One of the most frequently quoted essays on architecture was written in 1933, curiously, by a Japanese author who had no expertise in architecture. What Junichiro Tanizaki did have was an unerring ability to describe the experience of architecture. After recently finishing a book on Phenomenology, I wonder now if a true writer is needed to properly express the sensation of an architectural space.
Tanizaki's essay, in Praise of Shadows, is just such an essay. It delves into shadows of all sorts, from those on the surface such as dark wood, pottery, food, and even clothing, to those deep within the central room of a temple, or in alcoves for displaying scrolls within houses far from shoji screens. He finds beauty where one would least expect to find it -- in the dim places light almost fails to reach. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the fact that he starts his essay on aesthetics describing, of all things, toilets. Yet Tanizaki's prose, even in translation, is a moving paean to the Japanese out-house:
[T]he Japanese toilet is truly a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden .... I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kanto region, with its long, narrow windows at the floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones.
Throughout the essay, Tanizaki contrasts Japanese traditions with modern Western views. The bathroom brings out a stark contrast. Westerners, in Tanizaki's view, "regard the toilet as utterly unclean and avoid even the mention of it in polite conversation." While Tanizaki admits a traditional Japanese bathroom is harder to clean, he argues the Japanese have a more sensible approach, and most importantly, a more aesthetic approach:
No matter how fastidious one may be or how diligently one may scrub, dirt will show, particularly on a floor of wood or tatami matting. And so here too it turns out to be more hygienic and efficient to install modern sanitary facilities-- tile and a flush toilet .... Yet what need is there to remind us so forcefully of the issue of our own bodies .... The cleanliness of what can be seen only calls up the more clearly thoughts of what cannot be seen. In such places the distinction between the clean and the unclean is best left obscure, shrouded in a dusky haze.
Tanizaki laments the Japanese adoption of all things Western, wondering if left to their own devices, in isolation on their island, if the Japanese would not have come up with their own airplane, their own electric lights, and their own pens, each more in tune and sensitive to Japanese aesthetics. Even paper reflects this difference:
Western paper is to us no more than something to be used, while the texture of Chinese and Japanese paper gives us a certain feeling of warmth, of calm and repose .... Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall. It gives off no sound when it is crumpled or folded, it is quiet and pliant to the touch as the leaf of a tree.
He contrasts polished western tableware with the preferred "dark, smokey patina" on Japanese tea kettles. Every household in Japan "has had to scold an insensitive maid who has polished away the tarnish so patiently waited for." It is the same with the Chinese preference for Jade, a stone with "faintly muddy light, like the crystallized air of the centuries, melting dimly, dully back, deeper and deeper" as opposed to the bright sparkle of a diamond. Here, he notes:
We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity. Of course this ... is in fact the glow of grime. In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling.
The presence of time is the key to understanding Tanizaki's aesthetic preferences:
Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it ... we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize ... the sheen that calls to mind the past that made [it]. Living in these old houses among these old objects is in some mysterious way a source of peace and repose.
In a section that eerily reminded me of Alvar Aalto's Paimio Sanitarium, built at the exact same time as Tanizaki penned these words, he wrote that
Japanese hospitals need not be so sparking white, that the walls, uniforms, and equipment might better be done in softer, more muted colors. Certainly the patients would be more reposed where they are able to lie on tatami matting surrounded by the sand-colored walls of a Japanese room.
To further illustrate the prescience of Tanizaki's words, it's worth taking a brief side track to examine Aalto's hospital. Aalto first rose to prominence after the construction of Paimio Sanitarium in 1929-32, because Aalto was one of the first architects to consider the viewpoint of a patient in bed, and noted that ceilings should be painted a dark color to reduce eye strain:
Aalto also famously designed the sinks in each room to minimize the harsh sounds of water splashing by ensuring it struck the sink at an acute angle:
Despite Tanizaki's insistence on the very Japanese-ness of his preferred aesthetic, it is curious how often Finland and Japan, two countries on opposite sides of the world with presumably quite distinct cultures, are linked. Even in current literature, such as Murakami's 2014 book, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, the main character spent an entire chapter on a trip to Finland.
After toilets, wood, metal, food, and clothing, Tanizaki directly addresses traditional Japanese architecture. He contrasts the Western use of bricks, windows, and light weight roofs with the massive Japanese roof, heavy with tiles or thick with thatch, and deep eaves. Tanizaki notes that given the building materials, a deep eave was necessary to keep out the wind and rain.
Tanizaki is particularly good at describing the sensation of trying to see in a dark room. In describing the dim innermost room of a temple, he writes "I blink in uncertainty at this dreamlike luminescence, feeling as though some misty film were blunting my vision." In a dark private room in a restaurant in Kyoto, lit only by candle light, he writes that this darkness was "different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes."
Admitting dark rooms are not pragmatic, Tanizaki still revels in the aesthetic experience.
A light room would no doubt have been more convenient for us, too, than a dark room. But the quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty's end.
Tanizaki also has some painfully dated and rather unfortunate musings on gender and especially skin color, that give lie to the beautiful lyricism of his writing, exposing the dangers of aestheticism in politics. He drafted the essay only six short years before the Imperial Japan of World War Two reared its ugly head.
Yet there is no doubt that his vivid descriptions of darkness have incredibly value to architecture. This is especially true today, when the fashion for pure white interior room design has reached yet another nadir. Do you have have a loft with old bricks, roughly textured with years of use? Paint them white. Old growth clear heart no longer available redwood on your ceilings? Paint it white. Thick oak floor boards, full of years of use? Paint them white. Brass cabinet handles, with a patina formed from thousands of hands? White. You may choose one or two contrasting items, not too large, to have color, but preferably they be black.
Erase the character of the wood, stone, metal -- eradicate all signs of grime. And with it, the history of the surfaces, rendering a blindingly white void within which you can forever keep surfaces perfectly clean, for fear that the sensation of purity may leave you. I prefer Tanizaki's world, with its grime, patina, and unavoidable sheen of antiquity.
At the end of the essay, Tanizaki admits he sounds like a grumbling old man, but pleads with the reader that:
In the house of literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one house where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.