Broadway...Bigness for the Masses!

Metabolism started in Tokyo, roughly contemporaneous with other experimentalists and theoretical urban cell-groups like the mid-sixties Archigram of "plug-in city" fame. The Metabolists rejected orderly town-square intimations of the city as outmoded, badly adapted to the reality of mass housing pressures and dwindling space in downtown areas. In Tokyo, postwar reconstruction and unprecedented urban growth, pre-Olympic infrastructural improvement, plus a newfound consciousness of design and planning issues - Japan hosted the World Design Conference in 1960 - all fed into architects' concern with densification and mass housing issues. Metabolism's heritage was Modernist, but had little patience for pure aesthetic reflections on space, light, and transparency; the self-contained detached Miesian glass box was an indulgence, and even Corbusian public housing was not quite radical enough. Too settled, too single-noted. Perhaps what was needed was a certain Dis-unity of habitation, expanding on the utopian promises of Modernism without too much of its hygienic order. After all, it wasn't everyone who could afford the sun-dappled Corbusian glass grove or the Miesian villa.

Kikutake Kiyonori, especially, was Metabolism's patron architect manqué - he made ambitious proposals for modular capsule structures snaking wildly over existing buildings, towered over residential neighborhoods, prancing like DNA helixes and spiralling out of control - most of which were bluntly rejected by the relevant authorities. Metabolism promised to be ad-hoc and spontaneous, an organic, contagious movement that mirrored runaway economic growth, thronging populations and densities, growing fungus-like to match demand and circumstance. Instead, it ran up against walls of building codes, sunlight ratio and height restrictions, and a scandalized public fresh from the thatched countrysides of Japan. As with other artistic manifestoes, this one flung itself far and wide, gaining favor far from its original intent and context. When head honcho Kurokawa Kishou visited Singapore in the 1960s, marvelling at People's Park Complex, Golden Mile Complex and Paul Rudolph's Concourse, he found himself in the awkwardly pleased position of an originator whose disciples had run away with the scripture and freestyled with it.

Back home in Tokyo, an early pioneer of the warren-like mixed-use Metabolist highrise was the "Broadway" building in Nakano, three stops and five minutes west of Shinjuku. Completed in 1961 by Miyada Keizaburo, it became one of the first suburban destination complexes, with one storey below ground and ten above. Miyada had studied in Washington and been impressed by the shopping malls, apartments and supermarkets of postwar America, and when he returned to Tokyo decided to incorporate these modern comforts into "mansions," a sort of condominium prototype, equipped cells for modern living, never more than a short way away from amenities and "connectors" like public corridors, atria, and plazas for dawdling and gossiping with one's neighbors. Broadway included restaurants, fish markets, clothing stores, rooftop gardens, an outdoor pool and a golf range - reproportioned to fit the scale of the vertical complex-as-city, of course.

Broadway is still possessed of that time-warp charm, marooned in the sixties with its linoleum floors, formica countertops, fluorescent tube lights, and distinctly claustrophobic corridors, bracing eager shoppers with the classic smell of mouldering merchandise. It even has glaring design defects that make it hell to navigate but which everyone's come to love anyway - from the ground level shopping street Sun Plaza you are whisked urgently up to the third floor; and then, as required: up one flight of stairs to the fourth, or down one flight to the second floor. Its tenants, unconsciously or not, have helped to memorialize the era of its conception in their own way by devoting themselves to the sale of vintage goods and pop culture ephemera from that time. Kanransha is a cinephile's poster closet from the swinging sixties (French new wave, Antonioni, Bergman, etc). Mandarake operates a large buyback and trade-in depot in manga ephemera. The weekend mobs are more Kowloon than Omotesando. They throng the basement food halls and huddle in hawker concession booths for greasy takoyaki, "soft cream," barrels overflowing with pungent pickles and dessicated fishes.

Something like how Golden Mile Complex turned - and some would say, degenerated - from a utopian drawing-board scheme into a noisy ethnic supermarket and loitering forum for foreign laborers, Broadway's messiness proves the accidental genius of "Metabolic" development, thriving long and clamorously, far from the blueprint of its original conception. Architects are guilty of this betrayal: they wish only good things for the "civitas" of our public spaces, humane interactions in places we can proudly call "commons," but whose vision of the public is this? Certainly not the public's.

