Unveiling the Monumentality of Protection: the Japanese Infrastructural Network as an Urban Device

In Japanese culture, there is an extremely contradictory dichotomous relationship between man and nature. While this is a matter of veneration, spectacularization, even mythicization, on the other hand, Japanese society has always tried to control, harness and anthropicize the natural element. In this context, the greatest imposition on the landscape is the protective infrastructure, designed in order to defend the Japanese territory from the destructive force of nature, tsunamis, typhoons, earthquakes, landslides, floods, volcanoes that continuously threaten its safety. A vast and widespread infrastructure network aimed at protecting cities has created an involuntary contemporary Japanese landscape, a continuous monument. This same imposing approach on the territory and on urban space has inspired the metabolist brutality, crucial in the development of contemporary Japanese architecture, through which the centrality of infrastructure is exacerbated. Art and photography have admired its monumental scale, its role as the protagonist of a territory increasingly marked by anthropic action, but freezing the landscape and the city in an image, taking a conceptual distance from it. This thesis aims, instead, to recognize, describe and investigate the architectural value and potential of this infrastructural system as an urban device. The infrastructure is seen as an activating and engaging element of urban dynamics, in continuum with the city's soil, as a support matrix for practices and collective uses, stimulated by the inclusion of microarchitectural devices, unveiling a potential heritage. An historical, cultural and architectural analysis can reveal the monumentality of objects born for safety but the potential in the world of hedonism, if this same potentiality were recognized to them.