Discrete Continuity in the Urban Architectures of H. Hara & K. Kuma

The 2020 pandemic has laid bare the ambiguous value of the virtual proximity that distributed computing enables. The remote interaction it ushered in at an unprecedented scale also spawned social isolation, which is symbolically underscored by the reliance of this form of connectivity on individuals’ discrete digital identification. This cyber-spatial dualism may be called ‘discrete continuity,’ and it already appeared in architectural thought in the 1960s with the advent of cybernetics and the first computers. The duality resurfaced in the 1990s in virtual projects, when architectural software was first widely commercialized, and it reappeared in built form in the past decade. This paper sheds light on the architectural aspects of this conceptual duality by identifying the use of discreteness and continuity in the theories of two Japanese architects, Hiroshi Hara (b.1936) and his former student, Kengo Kuma (b.1954), in their attempts to combine the two topological conditions as metaphors of societal structures. They demonstrate that the onset of the current condition, while new in its pervasiveness, has been latent in architectural thinking for several decades. This paper examines Hara’s and Kuma’s theories in light of the author’s interviews with the architects, their writings, and specific projects that illustrate metaphoric translations of topological terms into social structures, reflected in turn in the organization of urban schemes and building parts. While Hara’s and Kuma’s respective implementations are poles apart visually and materially, they share the idea that the discrete continuity of contemporary urban experience ought to be reflected in architecture. This link between their ideas has previously been overlooked.