Always New Performance Based Design: Ise Shrines as a Model for Future Architecture

In Japan, a radical experiment has been going on for more than one thousand years: wooden structures are built and dismantled every twenty years in an ongoing renewal process without a known beginning or end. We will look into the Ise shrines not as buildings but as genetic sequences or generative lines of code. As living organisms that change through time, that… emerge, age, decay, emerge… living organisms that have an exact understanding of their importance and impact in a much wider system. A renewable system carefully planned for long term resilience. A large widespread system that expands through all Japan. A system that has a long term strategy that resists becoming part of other global systems. A system that trades short term benefits for long term security. A system that changes and adapts through the years sometimes trying to be forgotten, sometimes trying to be embraced by the population. Ise in its humble scale and lack of ornamentation is as relevant for our future as it was thirteen hundred years ago.