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.