Part
1. Exoticism and the city
Fig. 1 Fine Arts Garden by Tadao Ando - plan and section |
Travel can be a strange and inexplicable thing. Every time I
return to Japan, I’m constantly intrigued by how fascinatingly different it is
as a place on most spheres of life; i.e. culturally, socially, economically and
architecturally. As an unashamed tourist armed with my brochures, maps and
pamphlets, I’m inevitably drawn to Japan through an exotic eye and it is this exoticism and the idea of what that means for
the architecture of cities that I’m most interested in illustrating throughout
the following parts.
Part
2. Gardens
As a city, Kyoto is well contained within its semi-enclosed
basin topography. The street grid and buildings are located mostly (if not
all) on the flat and for this reason one can immediately gain an appreciation
for how the tree-covered hills frame the city and add legibility to the north,
east and west. I was told that the belt of greenery is more or less a
reflection of the municipal government’s intention to preserve the surrounding
hills for cultural and historic reasons – in some cases dedicated temple
grounds. Most of the temples and its gardens inhabit areas of sanctuary to the
north, east and west – between the wooded hills and city proper: a no-man’s
land for spiritual connection, but close enough to the city to sense its
physicality. In each axial direction, subway lines work in tandem with the
seamlessly efficient bus system infrastructure to provide connections to the
various tourist experiences. At first instance, Kyoto seems like a virtual
city of gardens: a ‘Tourist world-city’ where experience is seemingly
specifically engineered for the enjoyment of its visitors. To my surprise,
not far away from my mother’s apartment was the ‘Garden of Fine Arts’ designed
by architect Tadao Ando and completed in 1994 (see fig. 1). It’s a curious
enclave just off the main road in Kamigamo, consisting of a series concrete
ramps that lead visitors through a journey of viewing large recreations of well
known art works (apparently the recreation of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement is
approximately the same size as the original in the Sistine Chapel), carefully
reproduced on large porcelain panels: it claims to be the ‘world’s first
outdoor art garden’ (see fig. 2).
Ando uses water here to its full effect in order to create an
contemplative, almost monastic experience through the scale of spaces; however
it represents a disjunction to the realities of the outside world – in some
ways it codifies a mini-version of an ideal Kyoto: an embryonic microcosm that
attempts to anaesthetize the realities of it’s mother urban Kyoto through
creating its own reality constructed from concrete, water, porcelain and the
‘great masters’. The ramps as streets, each art piece proclaims a place
for reflection – a virtual Kiyomizu temple in its own right.
Part
3. Towers
Fig. 2 View towards Michelangelo's 'Last Judgement' |
Through
the dense urban jungle of Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto, one cannot readily distinguish
where cities begin and end. Towers have an interesting function in this way as
they have the ability to allow visitors to locate themselves within the larger
city fabric (even though in some cases I still had some difficulty in
determining this). Tsutenkaku tower near Dobutsuen-mae (a southern part of
Osaka) is an interesting example of observation platform as urban marker. The
tower’s name literally translates to ‘tower reaching heaven’ and it was
originally built in 1912, originally patterned from the Eiffel tower. It
was also connected to the nearby amusement park, Luna Park via an aerial
tramway (see fig. 3). Its height of 64 metres made it the tallest structure in
Asia at the time of its construction. A fire in 1943 severely damaged the
tower, so instead of repairing the structure, it was dismantled for iron supply
during the Second World War. The height of the current tower is 103 metres
in total and was constructed by the local citizens in 1956. The tower is also a
timekeeper – it has Japan’s largest clock on its east side, which is LED and
octagonal in shape. Through its neon turret, it can inform its citizens of
upcoming weather forecasts via a combination of three different colours as it
is connected to the meteorological observatory – tower as weather barometer.
Fig. 3 The original Tsutenkaku tower and aerial tramway circa. 1912-1920 |
Architecture as scientific instrument. As well as having a scientific
dimension, the tower also has a spiritual one: it houses the local street god
‘Billiken’ – the god of good luck (it also houses a robotic personification of
the tower). In some ways, the second incarnation of the tower represents a
wider subversive architecture of urban hybridization – whether through its role
as observation platform or weather sock, it remains as a ghostly neon shadow of
its former self (see fig. 4). Through its different permutations and
likenesses the tower has become a beacon of entertainment and subtle
pragmatism, a motif that remains common within Osaka’s pleasure and amusement
culture. If Tsutenkaku can be seen as a hybrid of its various
representations and functions, then the next tower may be seen as a hybrid of
urban archetypes and program. The ‘Floating Garden Observatory’ is a
circular observation platform 173 metres high above Osaka at the top of what is
known as the Umeda Sky Building (see fig. 5 & 6).
