Down Comes the Landmark

In its heyday, Tokyo's Imperial Hotel was the city's most famous landmark after the imperial Palace. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1916 and 1921 in a style that combined the most extravagant features of Mayan and Oriental architecture, the yellow-brick stone-trimmed structure played host to visiting celebrities from Babe Ruth, Will Rogers and Albert Einstein to honeymooning Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio. But even to its fans, the Imperial has always had its idiosyncrasies. Every one of its 230 guest rooms is different, an efficiency expert's nightmare, and Wright was apparently so struck by the smallness of things Japanese that he included glazed doors barely five feet high.

Besides, the passage of time has wrought on the building indignities that Wright never foresaw. The ingenious, cantilevered foundations, which he designed to support the building on the gooey soil beneath it, proved trim enough to see the Imperial through the 1923 earthquake. But in the past four decades, as the water level has fallen, the structure has settled 3 ft. 7 in. Cracks have appeared in walls and ceilings, and postwar smog has corroded the soft green lava rock used by Wright for the building's fantastic ornamentation. Concluded one recent visitor, Novelist Anthony West: the hotel is now "hideous, inconvenient, inadequate and a depressing eyesore."

Swan & Symbol. As a result, the hotel missed an avalanche of yen during the 1964 Olympics. With the 1970 World's Fair at Osaka coming up, the hotel's crusty president, Tetsuzo Inumaru, 80, decided to wait no longer. Early last month he announced that the old Imperial would be demolished, except for its 1958 annex of 550 rooms, to make way for a modern 18-story hotel with 1,000 additional rooms. Protests, editorials and cables from abroad poured in. The influential architect Kiyoshi Higuchi called the old Imperial "a swan afloat on a lake." Young Japanese architects formed a society to save the hotel as "a symbol of courage and originality." Wright's widow, Olgivanna, now in her 70s, flew in from Taliesin, Wis., to meet with officials in an effort to save the "spiritual presence of my husband."

Finally, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato entered the controversy, announced he would be happy to see the Imperial moved "in part or entirely" to Meiji Village near Nagoya, a sort of Japanese Williamsburg. Only two days before demolition was to begin last week, Owner Inumaru met with representatives from the village and agreed to save the main lobby, at least temporarily. Assuming the estimated $4,000,000 can be raised, Wright's spiritual presence seems likely to settle down with relics from the Meiji period (1868-1912). The prospect of becoming a part of Japan's architectural heritage would probably have pleased him, since he greatly admired 19th century Japanese prints, which, said he, preached "the gospel of the elimination of the insignificant."

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