Man without qualities... is a woman! : on the work of Itsuko Hasegawa

• The aftermath of the Third World War is a theme familiar to science fiction readers. The spiralling tension between Nato and the Warsaw Pact that reached its chilling height in the 1962 Cuba crisis inspired many a literary doom-monger to fantasies of the final Armageddon (and the morning after). At the time everybody must have been wondering what it would be like to glory in that radioactive dawn, to be one of the few survivors chosen by Dr. Strangelove to perpetuate the human race. The grim prospect of a nuclear winter, which in retrospect seems to have helped tip the moribund Soviet monolith off its pedestal, seems also to have left its tracks in the Western spirit. The greatest post-war mass demonstrations were the peace rallies. Politics was overshadowed by Pershings, Cruise missiles and SS-20s. But what touched people at a deeper, moral level was the fact that if the statistics of the ballistics were anything to go by we could soon all be killed 40,000 times over. Should we, in this cultural condition of as yet unconsummated annihilation, now think about Japan? It too felt the strains of the Cold War, at least in a military-strategic sense. But the widespread anxiety from which the no nukes movement flowered passed it by; for Japan had already had the Bomb, and without the privilege of agonis­ing in advance. So there the future had already arrived. Only Japan had already had a foretaste of the Third World War as we feared it. Now that the tension has drained out of the superpower stand-off and military politics is losing ground to economic strate­gies, Japan finds itself on the far side of our era. Can there still be poetry after Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Apparently yes, as long as poetry is not seen as the art of the true, the beautiful and the good, but as the art of the contingent. ltsuko Hasegawa displays all the features of the present Japanese building frenzy, which from outside looks like advanced lunacy but sometimes, in isolated projects, achieves a state of undeniable poetry. In a culture where mass destruction passes for a collective experience and in which architects pre­fer to shut themselves off from metropolitan chaos by striving for the autonomy of their objects, there is sometimes one who manages to emerge as an interpreter of a hopeful common voice. ltsuko Hasegawa, poet, architect and woman, is such a person. And that is something very exceptional amid the ubiquitous and deeply traditional male chauvinism of Japan. For however grotesque the impact of Western modernity may have been in and after August 1945, some things never change. 

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Arkitektur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Architecture (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

The Invisible in Architecture

Itsuko Hasegawa

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