Nicolas Bernard Fiévé is a French historian of Japanese Architecture; he was born in Paris in 1959 and is the son of the cinema decorator, Bernard Fiévé. In 1993, he became a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and in 1996 he joined the Collège de France’s Japanese Civilization research team. In 2007, he was elected Professor at the Historical and Philological Sciences Department at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), where he teaches the history of pre-modern (16th to 19th centuries) Japanese urbanism, architecture and gardens. He is a member of the Accademia Ambrosiana, Milan. In 2022, Nicolas Fiévé was appointed Director of the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), or French School of Asian Studies.
Biography After graduating from secondary school in literary studies, Nicolas Fiévé was admitted to the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris-La Villette. In 1984, shortly after obtaining his DPLG degree and graduating as an architect, he left for Japan with a scholarship from the Japanese government, and he joined the research laboratory in Architectural Theory at the University of Kyoto led by Professor Katō Kunio 加藤邦夫, an architect and phenomenologist as well as a disciple of the modernist Masuda Tomoya 増田友也 (1914-1981) whom he had recently succeeded at the University of Kyōto and who introduced Anthropology of Architecture to Japan.Masuda Tomoya, Living architecture, Grosset & Dunlap, 1970. When Nicolas Fiévé joined his research group, Katō Kunio was lecturing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception while finishing a Japanese translation of Christian Noberg-Schulz's Roots of Modern Architecture and beginning that of Genius Loci.現代建築の根 (Roots of Modern Architecture), translation by Katō Kunio, Tokyo, A.D.A. EDITA, 1988, 214 pages; 実存・空間・建築 (Existence, Space and Architecture), translation by Katō Kunio, Tokyo, Kajima shuppankai, 1973, 236 pages; ゲニウス・ロキ : 建築の現象学をめざして (Genius loci : Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture) translation by Katō Kunio et Tazaki Yūsei 田崎祐生, Tokyo, Seiunsha, 1994, 409 pages. Under the tutelage of this remarkable master, Nicolas Fiévé undertook to study the architecture of medieval Japanese tea houses from a phenomenological perspective and began his research on medieval Japanese architecture and space.
While in Japan, Nicolas Fiévé took an avid interest in the study of Japanese and its different scripts, and upon his return to France in 1986, he decided to further his knowledge of Classical Japanese. The following year, having obtained his undergraduate degree in Japanese, he began a master's degree in Classical Japanese at the Université Paris VII where he turned out to be the only student of his class. In addition to lectures on Classical Japanese dispensed by Jacqueline Pigeot (Université Paris VII), his thesis supervisor, he also attended Jean-Noël Robert’s (EPHE) and Francine Hérail’s (EPHE) lectures in Sino-Japanese Studies. Throughout this period he earned a living working at the Paris Office of the daily Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun.
In 1988, armed with another scholarship from the Japanese government, Nicolas Fiévé returned to Japan to work again in Katō's research unit where he remained for the following five years. In 1989, Nicolas Fiévé completed his Master's thesis on the architecture of tea houses and obtained his master's degree in Japanese Studies at University Paris VII. He pursued his doctorate studies within Katō's research group at the Department of Architecture, Engineering Faculty of the University of Kyoto (1990–93), and, under the supervision of Jacqueline Pigeot, began writing his thesis (in French) on the elite classes during the Ashikaga shoguns. During this period he attended Professor Katō's lectures on major Japanese works pertaining to Japanese aesthetics and architecture, such as Masuda Tomoya's (Spiritual) Landscape of the House and Garden,Masuda Tomoya, 家と庭の風景 – 日本住宅の空間論的考察 (Spiritual) Landscape of the House and Garden – an essay on space in Japanese dwellings), Kyoto, Nakanisha shuppan, 1987, 282 pages. Watsuji Tetsurō’s 和辻哲郎 (1889-1960) Fūdo and Kuki Shūzō’s 九鬼周造 (1848-1941) The Structure of Iki. At the time, he also worked at the Atelier Ryō run by the architect Kinoshita Ryōichi and participated in the complete survey of rural houses in the Shiga region.
Upon his return to France in 1993, Nicolas Fiévé obtained his PhD degree and title of Doctor in East Asian Studies specialized in Japanese Civilization and joined the CNRS as Researcher. He was first appointed to the Institut d’Asie Orientale in Lyon for three years before becoming a member of the Collège de France's Japanese Civilization research team, where he continues to work alongside several of his former professors: Paul Akamatsu, Francine Hérail, Jacqueline Pigeot, Jean-Noël Robert, Jean-Jacques Tschudin and Cécile Sakai. In 2006, the Japanese Civilization research team —founded as a joint research unit with the CNRS by the Collège de France professor Bernard Frank— merged with two other research units, the Chinese and Tibetan Civilizations Studies teams from the EPHE, to form the Far Eastern Civilizations research Centre (Centre de Recherche sur les Civilisations de l’Asie Orientale) or CRCAO (UMR 8155 of the CNRS in partnership with the EPHE, the Collège de France and Université Paris-Diderot). Actively involved in the creation of the CRCAO, Nicolas Fiévé was appointed the unit's Deputy Director, working alongside the archaeologist and Sinologist Alain Thote (EPHE), from 2006 to 2010, and was nominated Director, from 2014 to 2016.
