Japan and Yokohama are a mix of old and new... There are some elements that seem alot more traditional, and then there are elements that are much more futuristic than anything we have in the States... As far as context goes, the area around there isn't exactly the most dense fabric, I think it backs onto a highway... Across the way is a shopping district that has a huge ferris wheel that is illuminated at night so you can see that as a skyline view... My impression standing on that thing is the sky feels really big...

It always bugs me when Americans think buildings in foreign countries should somehow fit into their idea of what foreign culture is... Makes me laugh when some American designers in a Chinese modern urban setting who try to design some kind of bamboo themed motif...

The building is experienced mostly as a landscape... You move up and down above and below, it's kind of cool... Below deck is sort of like the belly of a whale... Sculptural and interesting... And it is a cruiseship terminal, so something a little more iconic with a landmark presence that tells you when you have arrived, or where you left from on your cruiseship makes sense...

I think it's a good fit, because Yokohama is kind of boring

@brink



It really isn't that magical from the sea.

Pro-tip: Ports, whether they be airports, seaports or even train stations, have no real cultural context to landscape. The only real context ports (or transportation hubs) should have to their surrounding are is 'ease of access.'

In this case, you cannot even see the port terminal from any walkable street perpendicular to the port. However, this project is wildly successful in its integration into the existing infrastructure and the ease to access it by foot.

However, if you want to talk about symbology and context... then this building fails at cultural relation because it is not covered in perverted statues of racoondogs with enormous testicles, hentai tentacle rape imagery, lack of junk-food-and-panty vending machines or depictions of ancient and modern Shinto deities from Amaterasu to Godzilla.

BUT!

if the loudspeakers are playing Shonen Knife and Pizzicato Five, all of the above criticisms are off.

If Ue o Muite is playing, however, I'll turn this car around.

When this project was first discussed, it was heavily favouring diagrammatic practice. Recent descriptions have been about iconography and tsunamis. Still, FOA is Fucken O Awesome.

Yeah well it is a port that has a traversable rooftop... But yeah it's where you go to get on and off a cruise ship... Although transportation hubs do create an identity for a place

foa did not do the masterplan for the area. expectations for its integration are probably not best directed at them.

its a funny place. china town is just a few blocks away, as are a number of pretty good western-style stone buildings from the last century and earlier. there is no integration attempted as far as that all goes. instead the large development that is minato-mirai is a huge arc-ing built up place with large empty spaces and large buildings. it works fairly well, but is not my favorite public place in the world. its a pretty corporate feel in my opinion, meaning that the spaces feel a bit like they were traded for some kind of FAR and not actually intended to function as components of an urban plan. that is just my opinion however. one of the partners in our office is expert on planning in yokohama if interested in proper opinion shoot me an e-mail and i will connect you.


as for the building itself, well it is seriously fantastic. i have never seen a boat parked there but have been to parties and events in the halls, and they were brilliant. i also was part of architecture side for an installation on the roof, done for the art trienale 2 years ago, and found the design easily absorbed that kind of function.

the grass on the roof is brilliant and the entire design is just easy to use, at least as a casual consumer of public space. that said, it takes an intent to go there. it is not a place that anyone would go to naturally in some kind of strolling tour of the waterfront. not the fault of foa, and the typology is such that it would be difficult to integrate the place in that way in any case since its just a big dead end street. it is possible to bypass the interior space and go straight to the rooof though, and vice versa, which is pretty special. in that sense the place integrates well.

if you can imagine a place that cars and buses and people all enter from a narrow joint to the land and then also imagine all of those bits working without too much friction, and then having the actual destination be more than mere transit stop it seems to me the place can only be seen as a success.

You completely misread what I typed.

And the term "expert" in planning is a dubious title-- unless you friend can recite code by heart and knows the exact dates the streets were built, familiarity or "expertness" can be easily acquired with a map, a topographical map and Google Street View.

expectations for its integration are probably not best directed at them.

Actually, I said its integration is wonderful. It matches several modes of transportation, it is located in an area with similar peak uses, it can handle the sort of peak traffic you'd encounter with a passenger port terminal and they've done an excellent job of separating away the multiple users of the port (cargo and maintenance enter from the sides and under while passengers and the general public enter from front and top.)

Now, if they didn't do this planning... then all FOA did was cake-decorate-and-modernize a boat dock.


This picture gets much, much bigger.

I mean, looking at this... there's nothing here that ties this to anything even remotely Japanese other than the flag on the dock.

This entire landscape could be Anywhere, the World. If plain and banal in terms of color and from looking at this as a object from any other point than on the site... then I suppose it does match context.

