How do you remotely theorize on a city, let alone a city such as Tokyo? Can you even begin to theorize with any authority a city you don’t live in?
From New York City, I pick up on bits and pieces of Tokyo’s current events, from design blogs, trending websites, heresy, and lots of images. What, without walking the streets, sizing up the newest buildings and revisiting the old, or getting a sense of the changes in the neighborhoods and the reasons behind those changes (or lack thereof) — any attempt at speculating feels hollow or meritless.
Tokyo’s reverberations can only for now permeate to me in images, texts, sounds, and scents — vicariously experienced and imagined… maybe this sounds too romantic, but it is not meant to be semiotic or fetishistic.
No, what I am trying to grasp onto here are not echos, music long after the performance, now long ago — but Tokyo’s intrinsic rhythm and beat that is timeless yet syncopated, from the time before I visited to the time after when I may visit again. I would like us to theorize on the ebbs and flows of the city’s history intermingled with today’s surreal contemporaneity and tomorrow’s speculation realism — on what Tokyo can teach architects about urbanism’s intersection with culture, technology, and politics.
What I can do to try get at what I mean here is through retelling a half-memory, half-delusion of a personal anecdote: on my first visit to Japan, our professor told our class of a Modernist masterpiece—a noticeably tall, cylindrical, mostly windowless building, clad in metal now a rusty brown, sited at a busy intersection close to Central Tokyo. The tower’s impenetrable facade hides a clandestine program: a diving pool, tall enough to house the required spatial drop and watery depth for the diver’s descent — a diving pool conspicuously hidden in plain sight in the middle of the city.
Now, I can’t recall the architect, or if our professor showed us where the building was exactly, or if it was even built, or if it was paper architecture, or off-hand mention of a previous studio brief, or if this was all my complete misremembering, or complete fantasization. But if you told me that this building existed there, somewhere in-between Ginza and Shimbashi, I would theorize it could be nowhere else on the planet but there, somewhere between the realms of possible and real.
GS