On Minoru Takeyama
Minoru Takeyama’s life has gone through several cycles which have carried him far from Japan and then back again. This progression, although not always very smooth, has left him a very sophisticated observer, but one who has kept his curiosity. It has also given him a unique personal language, ‘Takeyamese,” of which my mother-in-law once said “you feel after reading it that you didn’t understand a single sentence, yet somehow you get the general sense of what he is trying to say.”
Although I publish a magazine on design, the truth is that I have always been as interested in the character of designers as in their work. Sometimes there is a remarkable consonance between the two, so that it is impossible really to understand one without the other. Of the architects I know personally, George Homsey and Lars Lerup come to mind in this regard. Other times, there is so much dissonance: the work is good, but the person is so odd or awful, or vice versa. Sometimes the work is not the point. Still other times it is hard to find the personality except in the work.
In the case of Takeyama, it is different again: the buildings seem to occur in parallel, the best of them providing a further but not indispensable commentary (that is, he can say it and build it) on what he observed about his clients and their projects. There is always a joking aspect to this, I sense: not mocking them, but looking with curiosity and humor at their situations. This is also a Danish trait, and perhaps explains why Takeyama fit so easily in Copenhagen.
Since I have only visited one of his buildings, my comments on his work are necessarily second hand. Some projects which come to mind are the Hotel Beverly Tom in Tomakomai, the Pepsi Factory in Mikasa, and the Nara Candy Factory.
What these quite different buildings have in common is that they all express what we imagine to be their inner life, their reality. The hotel, which my aunt would describe as looking like “a microphone,’’ seems to signal its baser possibilities to the passing ships. The candy factory appears to be run by a kindly (and wealthy) uncle. He’s grown rich at our expense. of course, but the money’s been put to good use. The Pepsi Factory, on the other hand, must be run by engineers: a celebration of bottling, not the contents. This must have been the year Pepsi won the Deming Prize.
I think that the Candy Factory is his best building, first because of the originality of his interpretation of what a candy factory represents, especially to children (only Roald Dahl and the movie I’m Alright Jack have done as well, although the latter is strictly an adult vision), and second because of the care with which he has realized it. Its understanding and blend of understatement and flamboyance remind me of Michael Graves’s Alessi tea kettle, his insightful and good-humored interpretation of one aspect of the English Tea Ceremony.
Takeyama has used the craft aspect of Japanese construction, the potential for creativity during construction, to make something of elements like the tilework, instead of squandering all that talent on mere repetition or banality. (Thomas Gordon Smith tried this in his house in Richmond; Chris Alexander’s work has a similar impulse.) The Candy Factory is an instance of Johan Huizinga’ s notion of serious play, a particular trait of children, so this ability to draw on the spontaneity that is always latent in the construction process (in America to provide amusement and income for attorneys) is in the spirit of his interpretation.
The most personal or self-expressive of his buildings may be his Nakamura Brain Surgery Hospital, which grew out of his relationship with the client, the surgeon who operated on his neural aneurysm, an operation in which Takeyama had a one in twenty chance of death, and with whom he later traveled, accompanying the surgeon from museum to museum as he indulged his interest in human feet. Reading an old Durrenmatt novel reminded me both of this peculiarity and how the probability of death and the sense of the inexorable dwindling of time as one awaits one’s fate put one on more intimate (perhaps oppressively intimate) terms with space.
For Americans, Takeyama’s most famous buildings are the two nightclubs on the cover of a Charles Jencks book popular when I was a student. Not having been to Tokyo, I once thought these buildings were enormous. I still haven’t seen them, but I now realize they are probably narrow and diminutive. (Modernism has survived in Tokyo because very few of the buildings are large enough to be oppressive.) I had a similar revelation when I visited Takeyama’s almost oppressively small office in Tokyo.
When I saw the slides of Takeyama’s more expansive studio in Sapporo, I thought: this is a piece of Denmark he’s brought back with him. Also, it has a kind of pre-Rubik’s cube, made of plywood, on the roof. This I take to be an emblem of architectural transformation, perhaps one old enough to be a kind of Metabolist gesture. It must be a ruin by now.
The second time I met Takeyama, he was interested in holograms. Maybe this was a reaction to trying to do hinged plywood transformations on a snow-covered roof in Sapporo. This is the same man who had wrapped his mother’s house (in Sapporo) in corrugated metal (long before everyone in Los Angeles plus David Ireland began to do so), so I can only assume he knew what he was doing.
Notes
I wrote this for a publication of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, marking Minoru Takeyama’s Plym Distinguished Professorship in the academic year 1989–1990. My authorial credit describes me as his friend, and I added that Charles Jencks once said to me, when I identified myself as such, that “any friend of Minoru Takeyama is a friend of mine.” Jencks predeceased Takeyama, who died in 2020. which is too bad, as Jencks was the man to write his obituary.
The photos are from the publication. I also wrote about Takeyama in 2012 in an article, “My Postmodernists,” on the short-lived TraceSF blog journal, the archive of which I’ve kept alive these past dozen years. It cites his interest in semiology and his wariness of modernism’s “international” ambitions contra the local. Jencks called his work postmodern, but I think it’s really post-Metabolist and on occasion almost vernacular.
I owe thanks to the San Francisco architect Bob Herman for writing a memoir piece on Takeyama, his Harvard GSD classmate, that mentions this publication and lists me as one of the contributors. It led me to find it and turn it into this post.
