Database management: Japan, postmodernity & architecture's digital turn

Abstract

This article offers a framing of the development and adoption of computer aided design tools by Japanese architects in the 1980s and early 1990s that counters the interpolation of their work into conventionalised narratives of a momentous "digital turn." It combines media theoretic and cultural studies approaches to analyse the design practices and design outputs of Japanese architects engaged with computers alongside prevailing political-economic policies and contemporary popular cultural genres/forms such as database novels. The article thereby elaborates on the formation of a "database imagination" of Japan and information management practices through which computer use was framed domestically and internationally in relation to emerging theories of aesthetic and technical postmodernity. Setting these domestic and international framings against one another, the article shows how efforts to construct a particular image of Japan were used by multiple groups to position the country and its architectural production within larger narratives of cultural and technological change. Finally, this positioning is examined as a site through which the cultural specificity of Japan and the co-constructive encounter of Japanese architects with computers was and continues to be negotiated.