Presentation Buddhism and Design Osamu Ishiyama Architect Prof. Waseda University In the summer of year 2000, I first time visited Finland for the event organized by the association. A symposium was held at a village named FISKARS, which was just like a village for arts located in deep and beautiful woods. At that time, I heard about the Argentine Tango from Mr. Yrjana Levanto who is just now attending this symposium. His talk about Finnish fondness on the tango very much provoked my interest, because I felt a strong contrast between tango and the atmosphere surrounding FISKARS that was characterized by woods after woods almost to my flinching. Now, mirroring my impression like that, I would like to talk about why his talk provoked my feeling, a kind of an answer to my own question. Just like my question to Mr. Levant about Argentine Tango in Filand, I would like to present the meaning of "ruins" in our today's daily lives as a key word. As you already know, European contemporary art and design deeply rooted in their history especially in Finland. When history is transferred to architectures, "ruins" obviously emerge. In Europe, many historic ruins, remnants are clearly have remained anywhere almost all cities, towns, villages. So that people there have been always reminded their history with those ruins, and nurtured their daily sense and feeling in their historic surroundings. My interest raised by Mr. Levanto's talk about Argentine tango fad in Finland may be especially rooted to a feeling of "melancholy." "Melancholy" is a terminology we find hard to translate into Japanese. Lately I have found melancholic feeling in common deeply in a good Finnish design rather than renowned quality wooden materials. In the line of this sense, I would like to talk about Buddhism. Properly speaking, Buddhism talk is Mr. Ekuan's repertoire but today he can not attend this session, therefore I would like to borrow his style in talking about what I have found. When it comes to melancholic feeling, I have found it emerges deeply from ruins. As you know, a very special architectural style called "National Romanticism" was established in Finland. I assume that this style was deeply rooted in geopolitical melancholy and historic melancholy. Now I would like to think if ruins in this nature exist in Asia and Japan. Grand Buddhism ruins can be located in India naturally as its birthplace, South East Tibetan cultural regions and Chinese continent through where Buddhism culture was propagated. However, in Japan, no ruins in such sense has existed today, as you already noticed except some historic remnants with sentimental cultural background like the place where Basho composed his noted pieces of poem such as "an old pond, a frog jumped in," "gone the warriors' ambitions were" at the most. Although I am not a Buddhism expert, I believe that those vacancy is not merely because ancient Japanese buildings were built of easily deteriorating wood, but profoundly rooted in Buddhism. Shakyamuni was a believer of transmigration and it led to an idea that the flesh and all material things might perish. Therefore if Shakyamuni alives in our times, his idea might be a little doubtful about design. I assume that almost all people attending here, including myself, cannot say "I am a Buddhist." Contrary to our lesser faithful trend toward religious ideas today, our mindset has been still influenced by Buddhism and some ephemeral ideas unconsciously. What I would like to talk about today by showing slides is a modern ruin, a new type of ruin existing in our daily lives. I can hardly think of architectural design or design in general by ignoring the new type of ruins. The Quietness in our times could be a sort of the Revelation we may be able to detect in on going ruining process of our environment. For example, we have quite wide range of modern ruins from Hiroshima Atomic Dome, Auschwitz, to Ground Zero of 9.11 alike. We have the Quietness in the reality of this ruins and it must be the quietness what we now have to contemplate. I should dare this subject knowingly I may fail to formulate. Please take a look at slides. This is not in Finland but a ruin in Sicily in the era far before Christ was born. We can feel this kind of atmosphere all over Europe where most of todayﾕs cities have been built over the ruins of Roman Empire era. I suppose that the fact in which people always have to live over the ruins has deeply influenced peoplesﾕ mentality and it has associated with the deep melancholy in Finland. This is the ruin of the Angkor Wat in Cambodia, a Buddhism root. The towers of the Angkor Wat are figurative expression of the Himalayan mountains. This is the ruin of the Baion. I donﾕt take the ruin's meaning here but rather would like to pay attention of the ruining situation of them. In South East Asian region in general, the power of nature is tremendous almost violent level, and almost to the extent of tropical vegetation and extreme moisture eating up ruins. This sort of situation may be unbelievable for people from Finland as a most northern country. I must take it as the difference of the emergence of natural forces. This is the Atomic Dome in Hiroshima. I imagine that the quietness human history has never experienced prevailed at the site where 560,000 people were killed in a second. This is a Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald where the Holocaust took place. This is a ruin in our times in a sense. We have to see the fact that people decided to preserve the ruin as a kind of big design. This is a big city named Pnom-Penh. The city was turned into a ruin by 3,500,000 genocide done by extreme communist Polpot. Many spots of he city have been preserved with various meanings as historical sites. Right now I have been working on an architectural project named "Hiroshima House" in cooperation with Hiroshima citizens. Kambodia is the home of a sect of Buddhism and people has been living up to it while in Japan Buddhism has become mere superficial religion. Hiroshima House was given a parcel of land in a corner of the premises of the biggest Buddhism temple in the country named Unamro for building the house. Having noticed difficulties about abundant Buddhism metaphors and allegories to deal with by modern design approach, I decided to design the house with using such allegories. These are the sketches for the house. I worked on these sketches based on the thoughts that the house built in the premises of the temple has to have an expression for average worshipers easy to understand. Here you can see on the left hand side an ordinary Buddhism temple in the city and to the right you can see Hiroshima House. The house was planned to resurrect the city from its literally dead silent condition inflicted by PolPot. A thing on the roof top is a foot, Buddhaﾕs foot. The foot symbolizes Buddhaﾕs west ward travel over the quiet woods which is most popular Buddha story among Buddhists, and they easily understand and are delighted with it. I am afraid that the expression, far away from modern design vocabularies, might be ridiculed by people in Tokyo but I have come to know this is a correct answer to get peopleﾕs understanding to my great astonishment. The house has been hand built by Buddhism priests and many volunteers including students from Japan and all over the world by employing a building method quite different from our conventional engineering. So the building has to figuratively expresses, even for an archbishop as a landlord of the site, a lotus flower, and the quietness in the woods alike. I believe that designers should be responsible to preserve the melancholy different from the nihilism profoundly existing in Buddhism. The quietness, with the meaning different from the one in the woods, created in Hiroshima bombing is suggesting what we have to contemplate and express in a present society by using an approach different from the modern design on which we so far counted upon. Now you are looking at the almost completed house. Under the Buddha's foot, it houses a museum, an orphanage and a wood workshop alike derived form an Buddhism allegory. However I utterly cannot deem, for Kambodian people this is really a Buddha's foot. Secretariat Japan Finland Design Association (Japan) c/o The Finnish Institute in Japan 3-5-39 Minami Azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan 106-8561 c/o GK Graphics Incorporated telephone : 03-5952-6831 facsimile : 03-5952-6832 e-mail : jfda@gk-design.co.jp previous