along Tamagawa Josui

Along with the Chuo-line meetup group I walked along parts of the Tamagawa Josui from Mitaka station and towards the city. Among other things we saw an urban farm and a road development project in progress. Here are a few more pictures.
For fantastic and convenient map of the the Tamagawa Josui look here. The dimensions are 300x20cm.

a road development

A park, a wall and plastic covered ground to stop vegetation from growing. The Tamagawa Josui (more about it here and here) is a 43 km waterway built to supply Edo (now Tokyo) with water, work started in 1653. Along a section of the Tamagawa Josui in Suginami-ku a road is being built, as all road developments in urban areas, things are in the way of the planned road. A comment in Japanese about the development here and a blog about here.

The situation regarding the execution of theese planned road that often stretch far back in history is more complicated than I've previously realised.  

Plans for new roads infrastructure approved in the 1960s have proven virtually impossible to revise, ...

There are literally thousands of such plan, particularly for City Planning Roads (Toshi keikau doro) projects for multilane arterial roads through existing urban areas. ... Although it might seem a simple matter for the central government to cancel a plan that is no longer needed or wanted (...) in fact it is not so easy to cancel such plans. ... - [As the plan] put some legal restrictions on allowable building activity, the government is concerned that cancellations of plans that were approved in the 1960s and 1970s might prompt massive compensation claims from affected landowners. No city planning roads have yet been cancelled.    

André Sorensen and Carolin Funck in Living Cities in Japan, Conclusions: a diversity of machizukuri processes and outcomes. 

The road project I've previously written about change a bit in the light of the above quote. The fantastic pocket of time here in special, but also here and here.

The projected road development along the Tamagawa Josui is well underway but the physical reality during the years long implementation of the plan is just strange and sad.

A section of the plan.

an urban farm

An Urban Farm along the Tamagawa Josui. Here you buy your locally produced vegetables, just leave some coins corresponding to amount you take with you. There are many small patches inside the urban areas of Tokyo still working as farms. This is the advantage of urban development happening in small chunks.
Today these farms are seen as resource by the city.

presence

A video rental store (they still exist in Japan), proclaiming its existence towards the street. 

The fake facade isn't used for the sign of the store, but to fit in the urban context. A peculiar decorated shed.

Nagakin Capsule Tower

Nagakin Capsule Tower. Kisho Kurokawa. This now rundown building is the realised key building of the metabolist project, a dream of handling the explosive growth of Tokyo and other cities (look here).  The capsule were the cells of the metabolist city, movable functional living units. No capsule has ever been moved on this tower. This building should be seen as an alternative dream future that never happened. As many utopian futures there are many problems to address.

the political goal of metabolist urban planning could only have meant the erasure of private land ownership and its total re-organization. 

Imagining the organic city p. 172  - M. Schalk.

The idea lives on in the capsule hotels which can be found around major train stations in Japan. But there the capsules fills interior space instead of defining the exterior as here. Also individual movable homes, capable of creating informal cities of course exists, but are mostly ignored because they are the homes of the poor.

Yokohama Int Ferry Terminal

The competition for the new structure above the grand pier in Yokohama was won by Foreign Office Architects 2002. An organically [1] shaped wooden landscape with patches of grass undulation and sliding between the different levels.

[FOAs] Yokohama Ferry Terminal saw them burst on to the international scene with an extraordinary structure which blended infrastructure, engineering, architecture and landscape to create a new typology for transport.

- The Architecture of Hope (introduction about FOA)

entrance or gap

A series of entrance situations of house on plots of flagpole type. Variation in material, usage and other things.

Tamabi Library

Entrance floor of Tama Art University Library by Toyo Ito. This is a fantastic building. Restrained and calm. Irregularly space concrete vaults divides space along curved lines.
More to read from Dezeen here and on Archdaily here.