But, frankly, you could slap this down in China, Russia, Finland, Morocco, Jordan or even Chile and it would still look the same. The only thing in this entire photo that's even remotely identifiably Japanese is the radio/control tower (Yokohama Marine Tower) in the far left.

But cultural context? There is none. Unless of course you'd argue that Yokohama has no cultural identity being an extraterritorial city of international trade that was wiped off the face of the earth in the Kanto Earthquake in the 1920s.

Interior architecture is not usually a part of context of a surround environment! Sorry!

Perhaps it's one of those projects that one has to see in person before one can pass judgement? Perhaps how it relates to the context is more performative or utilitarian than style or surface based?

i wasn't responding to you UG, but if it makes you feel better to think i was, do go ahead and feel offended (no offence intended) ;-)

my partner did his phd dissertation on planning in yokohama. i guess you can take that for whatever you like but i would say it makes him pretty expert. unlike you he didn't use wikipedia and spent about 6 years studying code and planning in the city and interviewing the players who put the city together in the last decades. If anyone has an opinion worth listening to it is him. He really knows his stuff, which is why he is the one we go to with planning questions...

I wouldn't say the same for myself. i have only been there to party and to do some nice installation stuff, including this:




i designed the bubble buckets for an artist i collaborate with fairly often. he is into changing space with ephemeral things so we get along.

anyway, its a nice building. the only one by FOA that i have been to but certainly a masterpiece, right up there with sagrada familia and others. but you know, mileage may vary for others.


as far as the skyline being generic, yup, no argument there, but i tell you if you were on the ground there is NO doubt you would know you are in japan. the urban forms here are not like anywhere else, except maybe mexico city, but then there are all the Japanese signs to give the clue that it isn't.

I do also have a clinging and absolutely adolescent desire to point out that most japanese people themselves don't give two hoots for how you don't think their skyline looks japanese enough, UG. This isn't a nation of nostalgia yet and they don't define themselves by what they were because their culture is still immediate and powerful without the symbols of the past lined up in a row. not that i think the skyline is particularly good, but its as japanese as it could be, all in all.

tokyo used to be called the city of fists and fires because there was always violence in the rough town (even then one of the biggest cities in the world), and arson was a common bit of mischief. so common in fact that there were buildings legally classified as BURNABLE (made them easier to rebuild every 5 years which was the average). Which means the built history in this part of Japan is grounded in impermanence. It might be nice to have some of that old stuff left over, but that would not be natural. So what you see before you is not just a matter of glottalization but an honest to goodness outcome of Japanese culture. more or less.

what that has to do with FOA and context? well, not much, except that perhaps the worry about context is not entirely meaningful if you take it too far beyond functional connections...

that is just my opinion.


oh, actually the one bit of design i find quaint/odd in the building is the drink machines. how they are fit into the sloping walls is so bad its funny. if anyone can find an image of it would be cool to post it. real brutal and totally underlines the challenges that emerge from making buildings without straight walls.

Out of curiosity, what compels you to pick fights every time a post on Japan appears? Does it owe you money? TED has the same spastic reaction whenever someone mentions London.

That installation - good for you. I think you're a bore, but I like those photos.

I'm loving the installation, jump. How long was the installation running?

It's funny all the talk about "generic" and "it could be anywhere"... First off, if you have actually been there, that location is not that spectacular, it isn't like really historic in nature etc... It's a pretty newly developed area, not super highly trafficked or densely urban... And this is afterall a cruiseship terminal, not the Guggenheim or something...

Could it be anywhere? Personnally, I don't have a problem with uniquely modern new facilities that *invent* a kind of futuristic identity in locations where there wasn't much there in the first place... In some way, the FOA terminal has kind of *created* a part of Yokohama identity, not unlike the Seattle Space Needle or whatever else... Yeah, it could be anywhere, but honestly, it's not anywhere and *now* it is Yokohama... A part of it anyway... You could say "it could be anywhere" about any number of much more lame and less interesting Infrastructural buildings built in the States or wherever else, but simply, nobody bothers to talk about them... It sort of makes me laugh when people project their own touristic or stereotypical ideas about other countries and their cultures without ever having been there or understanding what it is really like living there...

Anyway, yeah agreed some buildings need to be experienced, are difficult to judge from pictures on the web, etc...

i think it was about a month in the end n_ i loved it as did my kids. the artist is really amazing and does quite brilliant things.

not sure job job. do you really want an answer or are you just making a point? i will endeavour to be more entertaining.

good point brink. it really has changed yokohama's identity. how many architects get to do that? a few in a century?

