through systems that allow architects to explore the details of a structure by moving rapidly though a series of images on a computer screen, and with systems where users put on gloves and goggles to manipulate virtual objects that seem to be actually there.
Because architecture stimulates every sense in the body, it represents one of the most promising areas of application for such systems. This probably accounts for the frequent appearance of architectural devices in demonstrations of virtual reality. But when we begin to think about the differences between virtual reality and reality, and to ask how essential those differences are, we will have to think about the question of what architecture itself is. The concept of virtual reality is not new. High school students learn that there are two kinds of images formed by the lens of a camera-real images and virtual images. They also learn that there are two kinds of numbers-real numbers and imaginary numbers. The difference between virtual and imaginary is not easy to describe, but it seems that virtual reality is not something imaginary. That is, it does not exist only in the imagination. So what is the relationship between a virtual world and the real world? What is it that goes to make up a world?
II
One of the dreams of those who wield power has been to rule the entire world. In the Middle Ages, kings sought to maintain and expand their kingdoms. Lords sought to expand their domains. Stewards sought to administer their provinces in peace. In feudal society, these were the basic requirement for admission into the structure of power. In one form or another, members of all of these classes held land. Even if were not the whole world, it was gratifying to do as one pleased with one專 own corner of the world. The reason is that land is the reality of the world.Land that was possessed in this way had some kind of form. It was a real object. When people came into possession of a piece of land without any meaning, land that was simply an object, they felt the need to infuse it with meaning. Objects could not continue to be simply objects without any meaning. A classic example of endowing land with meaning is furnished by the garden. The emperor Hadrian, one of the five wise emperors of ancient Rome, built an enormous villa on the outskirts of the capital at Tibur (modern Tivoli). The garden contained depictions of memorable places he had visited throughout his life. An example from Tokyo is the Rikugien garden in Komagome. This garden was built by Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, a favorite minister of the fifth Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. It was designed as a series of allusions to 88 famous sites mentioned in classical poetry.
However, as work progressed, Yoshiyasu didnユt stop and ended up including allusions to more than 88 sites, a fact whichunf ortunately was not communicated to posterity. The ironic result is that scholars of later ages continued to believe the story of 88 sites, and even selected a new series of allusions to 88 poems. What this shows is that, in present day terms, a garden can be fiction.
There are a number of standard techniques available to garden designers. Japanese gardens often employ the techniques of borrowed landscape, reduced landscape, and allusion. Borrowed landscape is a technique that incorporates the view beyond the garden, so that the garden seems to extend beyond its borders. This creates an impression of unity with the external. Reduced landscape is a technique that makes the rocks, trees, and other features of the garden appear to be larger than they actually are. For example, the rim of a small pond can acquire the ambiance of an ocean shore. Allusions are a technique for incorporating references to famous sites and scenes from the external world, using the techniques of reduced landscape and other ways to make isolated parts suggestive of a whole.
As a result, gardens enable us to glimpse a world that extends beyond the physical dimensions and form of the space. This world has the power to stimulate our imagination. The same tendency can be found in Western gardens. For example, English landscape gardens often feature trees planted in an irregular pattern around the edges of the garden, so that the border between the garden and the external world becomes vague, or hidden fences that conceal the border between the garden and the surrounding pastures. The techniques of the perspective are used to make distant objects appear to be closer, or close objects appear to be more distant.
Gardens created in this way are in a sense replicas of the world. Is a replica the same thing as the world which it represents? Of course not. Replication is literally replication, a kind of mapping. The real world is mapped onto the garden, but there is no precise ratio of correspondence. The mapping involves enlargements or reductions in scale, deformations and exaggerations. The flow of time in such a mapped world is different from the flow of time in the outside world.
When we visit an old garden, we can sense the spirit of the Edo period or savor the flavor of Higashiyama period culture because the garden has the power to transport us out of our own age and into a time preserved in another realm, into a mapping with multiple meanings.