With a vitality beyond any reasonable original expectations, Broadway is a classic exercise in hands-off dirty populism, a living instance of devices left to themselves, left to languish or flourish, as they will. One key difference, though. Because the Japanese practise an exceptionally obsessive gopherism, whatever their chosen consumerist fetish, this is no facile idol worship teen hell mall with posters and stickers and dangly cellphone accessories. It looks only like a barracks of so many cluttered bedrooms of people who stay in and watch too many videos, but you might stumble upon actual theatrical release Antonioni or Godard posters, dead stock tie-in merchandise for C-grade horror flicks like thermos flasks or red clasp-lunchboxes. There's a tiny outlet doing a roaring trade in antique sports watches with an accordingly swish interior (at sharp odds with the makeshift stockpiling of the first-generation nintendo game cartridge museum next door). For an instructive comparison, I recommend a visit to People's Park Complex (Zhen Zhu Fang), a similar complex with quite a different accumulation of objects. This will be the profitable subject of some other article, but in rough terms, it's Japanese curatorship and selectivity on the one hand, and Chinese pirated kitsch on the other.

Showa Modern 昭和モダン

Although never formally colonized, Japan has always been fertile nesting territory for Western cultural imports. The vogue for youkan (western houses) dates from Meiji, but it was only really during early Showa (1925 onward) that modernist architecture as such began to sink roots. Ever since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel was completed in 1923, Tokyo has cherished, if not actively fetishized, the industrial gleam of steel and glass, prizing their “negative” values like natural light and void space. Maybe that affinity was mirrored in its own native building traditions: the one storey hiraya, a wooden house constructed from timber joinery and sliding screens; the row house (nagaya) stretching deep into narrow back alleys (rojiura) despite an extremely narrow frontage (supposedly a legacy from feudal times when merchants, for whom this dwelling was principally constructed, were taxed on their property according to the width of this frontage along the main thoroughfare); the tea room, or sukiya, that opens out onto a “verandah” (engawa) overhanging the garden or doma (unfloored part of the house), the site of domestic urban-pastoral happiness, it seems - frothy matcha in tea bowls with Japanese sweets, sunning oneself while playing go, entertaining the house cat, etc.

Foreign architects working in Tokyo found warm reception for their open plan, well-lit interiors; conversely, Japanese repatriate architects returned to plant Parisian arcades and brick buildings all over the city. Wright’s assistant on the Imperial Hotel, the Czech-born Antonin Raymond, enjoys something of a mythic status as a pioneer of rational, angular modernism. In suburban Suginami ward, Raymond’s Tokyo Women’s Christian University nestles next to Zenpukuji park. The church façade is riddled with geometric ventiblocks that resemble a Moorish arabesque, or one of Wright’s Mayan-inspired suburban stone villas in Hollywood or Pasadena.

The record of Japanese product during the same period, however, was patchy. Mainstream Japanese modern before the war was essentially Bauhaus inspired-and-imitated. Apartment blocks were initially meant only for foreigners and Japanese repatriates; it introduced other curious and forward-looking youngsters, mobo and moga (modern boys and girls; essentially the Japanese generational equivalent of London’s Bright Young Things, or Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age dandies) to dosoku seikatsu – literally, life with shoes on. From wood, cinderblocks and rice paper, lounging on cushions and tatami, suddenly Tokyo’s moboga were capering around a living room in brogues and heels, perching on top of Bauhaus pipe chairs and sipping earl grey from English china. The love of “modern” interiors was uncritical and unchallenged, and at first the Japanese didn’t so much import Western architectural expertise as borrow the glamor of its associations. The defining curves and stylized lines of New York Art Deco were props on permanent loan for the living spaces of Asia’s first burgeoning middle class urban consumer society.

European mod cons seemed as if they were flown in direct and retrofitted. After much of wooden- and straw-roofed Tokyo was levelled by the earthquake in 1923, aspiring modernists were given a clean slate to work with. "Kanban kenchiku" (signboard architecture) grafted copper boards, slate or mortar onto flat facades of two-storey shophouses, leaving behind the more traditional joinery and protruding wooden beams (dashigeta) angling downwards from a sloping roof. The armored reinforcements were practical - copper plating was fireproof, and later shielded the building from shrapnel during WWII air raids - but there was always room for ornamentation. Art deco motifs and geometrical patterns were often carved or hammered directly into the copper plates.

From Paris, but with about a forty year time lag, the shopping arcades, or passages, suddenly materialized in central Tokyo. The first indoor arcade appeared in the Maru office building in 1923, in the Marunouchi/Hibiya district, historically faithful down to the mosaic floors, Art Nouveau arches and wrought iron rails and balustrades. This would mark the start of an enduring taste for Reform Club smoking-jacket chic : heavy lampshades, thick wooden panelling and so on. Even today, this sort of gentleman's club atmosphere lingers in the more sullen corners and musty basements of Marunouchi and Ginza, still cherished by retro hounds with a taste for boardroom gravitas.

