entrance

The staircase is transformed into an entrance garden.

Architour

The first tour is on Saturday. Please look here

strange shape

I still see houses by chance that makes me surprised and a little bit happy. Like this. Even tough if feels like I've seen this before.

tokyo apartments

Tokyo Apartments, Sou Fujimoto, 2010. The stacking of boxes of house type presents problems both with structure and logic. The structural problems are overcome by accepting the structure as part of the architecture, however the way the structure makes itself visible here is fundamentally different from the full frontal assault of Shinohara's House in Uehara or some of Sakamoto's houses were the the structure is left exposed in unexpected places because the absence of a will to resolve the problem, different layers of default interacting. Here the structure is exposed trough the default placement of the windows.

The rotations in plan but not in section expose something different. The series of house type boxes are only manipulated in height, houses without a plot. Is this a series of stacked plots in Delirious Tokyo? It is definitely contextual in a way that makes the word lose its meaning.

The house is default white and gives an answer to the question of how the bottom of a house looks. It is white too. 

It is still a very fun project to visit. To me it is neither beautiful nor ugly. But also not very resolved or critical.  

Note Casa Brutus in the window and the sign proclaiming the name.

vegetation

Bench beneath a tree. A effective, simple and nice configuration.

However it is the tree and the effect is has on the street that is really worth noticing. It leans out and provides shade, it transforms this short stretch of the street into something calmer and more welcoming.
It also reminds me of a paper architecture proposal by the Russian (ex paper-) architect Alexander Brodsky suggesting a retirement home for football players. A courtyard building surround a football field , with a tree placed asymmetrically to provide shade from the sun so the old players could rest.

This one tree suggests to me a manifest of a city consisting of a series of smaller interventions.

what lies beyond

The inside of mansion tower building.

The light at the end of the tunnel.

prologue - Tokyo from above

The sunset seen from Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (Kenzo Tange) in West Shinjuku.

View of opera city and the Metropolitan Expressway.

The city as model. Akihabara.

A map of the administrative borders of Tokyo-to. To the east in darker green, Tokyo 23, and to west the Tama district of Tokyo. South of Tokyo Kanagawa-ken, to the west Yamanashi-ken, north is Saitama-ken and to the east Chiba-ken. The 23 Special Wards that make up Tokyos city centre is under central administration to a certain degree, they are the least free cities in Japan, but they are still not one city. Tokyo is not one, Tokyo is many different parts that are put together.

All maps are reductions, this one is only showing built up structure of a certain kind. The kind more likely to burn. Here the city is visible as a thins down around the most central spot.

Tokyo is famous for it complex networks of trains that transport enormous amount of people every day. Here the central section of the railway network.

A map consisting of build structure.

Built structure classified by how resistant the structure is to damage. Also a hint of the morphology of the city.

And finally a map of where we began, in Shinjuku, looking down on city and seeing the mixture of scales a the complete mess of spaces, however, there is only so much these maps tells us, even if we are used to looking at maps, without further knowledge of the context they come from.

prologue

Let us begin here looking at an anonymous buildings catching the lights of St Grace Cathedral.

Contemplate how the lights shine on this concrete façade. Surely this is architecture.

See this building; it is not a cathedral, it is a wedding chapel close to Ometosando. Surely this is also architecture, but of a different kind. Or maybe order. But one building brings light to the other.

Watch a woman walk on narrow street partially illuminated by the lights of a delivery truck.

Move to Aoyama-dori and see Fumiko Makis Spiral (1985) building. The top part reflecting the red lights of a billboard.

Named after the way people flow up through the building in a spiral movement.

Pause in the crossing of Aoyama-dori and Ometosando.

Cross Aoyama-dori and follow Ometosando and Pradas Aoyama Epicenter (H&dM 2003) is even more architecture, in a purely quantifiable way.