Page 9 of 10
Tokyo, Japan
Or watch the Sunday gangs in Harajuku, something's wrong with me, I'm a cuckoo
There is architecture to be found in Tokyo (I mean it is a big, big city after all) and (shockingly) I went on a quest to see some of it. There is a fantastic iPhone app from the MiMOA people that shows you where the very best contemporary and modern architecture is hiding, along with usable GPS maps that help you to find everything that you've come all that far to see. A great application and highly recommended, especially when traveling internationally (it's sadly not all that helpful yet in North America). Today's pictures (for better or for worse) are a result of what I might have otherwise missed if I did not have the MiMOA app, some time in Tokyo and a desire to walk the streets recklessly wielding at least three different cameras, all purely for my own enjoyment and without any thoughts of the consequences. Enjoy.
Starting off this page's contemporary architecture pictures is Herzog and de Meuron's Prada Aoyama Epicenter, a retail store in Omotesando, a part of Tokyo where high profile retail stores hire high profile architects to design high profile buildings, all in an effort to attract high profile shoppers and, well, me.
The building is a store inside and a simple (enough) massing outside, but it's the skin that wraps it where everything interesting happens. A grid of diamond shaped windows seems simple (enough), but when you start to bubble some of them out, things start to get a lot more fun.
Kisho Kurokawa's National Art Center is a blob- a curving, bulbous building with a carefully thought out facade of glass and more glass, notably featuring bands of fritted horizontal glass attached to the exterior. The effect is striking although not especially practical. The fritted glass acts as a sunshade to the interior, a good idea in theory but a bad idea in practice- walking inside the space it's easy to see that all those fritted glass sunshades don't seem to do a very good job shading anyone from the sun.
Programmatically the building itself is rather interesting, almost like a Japanese Pompidou Center or a straight forward kunsthall, it features a series of temporary exhibition spaces where all kinds of art is on display, everything from blockbuster traveling exhibits (I saw a surprisingly good Van Gogh exhibit there) to local contemporary art for sale.
Inside (and outside) the National Art Center, where cafes are plentiful and people scurry about the rather well lit and poorly shaded space.
Only a few blocks from the Prada Aoyama Epicenter is SANAA's Carina Store, a small shrouded jewel box on a side street that I would have never found if not for MiMOA. Side streets in that part of Omotesando (where the streets have no name) are narrow and paved with no sidewalks- pedestrians simply share the streets with cars. Everywhere from Nagoya to Inuyama to Kanazawa to Kyoto to Tokyo, streets without sidewalks are common and, with cars driving on the wrong side of the road, often uncomfortable to be on.
Another SANAA designed building (Dior Omotesando) and a MVRDV designed building (Gyre Shopping Center) stand across the street from each other, forever in an unending stare down between light and dark, between good and evil, between a building designed by a firm with a five letter acronym and another building designed by a firm with a five letter acronym. Same as it ever was.
Renzo Piano's foray into big name Japanese retail architecture is Maison Hermes, far from Omotesando and far closer to Ginza. A simple building with a surprisingly impressive glowing glass block wall, it is one of those buildings and one of those facades which is interesting during the day but just spectacular at night.