Perhaps it could be called a world within a world. When we consider the significance of this sort of world within a world, we are thinking about time and place. Is it possible to regard such worlds as virtual worlds? Perhaps not, since the associations of the term virtual seem inappropriate to the actuality of the elements enclosed within the space of garden. The garden encloses a fragment of reality, a corner of the real world.
III
Let us consider an example from outside the realm of gardens. Relics are an example of objects rich in associations which continue to affirm a world beyond the constraints of place or time. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that objects that continue to affirm a world beyond place or time are called relics. Many relics have religious character, but some do not.For example, one of the most famous implements in the history of the tea ceremony is a tea case called the "tsukumo nasu". Originally it was brought to Japan from China. Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu was so fond of it that he carried it with him into battle. Later it passed through the hands of nine successive owners, including the Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, the monk Murata Juko, legendary founder of the tea ceremony, as well as military leaders and merchants. Then it came into the possession of Oda Nobunaga, the military genius who unified the country. Nobunaga reportedly took it with him to Honno-ji temple and used it in a tea ceremony only a few hours before being assassinated by the forces of Akechi Hidemitsu. Somehow it was rescued from the turmoil of the struggle and passed into the hands of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Nobunagaユs successor. It was passed down to Hideyoshiユs son Hideyori and burned in the treasure house of Osaka Castle during the final assault that led to the downfall of the Toyotomi clan.
Tokugawa Ieyasu, victor in the battle of Osaka Castle, ordered a search of the ruins and finally the fabled tea case was discovered. It was taken to Nara and repaired by the lacquer craftsmen Fujishige and Fujimoto, who subsequently acquired it as a gift from Ieyasu.
Thereafter it was passed down as a secret family treasure throughout the Edo period. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the family could not afford to keep it any longer, and in 1887 it came into the possession of entrepreneur Iwasaki Yanosuke, who is said to have borrowed the 400 yen needed to purchase it from his brother Yataro.
Presently it is held by the Seikado Bunko art museum, which houses the collection of the Iwasaki family. The reason why Yanosuke was so avidly eager to aquire it was perhaps, aside from its historical significance, because its name, "tsukumo nasu" rhymed with the name of his company, Tsukumo Shokai, the firm that laid the foundation for the giant Mitsubishi conglomerate of later years.
If this is so, then this implement can be said to have continued acquiring new associations even in the Meiji period.
As related, this tea implement is a real object that exists in a museum of art.
The authority Takahashi Soan, who examined it during the Taisho period (1912-1926), wrote that "being an object that was rescued from the ashes of destruction, it retains very little of its original material....and in form it has been largely destroyed. But through the painstaking labor and superb technique of Fujishige and son, it has been restored with lacquer to the point where could be mistaken for the original. It has acquired new life and fully qualifies as a masterpiece."
Through these historical links to some of the most illustrious names in Japanese history, it could be said that a "tsukmo nasu" legend was born, with an ever expanding ambiance of associations. The value assigned to this small clay pot cannot be discussed without reference to recollections of its historical owners. Far from denigrating the value of the "tsukmo nasu" itself, this demonstrates the refinement of the system of values that apply to implements of the tea ceremony.
Moreover, this is an implement which, having once been burned in the fall of Osaka Castle, was repaired with lacquer. It is an object that "retains very little of its original material" but which "could be mistaken for the original". As a real object, this tea case has lost most of its original character as a clay bowl, so that it could no longer be called the same object. This being the case, this tea case becomes a recollection of a tea case, a purification of the idea of the tea case. There may be more of a relation than we suspect between such an object and the metaphysical status of virtual objects.
IV
Although the "tsukumo nasu" may be exceptional, it shows how relics can acquire a virtual value. Why is there a difference between this value and the associative value of gardens, and what is the difference? Relics acquire their value as a result of their history.The relic is a symbol of its history. Therefore a relic acts as a catalyst, touching off an expanding chain of historical associations.
