Symbiosis; or Post Bubble Sprouts

Like most recent art spaces, Kisho Kurokawa's new National Art Center in Tokyo was designed as a place of public encounter, running in tune with a high profile cultural calendar. In its own little pocket in foreigner-friendly Roppongi, the NAC includes sprawling exhibition halls (the largest single museum space in Japan, in fact), a satellite branch of Paul Bocuse's high French cuisine, and an outpost of the heavily curated Tokyo "select" shop Cibone. Cibone typically sells a severely limited range of folktronica, artisanal stationery and other extraneous ingenuities. While the museum primes itself to become the showpiece of the cultural part of Roppongi (whereas the pimps, foreign hostesses and military R&R men can carry on frolicking all night in the seedy part), Kurokawa is moving on to other projects, including running for governor soon. He thinks the current one, Ishihara, is becoming a bit of a menace, clamoring to rearrange the city yet again in preparation for a possible second Tokyo Olympics in 2016.

Our newest public spaces are guilty of this betrayal: they are anything but democratic, frequently under the whim and directive of some ambitious technocrat with generous funding. This new cultural hub has its own exit from Nogizaka station; you are spirited effortlessly through a series of engineered tunnels, following the trail of illuminated signs that ensure you don't get lost or take the wrong exit. The polish is quite oppressive. It's got that whiff of expensive remodeling, the tyranny of a perfect refurbishment.



The new art space is complicit in advertising its own image/imagination. Four years ago, Minoru Mori's mixed-use Roppongi Hills complex (service apartments, modern art museum, international cuisine, lavish boutiques) was outdone only by the audaciousness of its ad campaign. Takashi Murakami got commissioned to design a series of cartoon posters featuring his terminally exuberant "Superflat" critters having a little romp around the playground of their "New Hills Lifestyle!". Kurokawa's NAC is its new accessory. (In about two weeks, though, Mitsui Fudosan, one of Japan's two or three national construction dynasties, is going to launch Tokyo Midtown, a similar development which will overwhelm even Mori's Hills.) Kurokawa and his contemporaries began championing an urban model of organic rogue-like contagion in the sixties, outcroppings of "Metabolic" architecture left to spawn itself throughout the city. Little of that extemporaneous spirit remains, unfortunately. Nowadays what makes the news are large tracts of land for well-funded projects, usually variations on the condominium complex theme, overseen by the singular utopian vision of a master planner.

If we must be crabby about development, let's at least acknowledge that it's been awhile since we've enjoyed so much outwardly benevolent patronage for Art, in the marbled lobbies of investment banks, as showpiece centers for ailing provincial towns. Much of it, however, tends to be programmatic assembly work that feeds off a fantasy narrative of work-and-play downtowns. Real estate brochurespeak for people who enjoy buying (into) packaged identities. Kurokawa used to be known as something of a maverick, junking traditional urban planning for messy, erratic development. Now he's switched to the more orderly model of "symbiosis". Does he mean a harmonious relationship between man and his shelter? In any case, it's quite a different ecology that comes to mind - a model of symbiotic power between corporations, developers, investors, advertising. Quite a world apart from the monstrous metabolic spasms of postwar Tokyo in the throes of rebuilding.

Despite this recent polish, Tokyo is a city that's managed to resist wholesale refurbishment, the look of uniform newness that Singapore loves. It's probably the last city - and certainly the only one in Asia - to have had the benefit of a relatively gradual transition to Western standards of modernity. Having fulfilled all its gleaming infrastructural ambitions forty years ago, Tokyo can now sit back and appraise its forty-year old patina. A good part of it has that dated look from the sixties, lots of concrete and municipal-hall modern. This is its "authentic." Large swathes of cobbled tile and concrete and aluminium in tofu blocks. Corrugated aluminium, polycarbonate screens, battered clapboards and weathered rain-stained cinderblocks. This unplanned jumble of cheap industrial bits and pieces. Littered with unpromising materials, Tokyo screams to be redesigned. Developers are starting with Roppongi. Some architects have been having different ideas, though. Atelier Bow Wow, currently the subject of an exhibition at Gallery Ma, appeals to a "practice of lively space: glocal detached house and micro public space." Bow Wow are a vigilante husband-and-wife team of post-materialist Situationist rogue agents who like firing up the suburbs, sprouting subtle interventions in post-bubble Tokyo.



