Driving on a Tokyo expressway with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, a leading architect of the 30-something generation, I begin to think I'm in a dystopian vision of the future. He's wearing a leopard-skin face mask to protect himself from pollution, pollen, and communicable diseases. Clusters of mismatched buildings line the streets outside our windows, and color-coded traffic warnings flash overhead. "We have a very strong cultural tradition of acceptance," Tsukamoto says. "People don't really care what a building looks like." From neighborhood to neighborhood, there's no discernable pattern of scale, materials, or form. Neon collides with concrete; building slivers are squeezed into improbable sites. Few structures appear to be more than a decade old. Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow celebrates existing low-rise buildings in a city that's rapidly undergoing high-rise construction. For example, this three-story building (opposite page)--which contains a noodle shop and a residence--is only six-and-a-half feet deep. Several times during the tour we run into traffic congestion caused by construction. Even in Japan's dismal economy, Tokyo keeps demolishing and rebuilding itself. The capital of the world's second largest economy is clearly an international city, but its built form remains utterly unique and defiantly Japanese. Tsukamoto, 38, and his partner Momoyo Kaijima, 35, have written (with Junzo Kuroda) an influential book on the subject, Made in Tokyo, extolling the virtues of what they call "the real city." In the introduction they explain the origins of their fascination: "The buildings we were attracted to were ones giving a priority to stubborn honesty in response to their surroundings and programmatic requirements, without insisting on architectural aesthetic and form. We decided to call them Da-me Architecture ("No-good Architecture"), with all of our love and disdain. Most of them are anonymous buildings, not beautiful and not accepted in the architectural culture." ---ROPPONGI HILLS The $5 billion project includes a 58-story tower, a 390-room Grand Hyatt, a television broadcast center, residential buildings, a theater for the performing arts, and the Mori Arts Center, the first institution affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art in New York.--- Partners in the firm Atelier Bow-Wow, established in 1992, they produced the book as an antidote to the many Japanese publications dedicated to the extravagant buildings of the prosperous "bubble" period. Before it burst in 1990 with the Asian economic crisis--plunging the country into a long recession from which it is still suffering--the era produced a number of large projects that they feel do not accurately represent the city. "I wonder why architects," Tsukamoto asks, "are interested in buildings that do not tell the real story of Tokyo?" MORI ARTS CENTRE The ground-floor entrance to the Mori Arts Center; the museum is located on the 53rd floor of the tallest tower at Roppongi Hills. "For symbolic and pragmatic reasons, there needed to be a separate museum entrance that bypassed the commercial entry," says Richard Gluckman, whose firm designed the sleek cylindrical structure. "A place that provided a drop-off for buses, taxis, and cars, as well as an element that collected all the pedestrian movement through the site." Among the hybrid building types in Made in Tokyo--their version of the city's architectural record--are a department store with a rooftop roller coaster, another one with an expressway on the roof, a taxi company annexed to a driving range, a tunnel topped with a shrine, and a horse stable at the base of an apartment building. Each building function is unremarkable, but their inexplicable combinations are pure Tokyo. "One of the most interesting things about the city is it's constantly rebuilding itself," says Ken Oshima, a lecturer at Columbia University on Japanese Modernism and architectural history. "Even in its bleak economy the construction continues." Most of Tokyo is low rise. For decades it resisted high-rise development, but a new vision of the city is rapidly taking shape. In the Shiodome region overlooking Tokyo Bay, a skyscraper district featuring towers by Jean Nouvel, Richard Rogers, and Kevin Roche has taken form. Across town Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates has transformed the Roppongi neighborhood with a 58-story tower. The KPF building is the centerpiece of one of Japan's most prominent developers, Minoru Mori. Mori's $5 billion mixed-use Roppongi Hills project represents a bold departure from the status quo. Rejecting the sprawling low-rise density typical of the city, the plan proceeds on the assumption that Tokyoites are ready to abandon their "rabbit warrens" for more spacious centrally located developments surrounded by modest public green spaces (a rarity in Tokyo). Mori has hired a number of internationally acclaimed designers to assist in the creation of dozens of new buildings and landscapes. They include Pritzker prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki, Terence Conran, Richard Gluckman, Jon Jerde, and Bruce Mau, who's designed and coauthored a book on this new approach to urban living called New Tokyo Life Style Think Zone. ---CARRETTA SHIODOME COMPLEX Part of a flurry of new development in the Shiodome area, Dentsu advertising company's new corporate headquarters (pictured above on the right) was designed by Jean Nouvel. The complex includes 56 shops and restaurants, a theater, and a 48-story office tower. Also in the area is Richard Rogers's headquarters for NTV.