Religious relics, such as the towel that wiped Christユs face, fragments of the true cross, and relics of the Buddhaユs body have this sort of character. The value of the relic is the value of the historical truth that it conveys. To put it boldly, we could say that the relic is not the relic. This is the reason why so many fragments of the true cross are discovered and why there are innumerable relics of the Buddhaユs body.
Is this sort of being possible in a garden? The most significant factor in this respect is that gardens do not move in place or time.
Relics are easily transported to distant lands. The transmission of relics is the transmission of sacred histories and exalted legends to distant places. Merely mentioning the Pot of Luzon or the obelisk called Cleopatraユs Needle is enough to conjure up an image of the history of foreign lands. It is astonishing that such artifacts are found in Japan in London.
However, gardens do not move. What gardens can do is import the world outside. The gardens of the Momoyama period (1568-1600), planted with cycads, are both splendid and reminiscent of foreign lands. It could also be said that gardens depicting famous landscapes and sites from classical poetry are quiet hoards of values from the world outside. A garden decorated with bizarrely shaped rocks has something of the atmosphere of China. Even if the garden is in Japan, the presence of such rocks creates a China within the garden. Green lawns evoke an image of European or American suburbs. The garden is constructed in a specific place and cannot be moved, but it can import and store elements from the outside world. In the essential sense, places are sites for the storage of culture.
V
Architecture can be regarded as a domain midway between relics and gardens. What are the implications raised by these questions for architecture?Architecture can be moved. Teahouses are often transported to new locations. For example the teahouse Joan has been moved from Kyoto to Tokyo, Oiso, and Inuyama. Other kinds of structures are moved as well, often with pedigrees that indicate a genealogy going back to the imperial household or other august quarters. Even if most of these genealogies are fiction, the fact remains that buildings can be moved and are moved. Moving a Japanese building entails the supplementary operation of reconstructing the surrounding garden or galleries. It is only when these ancillary features have also been completed that the building can be said to have moved. This is an attempt to move the history of the building, or in other words to move the place itself to a new location.
Examples of buildings that have been moved in other countries include the transport of the ancient Egyptian monuments in Abu Simbel from the area inundated by the Aswan dam, and The Cloisters museum in New York, which is an amalgamation of several European monasteries. Interiors can be moved to new buildings, for example to museums such as the Metropolitan or to private homes. On a visit to Princeton University, I was once ushered into a room from an 18th century French palace. As a specialist in the history of architecture, I was invited to stay in this room for the duration of the conference. I spent a week there, going to bed every night with a strange sensation.
Architecture can move. But what does this say about the nature of architecture? Teahouses and the wooden structures of Japan can be transplanted exactly as if they were trees. They are dismantled, moved, and reassembled, and when the surrounding garden or galleries are finished they take root in their new location. In other words, like the "tsukumo nasu" tea case, they are vehicles for the transmission of history.
Perhaps Western architecture can be moved because it is considered to be a self-sufficient space. Historical interiors as completely independent boxes can be inserted into new containers. This is the typical Western approach, which derives from Western assumptions about the nature of architecture. Western thinking assumes that architecture is essentially a complete space, and therefore movable. This says something about the essential nature of Western architecture. The concept and realization of virtual reality are developments of this kind of spatial consciousness. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the novels of Huysmans and the music of Scriabin attempted to create artificial spaces. These attempts were predecessors of virtual reality in precisely the essential sense of complete, independent spaces.
The cultural presuppositions of virtual reality become clearer when we ask whether the world consists of space or whether it is made up of places. The attempt to create virtual reality seems to assume that the world can be understood as space. This is a world view based on a very characteristically Western cultural tradition. The vision of Buckminster Fuller, who imagined a dome to enclose the world, appears at first glance to be the apotheosis of technology. But in fact it is based on a very Western view of the world. In the same way, the techniques of virtual reality are based on a very Western view of the world. The concept of virtual reality becomes meaningful only when the experience of architecture is transformed into space. But is architecture really a mechanism for the creation of space? It may be the art of creating places. Is it possible to have architecture without a place?
Translated by Thomas Donahue
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