Contamination: the influence of japanese architecture on european avant-gardes

There is a widespread consensus among architectural historians that the cultural and aesthetic revolution carried out by the avant-garde artistic currents at the end of the nineteenth century is a strictly Western issue. ‘Western’ means European culture of Greco-Roman derivation. Nevertheless, it is probably safe to say that when Westerners arrived in Japan during the Meiji Restoration era (1868-1889), Japan was already a ‘modern’ country. Western thought originated from the ontology of Being and metaphysical thought. In an antithetical way, the East has built its culture on a perception of reality that is less theoretical and more pragmatic. One culture has sought dualism and domination over nature, the other one, integration with it, and has considered dualities complementary terms. These differences have determined divergent aesthetic and formal outcomes. In the figurative arts, the contamination has occurred with greater force than in architecture because European architects found in Japan the exact characteristics of absoluteness they sought in modernity, though reluctant to admit it. Despite this, because of contingent and synchronic circumstances between Japan’s opening to the West and European society’s disquiet in the nineteenth century, when the avant-gardes artists met the Japoneries, they were fascinated and surprised.