It would take some time for modernism as such to be fully digested by the New Japanese architecture, though. Maekawa Kunio, together with Sakakura Junzo and Yoshimura Junzo, completed the somewhat textbook-Miesian International Culture House (kokusai bunka kaikan, not to be confused with the late 50s concrete concert and event hall in Ueno park called just bunka kaikan) in Roppongi, which even way back in 1923 already had the stirrings of a foreigner-friendly cosmopolitanism. Late in his career, Maekawa would find the balance that would earn him his reputation as a leading light of the New Japanese Modern, successfully marrying his Bauhaus leanings with traditional “authentic” Japanese traditions. His personal residence (1942), now dismantled and reincarnated in the open-air Edo-Tokyo architectural museum in Koganei city, is essentially a hiraya with more generous proportions and better natural light. It retains the free flow of space from the interior living room outward to the yard of the traditional Japanese residence, with an elegant concession to double-height ceilings, an open plan staircase, and a two-tiered graduated shouji (sliding wooden screen in a grid pattern) - rice-papered at ground level, transparent glass for the upper half. The result is one of those rare instances where Bauhaus box modern and the "New Japanese" fusion rid each component of its limitations. The Japanese house managed to shed its usual gloom, and the modern glass box shed a good deal of its dogma and acquired a newfound warmth of materials. I’ll let the picture speak for itself.

Doujunkai Apaato; and your New Hills Lifestyle!

In a city known for feverish new development and a generally shinier patina than most, gracefully decaying buildings are something of a Tokyo marvel. The average lifespan of public housing, shuugou juutaku or danchi projects, is 30 years. Especially during the feverish era of postwar rebuilding, entire tracts of faceless "tofu" apartment complexes (豆腐のようなデザインの集合住宅) materialized overnight; in an effort to rehouse maximum numbers of people at minimal cost, they were often in slapdash materials, marred by haphazard workmanship. Walls and floors were thin, uninsulated, prone to leakages and fractures. Subsequently, and usually within that narrow 30-year horizon, upwardly mobile residents got fed up of dealing with the repairs, and simply upped and moved elsewhere, or else tore down and rebuilt in something more "modern," like concrete, tile and aluminium. Because they were provisional structures in the first place, preservation and heritage were never on the cards at all. Those housing blocks that were not part of this mass rehousing scheme, built before the war and spared the blitzing of Tokyo, however, were of a much higher quality. (This was during a time before the rather twee self-branding campaigns began - now danchi are danchi, apartments are (non-public) apartments, "heights" denote a little more luxury, and "mansions" are a guarantee of comprehensive "western" mod cons like dishwashers and (gasp) combination toilet-bathrooms).



In other large metropoles, midcentury architecture, especially of the Corbusian "unities of habitation" variety, has become a motherlode of perfumed ruins, prized as "authentic" historical blank canvases for architects and photographers to install their studios in...Tokyo's the same (and very probably more smitten. In any cool cafe worth its half its pretentions, the magazine rack is sure to have the Casa Brutus "BIG 3 extra issue" featuring all the forgotten and obscure works by Corb, Wright and Mies - including an unbelievably curated architour of Chandigarh). Perhaps this pre-war/post-war rift in quality control has fueled an even greater obsession with the charmingly creaky and paint-peeling walk-up tenements, sometimes with hardly anything else to recommend them except their venerable age. As recently as the Bubble 80s, though, Tokyoites were too busy speculating in French country chateaus and Manhattan penthouses to pay much attention to their own native deadstock of public housing, known collectively as the Doujunkai apartments.



Originally numbering 16 projects in Tokyo and Yokohama built in the late 1920s and early 30s, the sturdy, practical construction in reinforced concrete (fireproof and earthquake-resistant), ample ventilation and natural light made them ideal for dense inner city living. The majority were dismantled in the 80s, and presently only two remain, in the eastern "downtown" (shitamachi) districts of Uenoshita and Minowa. More recently, there have been some sensitive facade treatments and adaptive reuse, however. Daikanyama, a satellite residential district of Shibuya, is something of an ongoing (half-century, and counting...) study in public housing on a human scale. Maki Fumihiko's Hillside Terrace, a sort of proto-Metabolist housing project, used clever partitioning and layering in an attempt to revive the idea of a "commons" in a public housing project. It's hosted unfinished alterations and progressive annexes since the 60s. The Daikanyama Doujunkai was "upgraded" in 2000 to become the more condominiumish Daikanyama Address. All this is somewhat besides the point, if you consider that Daikanyama, together with adjacent Nakameguro and Ebisu, is now part of one of the most gentrified sections of the city, cheek-by-jowl with discreet bars, sidewalk and canal-bank cafes, boutiques and all the rest of it. If the Doujunkai has "survived" in Daikanyama, perhaps it's only as some kind of token communal landmark that can then be safely reworked, helping to bolster land prices and spur on the nostalgia industry...



