Ma

The bond between Kazuo Shinohara’s work and Shodo

Abstract

In Japan, traditionally, the arts as painting, music, theatre and, exceptionally calligraphy –shodo-, share an essential constant: not-being as compositional agent opposed to being. In terms of materiality, this can be expressed by interdependent duality between fullness and emptiness. Japanese term ma implies this void in itself –as interval-, as well as the simultaneous awareness of  both: full and void. Its linkage with spatial perception has been an object of interest over the last decades. Nevertheless, statements regarding the materialization of ma through physical construction are scarce. For that reason, this research pursues the decryption of the means by which this duality emerges in architecture.

For that purpose, two works projected by Kazuo Shinohara, well known advocate of traditional Japanese architectonic essence and of the artistic status of the house, will be analysed. The investigation focuses on the plans of Umbrella House and House in a Curved Road, which have been redrawn specifically, employing a binary code in order to distinguish full, in black, from void, in white.

From the results obtained, it is inferred that Shinohara intentionally condenses household activities, releasing the remaining interior space from partitioning and thus generating a large void space inside which isolated structural elements arise to create spatial tension through the inconstant distances between them and the enclosure.

Both strategies –the varying degrees of compartmentalization, and thus of fullness condensation, just as the void tensioning due to isolated elements- are equally visible in shodo works. And, despite the underpinning differences between these two disciplines, beyond being a haphazard coincidence, these similarities point to a common compositional logic that finds its core at the configuration of ma.