After the moneyed fever of eighties development died down, clients became more sober and stopped demanding kitschy fiefdoms with Roman capitals and marble verandahs (Singapore unforunately hasn't quite outgrown this). WIth less money and more restraint, clients went in for modestly outfitted and compact boxes in prefabricated materials and plasticky finishes. This is the sort of place that goes unremarked, quietly commissioned by sympathetic clients, nestling anonymously in a sea of huddled one or two storey houses. Post-bubble, this is Tokyo's recessional wabi. Buildings are treated as independent allotments, micromanaged and rearranged as you like.



Back home in Singapore, I wonder when we will have the luxury of distributed development, anything at all, really, to contest the bland official line on global cultural renaissance urban downtown masterplans, etc. We're not alone in this, of course. It seems to be Asia's particular lot to have to face the ruinous effects of compressed modernization. It's difficult to escape the tyranny of regulated development and pre-integrated lifestyles, ambitiously assembled by government advisory boards and developers. The proliferation of chain stores and international franchises. Superbrands have turned most city centers into High Street corporations. We tend to get the cityscape we deserve. If nobody's going to stand firm and insist on more graceful aging and kinder environments, we can look forward to more and more arrogance and invasiveness.

Singapore has generally been on a bit of a tighter schedule than Tokyo. So many things torn down and trashed at one stroke, before they had the time to fray, crumble, crack and peel, in installments. Patina is one of the few things remaining to us that still resists being dematerialized, reduced to an image (I discount here the sort of urban quotidian-pastoral school of photography that fetishizes unkempt alleyways and their rusty pipes and crumbling brickwork). In Singapore, where we threw patina out the window at first and now clamor to get it back now that our surroundings are radiant and our infrastructure is spotless, the cause is even more hopeless. Is there some middle ground between toy-bright Chinatowns and cloistered playground waterfront Integrated Resorts and yachts and condominiums? If we haven't had the time to unfold gracefully, do we have an alternative to one-stroke corporate-funded refurbishment?

What is Singapore's authentic? Its native Gothic? If you disqualify HDB public housing stock, our foreign starchitect showpieces, and cheapened heritage conservation areas...Still, I can think of a couple of examples: SIT first-generation flats in Tiong Bahru or Queenstown, row shophouses in Joo Chiat or Yio Chu Kang, colonial bungalows in Seletar or Tanglin. Last There was a lovely short film that kicked off RESfest in Singapore last summer that knowingly captured our very own Tropicalia. An urban pastoral walk in the park, the film stock colored by heat-fatigue. The sepia tones shimmering with late-afternoon languor. A girl dawdles in a corner of Siglap: the forlorn coffee shop with cruddy windows, the Peranakan matriarch's ancestral terrace house and its garden overtaken by weeds, cycling aimlessly in a stranded carpark. Lots of shifting light on mosaic tile, homages to formica tabletops and melamine tableware.


　　
This is part of our "authentic," although no one with any pretentions to more glamorous stereotypes will care to admit it. At the moment, while everyone's preoccupied with visions of gleaming financial parks and zones of designated leisure, who's going to tend to our more humble hangouts? Already I think some of these "native" inspirations are being mined - look at Dempsey Road and Rochester Park's boondock-colonial backlanes being taken over by wine bars and villas-for-dinner. (The locals are taking back the colonial bungalows, moving back into the deserted plantation and having their own little version of Sunday bridge and tea-on-the-verandah.) In Tokyo there is a long and cherished vein of nostalgia that prizes the messy, meandering alleys of the old downtown (下町、shitamachi) as well as the forty year old shabbiness in areas that somehow escaped Bubble redevelopment. Magazines routinely memorialize derelict public housing compounds, time-warp shopping arcades, and the sort of department stores that we used to have (Tay Buan Guan, Oriental Emporium; fluorescent tubes and squeaky linoleum). It took Tokyo one boom-and-bust cycle to start reappraising itself. When our shiny showpiece New Downtown, plus all the waterfront condominiums and IRs finally get completed, maybe people will finally start catching on to the native Nanyang patina of our more neglected neighborhoods.

