坂茂さんがNew Yorkerに登場

Profiles AUGUST 11, 2014 ISSUE
Paper Palaces
The architect of the dispossessed meets the one per cent.
BY DANA GOODYEAR

雑誌New Yorkerの最新号で、今年建築界で最も権威のある賞Pritzker Prizeを受賞した坂茂さんが取り上げられていました。今週末開館となるAspen Art Museumを中心に、坂茂さんの経歴全般をカバーしています。記事の中で、Aspen—a city, the saying goes, where the millionaires have been driven out by billionairesとあったように、Aspenは大金持ちの避暑地なんでしょうね。毎年雑誌AtlanticなどがAspen Idea Festivalを開いているところでもあります。



最初の動画でも述べていることですが、坂さんの特徴は一部の金持ちのためではない一般大衆のための建築を目指しているところですね。The architect of the dispossessed meets the one per cent.という副題はそこからきています。One percentはここでは人口の1％の大金持ちのことです。

“Architects mostly work for privileged people, people who have money and power,” Ban said recently. “Power and money are invisible, so people hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. I love to make monuments, too, but I thought perhaps we can use our experience and knowledge more for the general public, even for those who have lost their houses in natural disasters.” One employee on the Tokyo staff devotes the majority of his time to disaster-relief projects, and others pitch in as needed. Ban claims not to worry about balancing the books. (“That’s why he has partners,” Maltz says.) The two sides of Ban’s practice are symbiotic. His commissions pay for his pro-bono work, and the pro bono serves both as a testing ground and as a powerful marketing tool. “He is both deeply concerned about humanity and also sees it as a way to uniquely advance his career,” Hawkinson said. “They help each other.”

建築界で異端であることは下記の部分からも伺えます。“I do not know the meaning of ‘Green Architect.’ I have no interest in ‘Green,’ ‘Eco,’ and ‘Environmentally Friendly.’ I just hate wasting things.”と環境に配慮した建築さえも不十分とするところにすごみを感じます。

Toyo Ito, another Japanese Pritzker winner, wrote in an e-mail, “Many architects in the world today are competing only for the beauty of the architectural form. Ban-san’s attempt is a counter-punch against these architects, and I think he represents a new model of a ‘socially responsible’ architect.” To many in the field, though, Ban represents a conundrum. “I don’t know exactly what to do with him, really,” Kenneth Frampton, a noted architecture critic who teaches at Columbia, told me. “Underlying his work is an idea of a minimalism based on the notion of energy and ecological sustainability. He’s connected to the Japanese tradition, but also very influenced by America and a Yankee-tinker attitude, which was Buckminster Fuller’s approach. It’s a value-free technical performance, detached from anything you could call a critical cultural position.” Like Fuller, who was obsessed by structural and engineering questions but indifferent to the dialogue around aesthetics, Ban labors at his private puzzles and patents his inventions. Whatever meanings may be embedded in his materials—globalism, consumerism, thrift—he will not be the one to tease them out. “I am not reflecting on it,” he says. Another time, he wrote to me, “I do not know the meaning of ‘Green Architect.’ I have no interest in ‘Green,’ ‘Eco,’ and ‘Environmentally Friendly.’ I just hate wasting things.”

まあ、建築に興味のない方にはピンとこないかもしれないので、一般向けエピソードを。ハリケーンカトリーナに被災地ではブラッドピットが設立した被災者支援団体が坂茂さんに建築の依頼をしたそうです。セレブが関わるとすごさを実感できますね（苦笑）

Several weeks ago, I visited the single unit that Ban built in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, in collaboration with Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, after Hurricane Katrina. The house, a taupe-colored box with a triangular roof, on eight-foot concrete piles, was missing its front porch and the staircase leading up to the front door, owing to rot. I entered the back way, which meant passing underneath the house, where a network of vines dangling limply from a trellis attempted to establish themselves as a green wall, and up a steep flight of stairs to a sliding glass door. The house belonged to Ann Parfaite, a seventy-two-year-old retired financial-aid administrator, who was inside serving bread with butter and syrup to her grandchildren. Her old house, where she’d lived since 1966, had entirely washed away. She had paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—partly covered by her insurance money and a forgivable loan from Make It Right—for the new one. “People say, ‘You live in one of the Brad Pitt houses,’ ” she said. “I say, ‘No, I live in my own house.’ ”

この記事では坂さんの生い立ちから建築を学び始めたころも紹介しています。Cooper Unionというところで学んだようです。“I felt that it was important culturally for them to know how important Proust was to thinking about space,”とプルーストの『失われた時を求めて』を読んだエピソードのところです。英語教師でも読んだ人がほとんどいない小説なのに。。。（滝汗）

（サイトの説明）
1859年創立。創立者ペーター・クーパーの理念である「教育の無償提供」を実践し続けている名門私立大学。扱うのは建築、美術、工学の3分野で、いずれも全米トップレベルの質、教授陣、施設を誇る。ニューヨーク・マンハッタンに位置するキャンパスは五つのビルからなり、いわゆるキャンパスにあたる敷地はない。人種・性別・宗教による差別を一切排除し、学費は全額奨学金で賄われるため、学生の負担金はゼロ。大学の運営は卒業生からの寄付金で成り立っている。ジョン・ヘイダック（建築家）、坂茂（建築家）、トム・ウェッセルマン（ポップアーティスト）などが学んだほか、トーマス・エジソンが若いころ、ここで化学の授業を受けたことでも知られる

The Cooper Union curriculum was rooted in the rational modernism of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, with flourishes of Dada. One seminar consisted of Peter Eisenman reading “In Search of Lost Time” aloud to the students for several hours at a time. “I felt that it was important culturally for them to know how important Proust was to thinking about space,” Eisenman, who now teaches at Yale, told me. Hejduk asked students to design a house in the mood of Juan Gris, and to study a piece of fruit over the course of a semester, as it decayed. A self-styled poet, Hejduk also insisted that architecture students take a poetry workshop. Ban says he was often asked to read his poems aloud, as examples for the class. “Surprisingly, I was very good,” he told me. “My poems were always short.” At night, he tutored his friends in structural engineering. One of them was another transfer student, Dean Maltz, who later became his New York partner. “He just understood it intuitively, better than any architect in our class,” Maltz told me. “He’s very calculating—I don’t mean strategically calculating, though he is—but calculations are what goes on in his head.”

7000語の長い記事ですが、このような長さの記事を読めるようになることは、英検1級後の一つの学習目標にしていいと思います。これくらいの長さだとより深くトピックについて学ぶことができます。