WORK IN PROGRESS
Antonin Raymond: The Divine Word Seminar Chapel (1966)
Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan
Part of the research project: "If you See Buddha, Kill Him: Japanese Brutalist Architecture and Zen."
Brutalist architecture emerged during the 1950s in England and is characterized by raw unpainted concrete and mostly geometric forms. Brutalism has sometimes been associated with Zen Buddhism. The rather counterintuitive idea makes more sense when considering that Brutalism is indeed widespread in Japan.
Associations with Zen are usually directed at Tadao Ando’s Church of Light (1989). A perhaps even better example is Antonin Raymond’s little-known Divine Word Seminary Chapel in Nagoya built thirty-three years earlier.
Raymond was of Czech origin, spent forty-four years in Japan, and is seen as one of the founders of modern Japanese architecture. Contrary to Ando, Raymond has no recognizable style, which might be the reason for his relative obscurity. However, when Raymond uses concrete to create a sculptural imagery similar to the massive language of the later Le Corbusier, the result can indeed be explored in terms of “Brutalist Zen.”
Raymond built the Divine Word Seminary Chapel twelve years after his St. Anselm Meguro Church in Tokyo (1954), and two years after Kenzo Tange's St. Mary Cathedral in Tokyo (1964).
While Brutalist architecture is not necessarily more frequent in Japan, Japan has produced some of the style’s most iconic buildings. Second, while, globally, Brutalism appears more extensively in public housing, civic institutions, and utopian projects, in Japan there is a striking number of individual residential units in Brutalist style. Many of Japanese Brutalist house incorporate gardens.
Like in a Zen temple, natural light is filtered through paper screens, which enhances subtlety.
Light is not decorative—it is expressive and contemplative.
照
For comparison: a door in Le Corbusier's
Cité radieuse in Marseille
Le Corbusier had moved away, after the war, from frame-based architecture to more massive and sculpturally expressive forms. Raymond blamed Corbusier for his use of concrete in projects such as Ronchamp and Chandigarh.
David B. Stewart. The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture, pp.168-9.
However, while Raymond promoted a strictly modernist architecture, his anti-sculpturalism was not consistent. The Seminary adopts the massive, sculptural language of the Ronchamp Chapel.
As the concrete is left unpainted, it absorbs the signs of weathering and ruination. With weathering and time, concrete gains character. Its texture can adopt intricate patterns through staining.
Concrete can have an organic feel that can go from natural or sleek to rustic. It is similar to weathering steel (Corten steel), which is widely used in architecture and design.
The idea of an exposed concrete surface seems to fit in with Japanese ideas of traditional décor. Concrete walls resemble Japanese sekihi (石碑), or stone monuments that can be found all over Japan. Sekihi are upright rocks with one flat surface, and their inscriptions most often convey historical information, poems, or philosophical messages. Sekihi are characterized by their simplicity, naturalism, and imperfection, and have the beauty of aged or weathered objects.
Another traditional item that seems to fit in with modern concrete are the stonewalls in Japanese castles, especially when they are built using the "cut" (kiri-hagi or kiri-komi hagi, 切込接) technique that creates a smooth and jointed surface with minimal gaps. On the picture is a wall inside the Imperial Palace Garden (Kyoko Gaien) in Tokyo.
Like Zen architecture, Brutalism creates a spiritual atmosphere not through signifiers but through spatial compositions (solid and void, form and absence), and light.
“There is not another thing to see except the play of spaces,” writes Reyner Banham in one of the first articles on “The New Brutalism” in England (1955).
Concrete walls enclose space by, on the one hand, being absolute and physically concrete; on the other, by being abstract and ungraspable. Tadao Ando uses concrete as a material “because in this way walls become abstract, are negated, and approach the ultimate limit of space. Their actuality is lost, and only the space they enclose gives a sense of reality existing.”
The use of concrete has been compared to "Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘colourless writing’ in literature." Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture, 2012.
In the West, there have been recurring waves of image bans and asceticism regarding furnishings in churches, but they have rarely led to lasting actions. As phenomenologist Gernot Böhme finds, “the dogmatic behavior of churches stands in a peculiar contrast to the reality of ecclesiastical spaces." Japanese Brutalist churches seem to do the job that the Western tradition has rarely finished. They stage the numinous through the creation of atmospheres in ecclesiastical spaces.