The other recent metamorphosis is of course Ando's Omotesando Hills, a studiously unconventional shopping mall that recalls the graceful curves of the New York Guggenheim; sure, it's about shopping and rabid consumerism, but at least Ando tries to disguise those ugly motives with his trademark artisanal concrete, sloping walkways and sensitive skylighting. The former Aoyama Doujunkai survives as the "gallery wing" of the complex, home to a number of art galleries, that shows off the open plan stairwells and simple frontal balconies to best effect. Behind all this apparently sensitive redevelopment, however, is the sinister master vision of one Mori Minoru, who has in the past decade or so syndicated his network of "Hills": a sort of 21st century urban template of Bigness (I wonder what Koolhaas would have to say about this) for a scattershot Tokyo, a city he sees as languishing in the face of competition from Shanghai, Bangkok and Singapore. His diagnosis isn't incorrect, but the prospect of his network of Hills, each one a vertically-integrated playground of curated leisure for moneyed internationals, strikes me as a Ballardian nightmare of super-rich gated communes. Already he has five major Hills in place; the first, Atago Green Hills, was completed in 2001, and Omotesando Hills opened to sharply-dressed mobs only last year. He stumbled a little over Roppongi Hills, because of the number of people he had to buy out and resettle, but the trend seems unlikely to abate. Tokyo "Midtown", another live-work-play megaplex, is scheduled to sprout in the same neighborhood in a couple years. Like some kind of global superstructure plastered onto the lowrise Tokyo landscape, Mori's Hills would be appalling even in Singapore or Shanghai, but they are especially depressing in Tokyo, a city I trusted would be mature enough to fend off the grandiose urban ideals of some meddlesome technocrat.

Showa Retro and Chuo Line Charm

Much of Tokyo came of age (and has since been fairly stranded) in the postwar years of capital-rebuilding. While Americans basked in their suburban deckchairs amid the hissing of summer lawns, one ear tuned to the TV jingles celebrating Hoover vacuums, Miracle Whip, FireKing dishwasher-safe glassware and frozen fish fingers, 1950s Tokyo staggered to get back on its feet. People queued at all hours for foreign provisions at the Ame Yokochou in Ueno, cheap public housing projects (danchi) were erected. In the runup to the 1964 Olympics, Tokyo paved and bulldozed its way to the staggeringly well-connected train, subway and tram network that now riddles the city, raised ambitious Metabolist cellular housing projects like Kurosawa Kishou's Nakagin Capsule Tower, invested in some seriously elegant modernist concrete that has since patinized beautifully. The Olympic park in Komazawa is a radiant example of Showa regeneration-era concrete (although elsewhere, more modest budgets might have urged the cheaper and more wabi cinderblocks...) It's less a park and more a sort of triumphalist playground, left over from a time when Tokyo was convinced that it was going to catch up with the west at last. Ueno park is another mature showpiece of Showa modernism in richly hued concrete, with both Corbusier's Museum of Western Art and Maekawa Kunio's Bunka Kaikan.



Tokyo has been drifting westward throughout Showa, with the result that much of the Chuo line (a suburban commuter rail system running west from Shinjuku toward major Tama area cities like Kokubunji, Tachikawa and Hachioji) is now celebrated as a largely intact timewarp commune of public housing, crusty public baths on their last dregs, mid-century western-styled luxury geshuku (lodging houses) with mantelpieces and other aristo trappings [the one on the right, "Seikou Lodging" nestles in residential Ogikubo and survives as a JR ryoukan], coffee shops, "western sweet parlors," and jazz bars of the first generation, at a time when chintz, vinyl chairs and floral antimacassars were still in fashion (of course, in some circles they still are. A lot of period deadstock interior trophies and vintage mid-century "classics" have somehow pooled and accumulated in this city). For the dedicated student of urban textures, this is ground zero for Showa retro. Tokyo has no "New Yorker" that I know of, but a magazine similarly named, called "Tokyo Jin," is telling in its differences; no high-profile verbal portrait of cultural celebrities or postcolonialish short fiction with yet another minoritarian take on exile and dishabitation. Tokyo Jin is a local interest paper that interviews cafeteria operators and night wardens, runs features on derelict public housing danchi projects in obscure greying neighborhoods, lovingly photographs instances of pokey bars owned by wiry-haired women with seven cats and a large collection of snow globes. The key difference of course is that this is a "local" paper for a megalopolis of thirty million people. One issue might feature the "magic of the Chuo line," but will also run a story on the classic "western" (youshoku) cafeterias in Ginza or Marunouchi that specialize in beef stew or mixed fry (and charge prices commensurate with the accumulated weight of their historical glamor), plus an article on a much-loved local community center cafeteria-cum-soup kitchen in Chiba. Reading it, one feels the overwhelming heartlandership of the reporting, a housewifish concern for the little details and harmonious neighborly relations, the importance of shopping local, the evils of globalism and development, and so on.

