PS12 Architecture and Design on the Pacific Rim

The Queensland city of Gold Coast has the most aggressively densified Pacific edges of any Australasian city, its profile moving eastwards from low-density urban sprawl to a seaside wall of high-rise apartments that overshadows the long ocean beach. This orientation, however, followed several decades of colonial occupation in which the Pacific coast was an outer edge to an inland pastoral territory that gave way initially to plantation farming of various crops. The first seaside dwelling in Southport (now in the city’s north) was originally built as the furthest outpost of an inland sheep station. The late-nineteenth-century embrace of the seaside (accounted for generally in cultural history), compounded by intense real estate speculation and government investment in rail and road infrastructure, accompanied a new series of exchanges played out in architecture and urbanism: with the Pacific islands and the US West Coast in the first instance, to participation in the Pacific Theater of the Second World War, to imbrication with Japanese and Chinese economic activity since the 1980s. Expanding on observations and analysis made in Gold Coast (2018), this paper will explore the function of this city as a test of relationships between Australia and its Pacific interlocutors over the course of a long twentieth century. (The title of this paper invokes a study of Japanese investment in the city.) It also considers how the shape of the city-territory withdrew from the Pacific in the first phases of British, colonial occupation, before returning to that edge with a vengeance—a shift from ecology to economy, reflecting on the long-term habitation of the present-day Gold Coast by the Saltwater people. It considers how the city’s organisation and its architecture tracks shifts in the attitude towards the Pacific as a moment in a semi-global architectural history.

Ranma—or carved-wood transom panels—are distinctive features of traditional Japanese architecture. Shortly after 1900, several houses built in southern California attempted to adopt such Japanese features. The earliest was the Japanese House at the Huntington Library’s Japanese Garden. 

The Japanese House was originally commissioned and built in Pasadena in 1903-4 by George Turner Marsh (1857-1932), an Australian-born connoisseur and merchant of Japanese culture. Following the success of his Japanese Tea Garden at the 1894 Midwinter Exposition, Marsh created the Japanese House, later selling it to Henry Huntington. The house features traditional post-and-lintel construction, a curved roof, sliding screens, and conventional ranma. 

At about the same time, architects Greene and Greene were designing houses in southern California that also drew on Japanese architectural elements: James Culbertson house (1902-15), Blacker house (1907-1909), and Gamble house (1908). The Greenes had a clear understanding of traditional Japanese elements, and adapted the ranma with innovative creativity. Interiors incorporated long, horizontal lintels, picture rails, and decorative transoms or freizes, with painting and sculpture to unify the space. 

In his book Japanese Homes and Their Surroudings (1886), Edward Morse illustrated seven ranma under the category of "Ceiling, Ramma, Windows”. He described ranma as useful for ventilation, but they also served as non-functional ornament in an otherwise spare interior. Ranma soon became a popular device for adding Japanese taste into Western residences: Bunkio Matsuki house (1894) and Knapp house (1898) in Massachusetts. Catalogs for Matsuki’s Japanese art-goods auctions also showed 13 ranma for sale in 1903, and 14 in 1904. 

Interestingly, ranma translated differently on the East Coast than in the West. Frank Lloyd Wright did not adopt ranma, though he understood its spirit as reflected in his conception of spatial flow, with continuous horizontal lines for unified space, preceding the modern movement in Europe.

International expositions in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries were important venues for showcasing a nation’s progress or development.  Within the context of colonialism, these world’s fairs were deployed by the colonial powers as evidences of justifying their presence in the colonies. Using the Philippines as a case study, this presentation particularly inspects the architectural representations of the archipelago nation during the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle.  Through a transhistorical and transnational analysis, the presentation will inspect the architecture of the Philippine pavilions, the mode of production of these designs, and the politics surrounding the displays. By comparing the representations of the Philippine pavilions and villages during and after American-colonial rule, the presentation seeks to interrogate the changing Philippine-American relationship during the twentieth century.  Furthermore, the architecture of the Philippine displays also underscore the shifting narratives of how the architecture of a foreign nation is to be depicted on the West Coast of the U.S. in light of the transpacific migration between the Philippines and the U.S. between the 1900s to the 1960s.  

This paper focuses on the protection of tangible and intangible World War II heritage on the West Coast. It uses a transnational, transpacific lens to address the conservation of military ruins and landscapes in Alaska, Hawaiʻi, and British Columbia. A primary objective is to study the rhetorical reframing of World War II and the ways in which preservation policy and immovable cultural property law are mobilized in the United States and Canada to redress wartime injustice. Secondly, it traces "transborder" redress movements which emerged as a response to the unlawful wartime detention and incarceration of members of the Japanese diaspora on the West Coast and Alaska Natives in the Pribilof Islands. By the 1970s, demands evolved to include the restitution of civil rights, apology, and monetary compensation for the mass removal and confinement of citizens (Nisei), non-citizens (Issei) and Alaska Natives from the Pacific Coast. In the 1980s and 1990s, the acknowledgement of World War II confinement sites in the Lower 48 states became central to making redress visible to the Japanese diaspora through historic site designations and annual pilgrimages. I aim to underscore how both nation-states and historically harmed groups mobilized around the official acknowledgement and protection of World War II ruins and landscapes using three empirical cases: (1) Funter Bay near Juneau, Southeast Alaska; (2) Honouliuli National Monument in Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi and; (3) Tashme Internment Camp in Sunshine Valley, British Columbia, Canada which were operated by the U.S. and Canadian military from 1942-1946 and confined members of the Japanese diaspora in addition to Alaska Native Aleuts, Okinawan, Japanese, Korean, Italian and Filipino prisoners of war captured in the Pacific Theatre. These case studies reflect how laws during wartime pertaining to national defense and security were not pursued uniformly within national borders and former U.S. territories.

The Japanese kawaii culture in art, anime, and fashion has in recent years charmed its way across borders to East Asia and beyond. Compared with the Anglo-American cute (derived from the word acute, consequently with the connotations of cunning and shrewd), the Japanese kawaii (with an etymological link to the word kawaisō, meaning poor, pitiable, or pitiful) is more complex. Manifested in art, its sundry variants include: rebellious kawaii (e.g. Nara Yoshitomo’s cigarette-smoking girl character), exuberant kawaii (e.g. Yayoi Kusama’s dotted pumpkins), and deformed kawaii (e.g. Takashi Murakami’s sharp-toothed, three-eyed kiki). In architecture, using examples of SANAA and alike, critic Tomoharu Makabe theorizes twenty-two essential kawaii traits, including imbalance, unevenness, smallness, and strangeness. In practice, though, what modes of agency are possible for buildings to operate within an aesthetic generally characterized by vulnerability and passivity; and for kawaii architecture to spread beyond its cultural/geographical perimeters?

This paper centers on the overseas kawaii architecture in the Pacific Rim with nods to local cultural traditions. Drawing on related literature re cuteness, I examine the trifold functioning/meaning of kawaii architecture, as 1) a mode of regard—the viewer proffers a gaze on architecture that is charged with empathy, intimacy, and emotion; 2) a discourse of love—thereof the sentiments of affection and tenderness makes a building lovable; and 3) a form of escapism—playing with different layers of reality, kawaii architecture entices the viewer into a whimsical, magical, and fairytale-like world. Moving from aesthetics to affect, I show the “soft (emotive) power” of kawaii architecture (to allure, charm, etc.), which breaks the dichotomy of the powerful and powerless. Finally, I return to the origin of kawaii to look at today’s building designs that, with an enchanting mix of innocence and sincerity, takes kawaii architecture to yet a cuter level.