| This doctoral thesis examines the relationship between modernism and tradition in Japanese architectural ideology in the transwar period of 1931-1955. Initially, modernists struggled against the hybrid "Nihon shumi" or "Japanesque," promoted by senior architects as the style of Japanese national representation in architectural competitions. Over the course of the war and its aftermath, modernists developed an authentic language of architectural representation--a modern Japanese monumentality--that became the dominant architectural style of the postwar era as well.;Six events are analyzed: five competitions and one outside intervention, that of the German modern architect Bruno Taut. These events were crucial to Japanese modernists in reassessing their views of Japanese architectural tradition, modernism, national identity, and monumentality. The competitions in which these issues were explored were as follows: the 1931 Imperial Household Museum Competition; the 1939 Chureito Competition for memorial towers to the "loyal dead" of the China War; the 1942 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere Commemorative Building Competition; the 1943 Japan-Thailand Cultural Hall Competition; and the 1949 Hiroshima Peace Center Competition. These competitions ranged from the fantastic and unbuildable to the officially recognized and well-funded, yet all were significant in the modernists' efforts to create an architectural embodiment of a modern national identity.;Although orthodox Japanese architectural histories divide the prewar and postwar periods into discrete units, they are addressed here as points on an ideological continuum. One important figure bridging both periods was Tange Kenzo. In his wartime projects, Tange synthesized Corbusian modernism, western hierarchical and dramatic techniques, and Japanese historicizing references to Shinto shrines and Imperial palaces. In the postwar period, Tange emerged with his project for the Hiroshima Peace Center, treated here as the culmination of his wartime design experimentation. With the monumental and internationally acclaimed Hiroshima Peace Center complex, Tange assumed the unofficial role of the Japanese architect of state in the postwar era. |