As hippies and various communards fled central Tokyo in the 60's, they slunk progressively further west on the chuo line; first to Nakano, then to Koenji (manga artists, vintage used goods warehouses and Tokyo's most packed outdoor summer dance festival), then to Asagaya, which still enjoys something of a reputation for literary types. Nakano now has approximately the electric atmosphere that Shinjuku did in the 60s when people in tweed blazers packed "live houses," smoke Gauloises and drank whisky in a room only slightly larger than a closet. Nakano is also famous for the shopping center "Broadway" with all mod cons of the modernist mixed use complex, finished in cheap formica and linoleum; harshly-lit and warren-like with that classic smell of mouldering merchandise. Golden Mile or People's Park Complex; maybe one of the period Kowloon teen-malls too. It specializes in pop culture and especially manga ephemera, and operates a large buyback and trade-in depot. Again, because the Japanese practise an exceptionally obsessive gopherism, whatever their chosen consumerist fetish, this is no facile J-pop idol worship teen hell mall with posters and stickers and dangly cellphone accessories. It looks only like a barracks of so many cluttered bedrooms of people who stay in and watch too many videos, but you might stumble upon actual theatrical release Antonioni or Godard posters, dead stock tie-in merchandise for C-grade horror flicks like thermos flasks or red clasp-lunchboxes. There's a tiny outlet doing a roaring trade in antique sports watches with an accordingly swish interior (at sharp odds with the makeshift stockpiling of the first-generation nintendo game cartridge museum next door). As I walked past a small video arcade lovingly restocked with coin-op machines from the glorious eighties, I saw a Street Fighter machine and succumbed fully and completely.

Next in the series: Japanese magazines, "select shops," and the tyranny of curatorship

東京：都会文化のローハス系

t's not even late autumn, although it's already december. depending on where you look (and inokashira park near kichijoji (ji2 xiang2 si4) is a very good place to start), the leaves are only somewhat blushing. it was a very urbanpastoral stroll in the park the other day as i sauntered down a gently sloping hill, passing boutiques called "comme ca du mode" or "cafe renoir", flowering shrubs and potted plants spilling onto narrow streets, the light magical, soft and brilliant as it only is at year's-end, past an ancient "lao3 pu3" yakitori shack (called tachi-kui, "standing-to-scarf" is my translation), i broach the entrance to the park. plenty of old people, impeccably dressed and wrapped in voluminous scarves just to feed the ducks or walk a dog (or three). it's textbook urbanpastoral, and i'm floored. there are rangers standing (or rather, cycling) around, but one doesn't feel surveilled. it's perfectly regulated, gently modulated to the sound of plashing water. there are even announcements and tinkling jingles to beseech you to enjoy nature, pick up after your dog, and be a responsible citizen in general. it would be a little more grating assuming i understood more japanese. as it is, i feel it's only slightly well-meant in the way a grand-aunt's exhortations to eat your vegetables can be.

today, the "other" japan. but still, urbanpastoral...? it's ando's new omotesando hills complex. again, i almost weep in shame when i think that we got a trashy third-hand castoff Toyo Ito prototype, badly finished, in VivoCity...but Tokyo gets this beautiful shrine to consumption, whose somewhat base commercial motives are ever so delicately glossed over and disguised by the wabi-sabi concrete and "natural" fissureship that is an Ando trademark...The walkways in the mall slope gently up and down, breaking the quadrilateral box-layout without sacrificing a certain compactness of scale. You thankfully wouldn't get lost here. The Dojunkai wing is a nice refurbishment and conservation of pre-WWII Japanese public housing. I'm not sure if Ando applied his concrete over and above the exisiting facade. gorgeous in any case, and a much better juxtaposition of old and new than say...Cathay cineplex...?