Fig. 4 The current Tsutenkaku tower in all its neon glory |
The platform not
only provides a panoramic view of the city skyline, it also provides a ‘tender
romantic experience’ in the form of the ‘Lumi Deck’. Young couples in love can
purchase a ‘Heart Lock’ from the shop below on the retail level and attach it
to the ‘Fence of Vows’. The couple can measure their degree of love by
sitting on a bench and holding hands across a dome that lights up the floor
below in the shape of a heart, the light pattern changes to reflect the
couple’s ‘degree of love’. A camera stand is also available to capture this
intimate experience. The hybrid mix of being both ‘tower and garden’ lends
the ‘Floating Garden Observatory’ to traverse extreme scales of human
experience: from the intimacy of human courtship to the ‘feeling of bigness’
from placing oneself within the expanse of the urban largeness.
Fig. 5 Umeda Sky Building diagram |
Scales of human emotion are channelled through the confluence of
the ‘garden tower’ – to almost parody the role that 19th century
English and French gardens had (most noticeably in literature) as environments
for romance and subtle nuance. The perversion here though is that visitors
have the opportunity to not only enjoy the view, but also witness (in a
voyeuristic way) the falling out between a couple once they’d realised there
relationship had been a complete sham from the glowing wonder of the Lumi Deck.
Part
4. Arcades
My Father once told me a common Japanese saying, where ‘people from Kyoto put their
money on their backs, whereas people from Osaka put their money in their
stomachs’. I think this saying has some truth to it; Kyoto does have the
feeling that their inhabitants spend more time and money on fashion as opposed
to the people of Osaka, spending their earnings on food and entertainment. If
Kyoto can be seen as the reserved, quite traditional and well-dressed father
figure in the family of Japanese cities then Osaka would be the slightly grungy
teenager that eats too much and spends too much time at entertainment
arcades.
Fig. 6 Umeda Sky Building and The Floating Garden Observatory |
Shinsai-bashi and Doton-bori are the hedonistic heart and soul of
Osaka. They are made up of a network of pedestrian only arcades, usually two to
three storeys high and covered with a barrel-vaulted ceiling (this varies
depending on the arcade’s distinct identity). These arcades provide the
blood that pumps the consumer heart, through an immersion of lights, sound,
general pandemonium and wave after wave of people it creates a euphoric
overload of sensual experience and anachronistic pleasure – the arcade becomes
the perfect architectural device to facilitate the experience (see fig.
7). Firstly, arcades allow the visitor to feel like they have entered
another ‘womb-like’ world – a kind of mini-city where calendar time has been
replaced by periods between eating kushi-katsu and getting the latest fix from
a gaming parlour. The narrow format of the arcade (being two-sided) means that
the visitor can really only go either side – going forward or the way they came
can be a long journey, so there is really no escaping once they are in
there. Secondly the arcade’s pedestrian only nature makes one feel like
they are a part of something larger – i.e. to feel like a part of the scene, as
characters in a virtual theatre of wanton apocalyptic consumerism and abandon.
Fig. 7 Shinsai-bashi arcade by night from bridge |
The arcades of
Dobutsuen-mae are a slightly different story – while the arcades of
Shinsai-bashi and Doton-bori house the most contemporary of Japanese
cosmopolitan culture, Dobutsuen-mae’s arcades are quieter in comparison,
virtual ghost towns inhabited by the homeless and frequented the most by a
noticeably older generation of Osaka citizens (see fig. 8). It made me think
of the possibility that the Shinsai-bashi arcades may become like Dobutsuen-mae
as an inevitable sign for its future as a hub for Osaka’s consumer and
entertainment culture.
Part
5. The tourist and the city
In
some ways the architecture that a tourist encounters is very much in flux: it
is the compression of time and space – thus condensed experience: buildings
become momentary material, which frame that very experience as slippages of
time and shards of space governed by subway timetables and airport itineraries. For
the tourist, architecture (and the city for that matter) becomes a constantly
shifting sea of images, sounds and smell – a kinaesthetic melting pot of
expectation constrained by the limitations of one’s budget. I’d like to
think of it as that old adage of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did
the architecture of cities generate the tourist culture or the other way
around? If I were to infer from the impressions of my recent visit, I
would have to say that the former may be more evident, but in reality I would
assume that it would perhaps be a complex amalgam of both.
Fig. 8 An arcade in Dobutsuen-mae |
One
thing that I can be sure of is that cities in general are vastly complex
organisms; they are not only built up of accretive layers of infrastructure,
public/private economic interests, street patterns, planning rules and
regulations (et cetera) – but also the inexplicably intangible layers of human
desire and anxiety conditioned by hundreds of years of society and
culture. These aspects to me are not easily quantifiable or even
statistically manageable in any readily available way, but they are documented
– not conventionally in any library or bookshelf – but rather within the cities
themselves.
Dale
Fincham
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