Curated cafes

Remaindered space is a particular Tokyo specialty. In boom-town Kichijoji, fifteen minutes west of Shinjuku, the city center is indistinguishable from any othey busy subcenter in the capital - Isetan, Marui, Tokyu, Kinokuniya, together with their phalanxes of service staff decked out in costumes that make everyone look like PanAm flight attendants from the seventies. What you don't expect in slick Kichijoji-central are the unkempt hideouts that nestle alongside the slick mall developments. Right in front of the north exit is Hamonika Yokochou (ハモニカ横町), a scrambled assortment of fishmongers, shops of mouldering pickles, 4-seater curry houses run by unrepentant "Indo-kei" types, donburi counters, auntie emporiums and "viking" smorgasbord standing cafe-bars. One of them serves "one-coin lunch." I clambered up the steep and clackety staircase without toppling over, sat myself in front of a five-seater bar on top of which a large casserole of niku-jaga and gyu-suji (meat and potatoes; beef tendons) simmered disconsolately. The stools were rickety and capped with red vinyl. For Y500, I got an hors d'oeuvre bento-box of a half crescent of odened daikon, cabbage salad, pickles and groundnuts, and then miso soup and a tuna and leek garlic saute. The lone window was cruddy, plastered over with band flyers, far-flung sake and shochu labels, one-off design exhibition postcards.

This is the scruffy chic that has made Tokyo's name for offhanded and cave-like dining options. But of course, Tokyo is also replete with the other extreme, hard to find so thick on the ground even somewhere like New York or London or Paris. I am talking, of course, about the Curated Cafe. The Curated Cafe is by no means unique in the Tokyo world of mass consumer happiness; there are legions of curated boutiques with historically accurate fetishes displayed like cabinets of curiosities; curated hair salons with vintage turntables that play infuriatingly well-chosen lounge exotica rarities; curated record shops with passionate agendas to push; etc etc. Beams, which celebrated its 30th anniversary recently, began scouring European craft fairs and flea markets, American heartland thrift stores before retro became retro. It probably invented the whole idea of the postmodern international emporium. It's now become something of an integrated empire of enlightened curatorship in art, fashion, music, and craft. It has the look and feel of a proselytizing bazaar, a kind of freemasonry of taste that nonetheless graciously welcomes new initiates who don't have the time to cultivate a personality, and then spend money agonizing over how to best externalize it. It tells you, what awfully mundane tastes you have. Look at your high street chain store threads and mass produced accessories. Come and peruse our precisely selected collections of artisanal wares, drop some cash and walk out a convert to a higher-order post-materialism (emphatically not the same as anti-materialism).

In Kichijoji, the best Curated Cafe I could find was Medewo and Dine, an "interior shop and cafe" in the Tokyu "Ura" backstreet area, but there are doubtless more stringently assembled ones in Daikanyama or Nakameguro. Medewo sells you food, espresso drinks (surprisingly good, actually) but also Freitag bags, graphic prints and Italian coffee equipment and tableware. The floor is unfinished cement, the tables are Formica and the chairs reconstructed from some mix of vinyl, PVC and Bauhaus stainless steel tubes. On the self-service reading shelf there's Classic Cafes, Adrian Maddox's loving monograph to the London formica Italian coffee bar (leatherette, Deco lettering, vitrolite and laminates), Medewo's acknowlegment, planted Nabokov-like on the premises for the astute "reader," of its historical references. This is one of the recombinant ones, taking various pokey inspirations from the sixties and stage-managed for an audience likely too young to fall for a coherent and thematically consistent reconstruction - of which there are plenty: zinc-barred and wicker-chaired French bistros and cafes in Azabu Juban or Daikanyama for example.

There is also, a ten minute walk from the station, A. K. Labo Patisserie, a two storey ivy-wound white clapboard house made out on the inside with beautifully worn dark wood floorboards and half-hearted Eames moulded plywood chairs. It's light and airy and the rotating art exhibitions have the same feeling - unretouched craft-fair sock monkeys, lovingly framed color pencil etchings, kitchen knitwork done by hobbyist housewives. The tarts have filigree filo and perfect crumbiness, the apple one with graceful juliennes, the chocolate Tigre gummy and sponge cakey at the same time. The bookshelf is casually stocked with Paris flea market and antique store guidebooks, LOHAS magazines with pastel photos of cycling in the park, baking quiche and shopping for tsukemono at the obaasan's pickle stall. French radio plays ethnic selections from its outer departements, like Henri Salvador or Guadeloupean beach bar sugarcane shimmy- let's sip curacao easy-listening. It also reports the latest traffic conditions on the Peripherique and counsels you to head on down to the Centre Pompidou for the last day of the Herge bande dessinee retrospective. It's just more pleasantly curated leisure time for the Japanese, but somewhat unnerving for me. If only because I get the niggling feeling that the Japanese do French better than the French do themselves.