--- Most of these large projects were hatched before the Japanese economy began its long meltdown; a few are now nearly finished. "And what's happening is that they're talking about it as the '2003 Problem'," Oshima says. "A lot of companies are moving into these new spaces, and the old offices are emptying out." The Roppongi Hills project, in particular, has a towers-in-the-park configuration reminiscent of midcentury planning schemes that have since fallen out of favor in the United States. "These large projects are quite controversial," Oshima says. "Many people are up in arms with the high-rise buildings because they completely change the character of the neighborhoods. They're going to change Tokyo from a horizontal city to a vertical one--but whether the land and infrastructure can sustain that much density is another question. And whether they're truly going to make it a better city is also going to be highly debated." To understand how dramatically this type of development breaks with Japanese tradition requires a look at the city's history. It was built on the former feudal capital Edo, which remained isolated from the west until the nineteenth century. A trade agreement with the U.S. in 1854 precipitated political upheaval and a competitive push to westernize. Fourteen years later the newly installed Meiji regime moved the imperial throne from Kyoto to Edo, and the city was renamed Tokyo. Accompanying this shift, a series of sweeping reforms abolished feudalism and paved the way for the city's rapid industrialization. But while new policies transformed nearly every sector of society in the span of a few decades, the agrarian culture of the preceding centuries made for a city of reluctant urbanists. Ê Because this residence is packed tightly between neighboring houses, windows have been give special consideration--large ones (bottom) are positioned to take advantage of long views down narrow alleys. Although Paris, London, and New York had long-established urban cultures with central concentrations of multistory buildings, Tokyo's retooling former farmers preferred to stay far from the center, close to the land. The vast majority of properties in the city, then and now, are two-story single-family dwellings. So the city was, in effect, feudal and suburban before it was industrial and urban. Even with frequent necessity to rebuild--after the 1923 earthquake and devastating attacks during the last two years of World War II--the renewal didn't fundamentally change the scale and type of buildings constructed. But history alone does not fully explain the predominance of Da-me architecture. Moriko Kira, an architect working in Holland and Japan, believes the Japanese obsession with maximizing the utility of small spaces blinds them to the broader picture. "There is a saying in Japan: 'Dealing only with the corner of the lunch box (bento box)--changing a little bit'," Kira says. In other words, only minor alterations are permitted to the rigid box and format of the typical Japanese lunch. "So instead of prawns," she adds, "you have egg cake or something. But nothing really important changes." This saying is particularly apt in a culture that demands constant change and improvement on small scales, such as in fashion or consumer electronics, while accepting dubious design in the urban context. In contrast to Kira's experiences in the Netherlands--where government sponsored "beauty committees," panels of architectural experts, oversee all proposed development--there is no corresponding system in Japan. The Japanese, it seems--at least in Tokyo--have a highly defined sense of beauty but no sense of ugly. ---MINI HOUSE Atelier Bow-Wow's 900-square-foot residence takes its cue from the economy of Tokyo's vernacular structures; there's just enough space underneath to park a Mini Cooper.--- Japan's building culture-like that in the United States-is developer driven. The enormously powerful construction industry plays an almost unhindered role in the Japanese desire to build, destroy, and rebuild. Although there's a high level of quality and efficiency in the construction trades, Tsukamoto says the industry suffers from a lack of enlightened clients: "This situation is bad for architects because clients tend to think of buildings the way they would products from Sony." The tendency to equate housing with cars or consumer products is reinforced by the Japanese banking system, which typically lends over a 20-year period but assumes a house will retain no value at the end of the term. "In neighborhoods where there are plans to build high-rises, you'll see signs by residents who are banding together to try and stop it," Oshima says. "Partially this is because the high-rises will change their own property values. Once those new projects are finished, their own houses will not be new. In Tokyo real estate values are often determined by how new--how attractive--it is for the moment." The average wood-frame residential building stands for about 25 years, which also contributes to a cultural acceptance of short-life-span construction methods and a preference for new housing. The Ise Shrine--perhaps the most important Shinto temple in Japan--provides a paradigmatic example of the country's