In 2007, Nicolas Fiévé became a member of the History of the Modern and Contemporary World Section (Section 33) of the National Committee for Scientific ResearchAppointment Decree, 13 November 2007, published on Légifrance : http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000706772&fastPos=3&fastReqId=1006873592&categorieLien=id&oldAction=rechTexte and was also nominated Professor at the EPHE,Appointment Decree, 6 December 2007, published on Légifrance : http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000017577180&fastPos=2&fastReqId=236849248&categorieLien=id&oldAction=rechTexte Historical and Philological Sciences Department, where he initiated a program of lectures on the history of pre-modern Japan's architecture and gardens—the first and only of its kind in Europe. Leaving purely urban studies aside for a while, he has resumed his work on the habitat of the Japanese elite, with a focus on architectural space in the retreats and retirement villas of Japan's 17th century elite.
Work Fiévé's research hinges on two fields of study: on the one hand, the study of ancient documents (both literary and administrative, technical handbooks, maps and plans) pertaining to architecture, urbanism and landscape (including parks and gardens)—generally resulting in the establishment of lexicons and glossaries of technical vocabularyIncluding « Nomenclature », in L’architecture et la ville du Japon ancien, (Architecture and Towns of Ancient Japan) 1996, p. 281-304; « Lexique des termes d’urbanisme » (Lexicon of terminology in Urbanism), in Atlas historique de Kyoto (Historical Atlas of Kyoto), 2008, p. 487-493; « Les techniques de construction d’un corps de logis au XVIIe siècle. Le shoin 書院 de la villa secondaire de Katsura » (House Construction Techniques used in the 17th century: the shoin of Katsura Villa), in Annuaire de l'École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), Section des sciences historiques et philologiques, 144| 2013, p. 276-288. and translation of various texts« Le livre des ornementations en usage à la Retraite des collines de l'Est (The book of Ornamentations used in the Eastern Hills Retreat), French translation of Okazarisho 御飾書 by Sōami相阿弥 ( ?-1525) », Artibus Asiae, Vol. 54-3/4, Museum Rietberg Zurich-Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 1994, p. 296-326.— and on the other hand, in situ research, based on his experience and perception as an architect. These two complementary approaches, which are not always easy to conciliate, are the fruit of his dual training in Japanese Philology and Architectural Phenomenology.
Fiévé conducts his fieldwork using the tools he acquired through his training as an architect, i.e. physical experience of the site under study, and observation of its spaces, routes, forms, materials, scale, and temporality, together with architectural survey based on measurements, drawings and photography. In his first years as a young researcher from 1980 to 1990, Nicolas Fiévé visited hundreds of sites throughout Japan: palaces, temples, towns and gardens, with a special focus on forty or so historical tea houses. He then cross-references and combines his field research with the study of related historical documents.
In his first work on tea houses (1989), in part based on the research of the architect and historian Horiguchi Sutemi 堀口捨己 (1895-1984), Nicolas Fiévé addresses the subject of the tea houses’ architectural space through the study of writings ascribed to Takeno Jōō 武野紹鴎 (1502-1555), Sen no Rikyū 千利休 (1522-1585), Yamanoue Shōji 山上宗二 (1544-1590). His work on the tea houses may already be described as a ‘history of habitats’ or as an ‘anthropological study of historical space’ since the sources he uses were written by those who built the sites in question or occupied them in the past; thus his philological approach serves to define an anthropological perspective on space.
This dual approach that characterizes all Nicolas Fiévé's work is often inspired by that of the geographer Augustin Berque, principally in the use of mesology (the study of the mutual interrelationships between the living creatures and their biological, sociological and environmental surroundings). Nicolas Fiévé's approach differs, however, in that he always retains an architect's perspective and his historical analysis always supports the conception, underlying all his studies, that architecture first & foremost serves man.
The research method Nicolas Fiévé gradually developed takes into account the architecture, spaces and landscape of parks and gardens together with the surrounding architectural and urban landscape. Thus his work L’architecture et la ville du Japon ancien (1996) shows that the mutations in space occurring in 14th and 15th centuries Kyōto follow a process similar to that occurring in palaces and in the composition of urban areal space wherein each sub-space (neighborhood, temple, shrine, palace, house, pavilion) represents an independent unit in which the same structural contrasts are reproduced .
This work received the Mainichi Shibusawa-Claudel award and the Giles Prize from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and a laudatory review from Mack Horton (University of Berkeley).L’architecture et la ville du Japon ancien. Espace architecturale de la ville de Kyoto et des résidences shōgunales aux XIVe et XVe siècles, reviewed by Mack Horton, The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter 1988), pp. 123-126. Following its publication, Nicolas Fiévé embarked on a research project that had been dear to his heart for many years: to compile a history of Kyōto combining the perspective of architectural anthropology he acquired from Katō Kunio with the historical and philological approach he inherited from Jacqueline Pigeot and Francine Hérail during his Japanese studies.