Novel about architecture and feelings in Japan | Babelia

when in 1954 Walter Gropius traveled to Japan for the first time and visited the Imperial Katsura villa, the first thing he did when he left was writing a postcard to Le Corbusier in which he said: “Dear Le Corbu, all that for what we have fought has her parallel in the old Japanese culture.” The fascination with the balance of pure lines and colors that give off the facades and interiors of their tea houses had already caused the German architect Bruno Taut to write in the early thirties the essay Katsura Imperial Villa (published by Phaidon), in which Katsura defined as “the architecture reduced to pure essence.” All this comes to the story to introduce the novel that concerns us, the summer house, of Masashi Matsuie, a fiction whose plot happens within a study of architecture of current Japan and that is articulated from the commission of projecting the National Library of Literature of Tokyo.

The young and recently graduated in Architecture Tôru Sakanishi fulfills the dream of entering the little but prestigious study of the architect Shunke Murai, today at the end of his career and in his day disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, determining figure of the architecture of the twentie Extraordinary Imperial Hotel, unfortunately demolished. When summer arrives in Tokyo, the chief architect decides to transfer the entire team to his summer residence, in the skirts of Mount Asama, so that community work is developed in the middle of nature and in an environment so according to Katsura’s that when cherry trees flourish and the owls one of the characters will remember the harmony of the aforementioned imperial palace and that of the tree of the same name, so peculiar, so peculiar, so peculiar. It will be there where Tôru lives the double founding experience of participating in a great project and of being strangely dealing with the doubts of love and, in turn, of the ephemeral friendship offered by a work colleague.

The sentimental plot overlaps with the disquisitions on the construction and elaboration of the project. Tôru’s relationship with the already veteran in the Uchida-san study is crossed from the chiaroscuros that requires a good story, as is the love triangle that is suggested between the protagonist and the two girls of the study. The teachings on the construction of a home by Murai are masterful (Gropius would have liked, no doubt) and both the newly arrived student and the reader resonate us as the words of a craftsman who explains his technique with simplicity. Undoubtedly, the novel is crossed by a very Wabi Sabi spirit (understanding the imperfection of beauty), but there is so much reference to the trade of architecture that narrative tension is diluted in the pond of the Garden of References to Architects (the biographies of Frank Lloyd or Erik Gunnar Asplund, for example), materials and descriptions of buildings.

As much as the novel has something incontestable architectural (“architecture is not art, it is the reality itself,” says the teacher, a key phrase in the book, which has been weighted by Rafael Moneo), the narration of the “adventure” lets desire in the emotional part. The narrator is difficult to free himself from academicism and his excess of perfection when speaking of architecture, the plot. There is no doubt that Matsuie knows what he’s talking about and who works in an architecture study will be reflected, because as a manual of advice of what good functional architecture should be, the summer house is unbeatable. Two works on architecture coincide in time, the movie The Brutalist and this novel. If in the first the director lacked a good advisor about what was really the architecture of the modern movement, here the author may exceed references. One thing is to count and another to feel.