From: Biniam Haile \(SWE\) (eritrea.lave@comhem.se)
Date: Wed Apr 15 2009 - 15:55:22 EDT
Japanese early-modern architecture/Asmara
This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on April 27, 2007 at
7:22 pm, filed under East and Central Asia, Japan.
As you know, I'm kind of a nut about early-modern/colonial architecture
in Korea.
Which is why I love stuff like this post over at Ampontan. Linked to his
post is this site chock full of early modern architectural properties in
Nara Prefecture, Japan. Fascinating stuff, and probably important from
the perspective of Korean architecture, given how much of Korea's modern
"Western" architectural heritage comes via Japan. You can definitely
spot the similarities in style.
Speaking of Japanese early-modern architecture, I found this line cute
[Oda City: Architecture of Japan]:
Meiji's Japan is probably the one and only nation in this solar system
that inflicted colonial architecture on itself; this was made more
bizarre by the fact that Japan is one of just two Asian countries that
have never been colonized by caucasian imperialists (the other country
is Thailand).
And since we're on the topic of colonial architecture, I recently
happened upon a website [Asmara.nl] dedicated to the architecture of
Asmara [Wikipedia], the capital of the East African state of Eritrea.
Asmara is interesting in that it was built almost entirely from scratch
between 1935 and 1941 by the Italians, who were intent on turning the
city into a symbol of fascism and Italian imperial might. The city
essentially became what Dubai is today-if you were an architect with
ideas-and there were a lot of ideas out there-the Italians were more
than willing to put up the cash to make them come true. What you end up
with is possibly the world's most concentrated collection of Modernist
architecture [UNESCO]:
The rapid transformation of Asmara from a relatively minor town into
Africa's most modern and sophisticated city at that time overlapped with
equally momentous events in the world of design and architecture, which
involved the global proliferation of Modernism and its various forms,
including Futurism, Rationalism, Novecento, and Art Deco. The spirit of
this new age of travel and adventure was embodied in these new
architectural forms. Asmara was an ideal blank canvas on which Italian
architects could practice and realise these modern ideals.
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2007/04/27/japanese-early-modern-architectureas
mara/