Curious About…Godzillatecture
I posted this picture of the Tokyo skyline on Instagram a few days ago, complete with the Tokyo Tower in the forefront and the hodgepodge of buildings around it. In response and my colleague Axel wrote: “The only thing missing is Godzilla.” Walking around Tokyo, you can’t help but be struck by its post-war modernist architecture, the funky concrete, tiled and curvy shapes contrasting with the more imperialist, Transformer-like towers of the Docomo building and the Tokyo Tower. All that’s missing is a man in a wonky lizard costume walking all over them and breathing fire. Time to investigate.
In the late 1950s a small group of young Japanese architects and designers joined forces under the title of “Metabolism.” Their visions for cities of the future inhabited by a mass society were characterized by large scale, flexible, and expandable structures that evoked the processes of organic growth. In their view, the traditional laws of fixed form and function were obsolete. Metabolism arose in post-World War II Japan, and so much of the work produced by the movement is primarily concerned with housing issues. Metabolist designs relied heavily on advanced technology and they often consisted of adaptable plug-in megastructures. Famous projects included the floating city in the sea (Unabara project), Kiyonori Kikutake’s Marine City, Tower City, Ocean City, Wall City, Kisho Kurokawa’s Agricultural City and Helix City. The most famous built example of Metabolism is shown above, Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, built in 1972. Their influence is felt in many parts of modern Japan, and Tokyo is no exception, where curvilinear and cubic Lego-like structures abound to this day.
In stark contrast, The NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building next to Shinjuku station is owned by the NTT Docomo group. Despite the building’s name, it is not the head office for the company, whose headquarters are located in the top floors of the Sannō Park Tower. The building houses some offices, but is mainly used to house technical equipment (switching equipment, etc.) for the company’s cellular telephone service. To commemorate NTT Docomo’s 10th anniversary, a 15-metre-diameter clock was put into operation in November 2002. The installation of this clock made the building the tallest clock tower in the world.
The Tokyo Tower is a communications and observation tower located in Shiba Park, Minato, Tokyo, Japan. At 332.5 meters it is the second tallest artificial structure in Japan, after the soon-to-be-completed Tokyo Sky Tree building. The structure is an Eiffel Tower-inspired lattice tower that is painted white and international orange to comply with air safety regulations. Built in 1958, the tower’s main sources of revenue are tourism and antenna leasing. Over 150 million people have visited the tower since its opening. FootTown, a 4-storey building located directly under the tower, houses museums, restaurants and shops. Departing from here, guests can visit two observation decks. The 2-storey Main Observatory is located at 150 meters while the smaller Special Observatory reaches a height of 250 meters.
What Of It? It goes without saying that one of the main cultural signifiers of a city is its architecture, and Tokyo is no exception. Funnily the proportions of many of the buildings here connote safety, warmth and certain kind of intimacy rather than the grandiose scale of New York, the industrial machine-age hum of Chicago or the baroque splendor of say, Paris. Tokyo to me feels, very, well, human, in terms of its architectural simplicity, humor and calmness. Of course it is precisely this architectural calm that makes it so easy for Godzailla to trample all over it, undaunted as he clearly was by the Metabolists idealism.
I am Curious about architectural vernaculars and how they are born, about cultures of optimism and idealism, and how cities “feel” to those of us that are looking to experience them on that level. And of course, cities that monsters have no fear of walking around, or treading on.
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