The Marmot’s Hole

As you know, I’m kind of a nut about early-modern/colonial architecture in Korea.

Which is why I love stuff like this post over at Ampontan. Linked to his post is this site chock full of early modern architectural properties in Nara Prefecture, Japan. Fascinating stuff, and probably important from the perspective of Korean architecture, given how much of Korea’s modern “Western” architectural heritage comes via Japan. You can definitely spot the similarities in style.

Speaking of Japanese early-modern architecture, I found this line cute [Oda City: Architecture of Japan]:

Meiji’s Japan is probably the one and only nation in this solar system that inflicted colonial architecture on itself; this was made more bizarre by the fact that Japan is one of just two Asian countries that have never been colonized by caucasian imperialists (the other country is Thailand).

And since we’re on the topic of colonial architecture, I recently happened upon a website [Asmara.nl] dedicated to the architecture of Asmara [Wikipedia], the capital of the East African state of Eritrea. Asmara is interesting in that it was built almost entirely from scratch between 1935 and 1941 by the Italians, who were intent on turning the city into a symbol of fascism and Italian imperial might. The city essentially became what Dubai is today—if you were an architect with ideas—and there were a lot of ideas out there—the Italians were more than willing to put up the cash to make them come true. What you end up with is possibly the world’s most concentrated collection of Modernist architecture [UNESCO]:

The rapid transformation of Asmara from a relatively minor town into Africa’s most modern and sophisticated city at that time overlapped with equally momentous events in the world of design and architecture, which involved the global proliferation of Modernism and its various forms, including Futurism, Rationalism, Novecento, and Art Deco. The spirit of this new age of travel and adventure was embodied in these new architectural forms. Asmara was an ideal blank canvas on which Italian architects could practice and realise these modern ideals.

Fascinating stuff.