City as Museum in Motion: Edo in Tokyo

The approach is innocuous. It's about a fifteen minute trek down a characterless thoroughfare that cuts straight through Koganei towards Kodaira. Just before you enter by the west entrance, lodged forlornly between the two high speed lanes of a busy intersection, there's the Tama Jousui Nature Walk, a scruffy path strewn with earth and roots, skimming something between a rivulet and a canal choked with water weeds and fallen branches. Then you enter Koganei park and are struck by the generous space, meandering cycle paths, dry patches of parched grass for picnics, the now-defunct locomotive commuter service lovingly erected as a monument behind latched gates. A little further on is a theme park for grownups.

There's a 1920s cosmetics store with a stonewashed facade and ionic columns carved out of its surface, a public bath with kitsch mosaics and original hand-dyed noren (flappy curtain-like drapes at the entrance), a Deco photo studio, Taisho period western homes with heavy oak and mahogany furniture, late Meiji farmhouses with thatched straw roofs, sagging eaves and a simulation brazier.

The Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum treads that treacherous sliver of a line between respectful preservation and joke museumification. It's like Siena or central Paris, afflicted with the brittle charm of intact history. The residents are publicly proud to live in an ancient tenement wearing its stains gracefully, but in secret they will tell you what a terrible drag it is to have to deal with creaky staircases, sagging plaster from the ceiling, the seasonal moulting of the paintwork. Koganei's mini Edo inherits this tradition of the museum city, without the pesky residents who actually live there. The actual preservation of the buildings in situ was passed over at first, and following their demolition, when Japan finally made its peace with reckless development and modernization, decided to exhume its defunct native architecture and reassemble it into a Legoland for posterity. As opposed to Singapore's facade treatment and adaptive reuse, Koganei decided it would not foist modernity on its pre-modern hardware. Little Edo accords history the respect it is believed to deserve. We will break decisively with this crumbling wood stock housing, remove it from the context of our everyday lives, and become curators of a dead tradition of craftmanship.

If preservation is difficult, it is difficult because it is wilful anachronism, against better practical judgment and modern-day expendiency. Architecture has this additional irony - it either becomes its own self-iconic museum, or disappears completely. Unlike most fine art, which bears being stuffed into a temple of modern museum-going culture for the believers, architecture is intensively localized and essentially unmoveable. Once dismantled, it has not much of an elsewhere to hide. Except, of course, in one fell stroke, in this sort of theme park setting, where it testifies to its own demise by archiving itself, in the nowhere and no-context of an "architectural museum". Refurbished with period furniture, tools, the clutter of daily routines, the architectural museum disguises its fradulence by branding itself a "real" simulation, of life as it authentically was back then. Accusations of kitsch are effectively negated, because architecture has no other chance to circulate. It insists that there is no other faithful archive.

The eastern side of the park is intended as a restaging of mercantile Edo, but in fact Meiji machiya (townhouses) and various provision shops, along with early Showa "kanban kenchiku" ("signboard architecture") angular shophouses (not unlike the Malayan Chinatown-colonial sort, with their narrow frontage, two- and three-storey construction, and Art Deco facade treatments) have been thrown into the mix, so that the visitor can straddle time and history more efficiently, saunter through a century of architectural history within the space of a weekend day trip. The archive, despite its sometimes lofty aims, is not incorruptible. Most museums aren't. Even the best and most faithful ones never fully recapture time-in-a-bottle. Most of our supposedly living cities are themselves archives-in-progress, haphazard accumulations of buildings out of phase with each other. If the city had the luxury of languid development (Rome), imperial decree (Nara), fascist renovation (Paris), or some combination of each, the residents count themselves lucky to inherit some of this strictly curated spirit. If, like Tokyo, none of this has survived to accompany it into the modern age, the archive is scrambled but intact. It will take some deciphering. Tokyo's archive has too many collections to be curated effectively. The exhibits come into their own. Some hoary and urban legendlike, others endlessly rebuilt and refurbished according to the fashion of the age, and yet others young upstarts trying to add color and new blood to a "historical" area.

The label "architectural museum" is fraudulent. It refutes the possibility of a living archive of architecture perpetually in variance with itself. It pretends to suggest that cities are in and of themselves incapable of preserving a core of history within a whirlwind of change. It is, at its base, against the proposition of art-as-life and vice versa. The living, user-friendliness of architecture as lifestyle.