Observing Change: Un-Making and Re-Making Architecture History in Early 20th Century Japan

In this paper I introduce a theory of architectural change and causality generated by Japanese architects, historians, theorists and preservationists at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Western art history, the process of architectural un-making invariably presupposes the generative potential of re-making and this constitutive pair has generated some of the discipline’s most lasting ideas including historical return, revival, survival and substitution. The paper focuses on how architectural scholars in Japan like the noted designer and theorist Itō Chūta translated and interpolated these conceptual and disciplinary issues against their Eurocentric biases to create the first world history of architecture in Japanese and bolster the mission of the new Japanese Empire. Looking at a series of drawings and articles made in support of this project, I focus on how new epistemological frameworks for observing and knowing processes of change challenged the paucity of empiricist research carried out by European researchers. Histories of un-making in Japanese architecture have traditionally focused on the omnipresent reality of natural disaster or the ceremonial reconstruction of Shinto shrines, however, this paper shows that scholar-bureaucrats introduced a more politically interested theorization of change that at once “un-made” Eurocentric models of history and “re-made” Asia by legitimizing imperial expansion.