Concrete is inherently sculptural and thus expressive. The aesthetic language of concrete can be one of unfiltered and basic truths that manifest themselves in sculptural architectural forms. However, they are not symbolic or transcendental.
As a result, the aesthetic experience is arguably more direct than anything that could be achieved through symbols because the latter need to be deciphered.
Concrete is molten stone
(Louis Kahn)
Brutalism is the last formal language of modernism before the advent of postmodernism. After one century, the modern vocabulary (Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Realism…) had exhausted itself and began to recycle older motives in a postmodern fashion. But before this happened, Brutalism emerged as the last defiant, truculent, and at times awkward movement. As if anticipating the “humanist” postmodern turn in aesthetics to come, it seems to concentrate in itself the last remaining bits of elitist and provocative modern energy to make the ultimate modern statement: “I am brutal, so what?”
When Arthur Koestler tried to grasp the meaning of Zen he referred to the rock garden. He could as well have referred to Brutalist architecture:
"Zen is to religion what a 'flat garden' is to a garden. It knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock garden knows no flowers, herbs, or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ, its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock garden which symbolize now a mountain, now a fleeing tiger." (A Stink of Zen, 1960: 15)
"Concrete can make the forces in a building flow, forces for example, between a column and a beam” (Henley, Redefining Brutalism).
"In the dead tree, dragon murmurs are not yet ended."
Blue Cliff Record, Second Case.
These buildings might be pleasing, but they don’t aspire to be pleasing. They simply are the way they are, which is a Zen principle: “One should not strive.” Striving to be awakened blocks your path to awakening. If you force beauty you’ll end up with ugliness (kitsch).
Zen is brutal. Hitting with canes, beating, and slamming doors to bring about enlightenment are common fare. Zen is not about talking but about feeling, and (controlled) beating might be one method.
天地不仁
"Heaven and Earth are ruthless."
Laozi, Dao De Jing, Chapter 5
“If any monk comes to Ummon driveling of eternity and infinity, he will soon let him have the taste of a stick” (Blyth)
The statement “You meet a Buddha? You kill him!" is from Linji, the leading figure of Chan (Zen) Buddhism in the Tang dynasty (618-907) whose teachings are typical of the iconoclastic spirit of Zen. Back to top
Image of an inkblot spilled on calligraphy, which appears on the cover of a translation of The Book of Serenity (従容錄, Shōyō roku), one of the major kōan collections from 1224. What does the inkblot mean? This is Zen Brutalism.
Picture in Heine 2007.
Brutalism is “real” in the Lacanian sense of "that which resists symbolization."
Nanzan Campus (Raymond original)
For more photos of Japanese Brutalism go here
Nanzan Campus (Raymond original)
Nanzan Shubunken 宗文研 building (Raymond Office)
Stairs in the Seminar Chapel
Alumni Center, Nanzan Campus, Raymond original
Bibliography
Ando, Tadao. 1982. "From the Periphery to Architecture" in Japan Architect 57, 12-20.
Banham, Reyner. 1955. “The New Brutalism Reyner Banham” in The Architectural Review December, 354–61.
Blyth, R. H. 1966. Zen and Zen Classics Vol. 4: Mumonkan. Tokyo: Hokuseido.
Böhme, Gernot. 1998. Anmutungen über das Atmospärische. Stuttgart: Tertium.
Forty, Adrian. 2012. Concrete and Culture: A Material History, Reaktion Books.
Harries, Karsten. 1982. “Building and the Terror of Time” in Perspecta 19, 59–69.
Heine, Steven. 2007. Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up. Oxford University Press.
Henley, Simon. 2017. Redefining Brutalism. London: Royal Institute of British Architects.
Koestler, Arthur. 1960. “A Stink of Zen” in Encounter, 13-33.
Smithson, Alison, Peter Smithson, and Theo Crosby. 1955. “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Design 25: 1.
Stewart, David B. 1987. The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture: 1868 to the Present. Kodansha.
Tulett, Paul. 2024. Brutalist Japan. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