cultural acceptance of frequent building cycles. "What's interesting about the shrine is that it's built and rebuilt every twenty years," Oshima says. "There are two sites side by side--and as one shrine is being torn down an exact replica is built on the site next to it. It is easy to use that as a metaphor for the whole cycle of growth and decay." ---PET ARCHITECTURE Standing between an elevated highway and a railway transformer substation, the two-story Y Residence has no rear windows and those on the first floor in front are covered for privacy. You enter through the one-story attachment, which also contains the bathroom. Residence 3 is exactly as deep as the width of the car parked beside it--5.9 feet. The door (not visible) opens directly onto the street. The tiny S Subordinate Cottage (9 feet wide by 12 feet deep by 7.5 feet high) sits in the corner of a parking lot in a residential area with a mix of building heights.--- While developers like Mori promise an efficient, well-designed future--like that envisioned by American developers in the 1950s-Tsukamoto and Kaijima suggest instead a reappreciation of the small building stock of the city. To encourage interest in these buildings, Atelier Bow-Wow last year published Pet Architecture Guide Book. The firm's studio is itself a type of Pet architecture. The two-story space, wedged in between two larger buildings in the dense Shibuya district, is only six feet wide. The book documents 41 examples of tiny buildings, which range from 3-foot-wide real estate offices to a 9-by-12-foot shrine that is 100 feet high. Pet architecture is an extreme manifestation of the Japanese fascination with smallness and "void phobia," the resolute unwillingness to let any space go unused. "Pet architecture is not accepted as important buildings," Tsukamoto says. "They can be easily built, they tend to be free of formal, architectural rules, but they're full of joy." One of Atelier Bow-Wow's most famous designs, Mini House, which won a Tokyo Architect Society's Gold Prize in 1999, is a celebration of smallness: only 900 square feet on two levels. (Most Bow-Wow houses are approximately this size.) The name is an oblique reference to the shape of a miniskirt, and it allows for a space under its "hemline" to park a Mini Cooper car. Since parking space is as scarce as living space in Tokyo, many houses are designed to allow a car of a certain size to fit perfectly within a small alcove or carport. The house is also sited on land that has been earmarked for a future expressway, so its limited life span is guaranteed. Because of this, it is built with inexpensive materials such as plywood walls and cork floors. "The neighborhood and environment around Mini House is unstable," Tsukamoto explains, "but still it's a good example of what is happening in Japan." DAS House (DAS stands for "deep and shallow" views) is a study in adjacency. High density and frequent use of two-level single-family homes make privacy a difficult issue for architects. Bow-Wow has made a virtue of necessity by manipulating views so that the neighbors' gardens can be enjoyed by the owner of DAS House. All houses in Tokyo are required to have a one-meter-wide "gap space" around the property. The intent is to provide a sense of greater personal space, but the areas are rarely used effectively and thus result in lost living space in an already crowded urban environment. In DAS House, completed last spring, a clever use of downward-projecting mirrors diverts shallow window views, which would look directly at neighboring houses. Instead flower beds, shrubs, and other greenery are reflected in the redirected spectacle. Other large windows are placed strategically to allow long sight lines through a narrow passageway to a nearby park (the "deep" view). Mirrors situated outside point upward to allow privacy while inviting natural light into the space. --- MADE IN TOKYO a department store with a rooftop roller coaster, a store with an expressway on the roof, a shrine-topped tunnel, and an apartment building that sits above a stable are among the hybrid buildings featured in this Atelier Bow-Wow book.--- As Tokyo embarks on yet another cycle of demolition and construction--its perpetual story--two conflicting models are emerging. Atelier Bow-Wow has chosen to embrace the more indigenous "made in Tokyo" solution. Rather than raze whole sections of the city to install generic skyscraper districts, they suggest a greater understanding of the existing paradigm of authentic local development. If industrial design is seen by many as the equal to architecture, Bow-Wow believes that this is where Japanese might look for answers to the questions facing modern Tokyo. "Like the absolute beauty," they wrote in their first book, "seen in the overwhelming functionalism of products made in Japan, such as the Sony Walkman and Cup Noodles, the format of urban dwellings observed in Made in Tokyo can guide us toward new ways of living in the future urban environment." James Culham related articles: u + a design award - japanese toilets two tokyos - conflicting visions of the city are emerging everybody loves muji - japanese no brand-high design retailer tokyo design week - exhibition review made in tokyo - 'da me', no good architecture atelier bow-wow - leading young tokyo architecture firm shuhei endo - extravagent curves in corrugated steel
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