difficult. By establishing a programme of contemporary public art which could occupy the space for a limited period of time, the ‘fourth plinth’ avoids some of the issues of permanent monuments. Certain of the proposals, however, do still fulfil the function of monumentality and remembrance, if in a different manner to the conventional military narrative. Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle occupied the plinth in 2010 before a public appeal funded its acquisition and permanent home at the UK National Maritime Museum in Greenwich; it memorializes global trade and colonialism by presenting a model of Nelson’s ship Victory with masts created from canvas influenced by Indonesian Batik.
Other exhibits on the plinth included an egalitarian project by Anthony Gormley who literally gave a platform to some 100 contributors in One &
Other. More interesting, however, is the work by Marc Quinn of Alison Lapper Pregnant in which the conventional language of the naturalistic representation of human form is applied to a non-traditional subject: a pregnant woman with physical disabilities. The white marble statue stood in stark contrast to the strongly militaristic male occupants of the other plinths, positioning her as being every bit as heroic and worthy of celebration.
Complicating the narrative around monumentality has its roots in postcolonial understandings of the world whereby the assumptions made by earlier generations of Western colonialists can still be found in our institutions.
Decolonization is a process, one of giving voice to those denied it, of recognizing the persistence of ideologies which deny agency to non-Western societies and individuals in forming our worldviews. It is a process of making aware and redressing balances, and a project we are only just beginning.
would be preserved in situ and those which no longer serve their original function and would be demolished. They tend to be either the houses of significant figures (such as modernist architect Kunio Mayekawa, who trained under Le Corbusier) or representatives of important building types such as a public bath-house, koan police box and various retail outlets.
The relationship between architecture and its context makes an unsettling experience when visiting the open-air museum. Baudrillard’s discussion of museum objects articulates this well and highlights the decontextualizing nature of collecting. It becomes clear that the transplantation of entire buildings represents a jarring fissure in our expectations for each structure. Small cues are present regarding the original relationship between buildings and the ground, their orientation and their positioning alongside other buildings. One store bears the marks of the Second World War bombardments whilst its neighbour is completely unscathed: as they originally occupied completely separate parts of the city. These cues become amplified over time to produce a deeper disquiet with the arrangement: the buildings are clearly authentic but their arrangement is not (Figure 4.3).
FIGURE 4.2 Author’s photograph of the exterior of the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum.
Baudrillard’s work The System of Collecting presents collection as an activity rather than a finished thing. The process of collecting things involves decontextualizing objects both spatially and temporally. Six key strategies are given:
1. Divesting the object of its function.
2. Loving the object.
3. Treating the object as a pet.
4. Placing the object in a series with others.
5. Assessing the quality of the individual object and selecting based on criteria.
6. Arresting and controlling the passage of time.
(Adapted from Baudrillard, 1994)
The change in function is crucial to understanding the process the institution engages in when transplanting an entire building from its original context to the parkland setting of the open-air museum. More than simply a scaling up of the process of placing pottery or furniture in a gallery, the fundamental lack FIGURE 4.3 Author’s photograph of the interior of the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum.
of portability of architecture is essential to the unsettling nature of the act. The object is not only stripped of function, but given a new one: it becomes the museum at the same time as it is placed within it.
Buildings which would have been private are opened up to small groups of tourists inspecting every aspect of their set-dressing. Much like the production design of a film, attention has been paid to every element of the fixtures and fittings to freeze each of the buildings in an appropriate period (Figure 4.4).
Often, this periodization is fixed to one era: no traces of earlier or later periods are allowed to muddy the image we have. We see behind the scenes of domestic life and are permitted to wander from room to room whilst being cordoned off from furniture which might invite us to actually dwell or inhabit the space.
This underlines another issue: that one is transformed into the spectator of a spectacle in what would otherwise read as a viable piece of architecture.
FIGURE 4.4 Author’s Photographs showing details of the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum.
The buildings are loved by the collector, cared for and maintained such that there is no dirt, no matter out of place as Mary Douglas might express it.
This establishes a distinction between patina and dirt, a category difference between the acceptable and unacceptable elements of wear and tear.
Baudrillard discusses the collected object as a pet: cared for, but controlled and neutered. The nature of the building is denied, the photographer’s studio on site bears all the hallmarks of such a space, the equipment in place, studio lighting and backdrops, but it is not permitted to behave as a studio. The buildings belong to a similar period, in order to evoke 1920s and 1930s Tokyo;
this series is important in giving some coherence to the collection. The mix of urban and rural structures accentuates the unsettling nature of the space, however: despite belonging to similar eras, the co-mingling of a farmhouse with urban and suburban modernism underscores the feeling that this place is not as it might wish to appear.
The buildings in the museum are exemplars, each carefully selected and curated. This erases much of the ordinariness from the architecture: the homes are those of famous poets and architects, not representative of the general population; the bath house preserved is both typical and a worth example: a Platonic ideal of the Japanese bath house of this era. Many other bath houses went un-collected, perhaps lacking the tile mural of Mount Fuji or the coherent composition of this example.
The root of the disjointed experience is how it attempts to arrest time:
erasing traces of inhabitation from unwanted eras, the buildings are dressed to conform to a precise point in time and then held there. This is self-evidently part of the museum’s narrative, but it is one which places the experience in this strange transition between exhibit and architecture. The museum as it stands attests to some of the ways in which we read architecture as we find it in the world: underlining the importance of context and temporality, the engagement with the wider environment and how it accommodates the passing of time, either by alternative occupation, remodelling, or even simply by containing some more contemporary objects and furnishings. As well as offering a window into Shoˉwa Tokyo, the museum sharpens how we view architecture in the wider world, and the importance of subtle cues to temporality and context.