Actually, there's been dock there with a near identical use for at least 136 years. And Yokohama (at least downtown) hasn't changed its master plan (other than a few new roads, a few split parcels and some land reclamation in those 136 years either.

The site has always been a centrally located dock being the predominate focus of the city!

Even before the Meiji restoration, Yokohama was the only place in Edo where foreign sailors were allowed to dock.

Thank you, European history classes!

there was a brothel too, but the foreigners were too prudish to use it much, which apparently made the japanese wonder...

Unicorn Ghost, have you actually been to the site?

Oh, now you're using that logic.

You can't judge it because you've never been there!

I have seen enough videos, maps and google street views to have "experienced" it even if in passing.

My point is that context should be an 'objective' feature to a building whether it be meteorological, logistical or historical.

Subjective context is not really context but rather than wishful thinking. Subjective context works well for objets d'art... but whole buildings? They are far too complicated to use broad grand gestures in appropriating some magical idea about them.

There's plenty of ways of connecting subjective context... but FOA would have to declare what clever tricks they used or ideas they had.

Oh... So you've never been to Yokohama... Have you been to Japan?

So you think the imagined and constructed experience of a place through the Internet is more "real objective data" than a direct interaction with people who live there, with surrounding buildings and developments and culture of the place? I'm not sure I agree you can know a place via the Internet... Isn't every history book, every photograph basically a framed view defined by the author? IMHO first hand experience trumps Internet photos any day

I don't know - how 'street' does one need to be before claiming local knowledge. Does one visit suffice? Two visits to install a ridiculous bubble machine? Ten visits?

Does your awesome school trip to Japan give you credibility? I've seen the Unite in Marseille once - I claimed no expertise on French culture as a result.

I often go to see buildings to walk away knowing only more of the building, and little of the economy, culture or context. Because - really - we are opportunists and our care of local culture extends only to a shallow assessment of what can be applauded in publications or lectures.

True... I think however that there are a few aspects to this... Certainly the more personal lived knowledge of a place and culture the more one understands, being a tourist is a very different experience of a place than actually living there... Also shared knowledge that comes from knowing people who live in a place as well, and gaining knowledge through direct interaction with people from a place.

I've been to many places, some for a couple months, others on a regular basis, like Japan I go to every now and then, to Tokyo and Yokohama specifically, I actually have family that lives tehre, but I would hardly consider myself an expert... Re: Jump, FYI he currently lives in Japan. He has started his own architecture practice there I believe, and has studied at Tokyo University if I recall from some other posts...

I think studies abroad are valuable, there are things you cannot learn and understand about other places and cultures that you cannot gain from sitting in a library or from internet google searches or whatever... knowledge through lived experience of the physical and social kind that take you out of the bubble of an academic setting.

My skepticism regarding the so called "objective analysis" of site, the sorts of pseudo scientific fact finding that seeks to define universal truths about space is that really, they are based on assumptions that are filtered by individual lenses anyway. If you think you can collect data from afar, you are missing a big point about what design does, which is really about people... The success of a project cannot simply determined by remote speculation about what should work based on our own foreign subjective cultural perspectives IMHO... What some people dismiss as "subjective context" is in fact more real than alot of so called "objective understandings" because in reality even quantitative study is based on a foundation of inductive logic... Really what limited sampling of data could ever hope to match the huge sampling of data that comes from local people who have lived in a place for their lifetimes and accumulated knowledge about their own experiences and desires and culture living in that place?

I don't think people can really evaluate a project in relation to context without having been there and doing the hard workj to actually know the people and what it is physically like there... It's sort of like if some Japanese architect made assumptions about a city like say Boston or Chicago or some local place in the States without ever having been here... It's okay, but just not very convincing...

"subjective context" is in fact more real than alot of so called "objective understandings"

Prove it. Like, I'm not trying to be an asshole.

I'm not even asking for causation (you know, proving that an action or process always has the same outcome with more or less within a +/- 3% deviation). I'm barely asking for correlation-- give me a supposed result and the possible methods, actions or procedures that get to that result.

The problem with the subjective reasoning is not necessarily the how but the why.

Things cost money. On this scale, they cost a lot of money. If you want to play in the world of art with a lot of other people's money, you really need to be able to answer "why" without giving some long-winded speech about "how you know the culture because you've been there and you've talked to people and stuff."

In my rebuttals, I've not only dropped assumptions on the history, function and logistics... I've also dropped cultural reference however contrived or stereotypical they are.

First off, if you have actually been there, that location is not that spectacular, it isn't like really historic in nature etc... It's a pretty newly developed area, not super highly trafficked or densely urban... And this is afterall a cruiseship terminal, not the Guggenheim or something...

You're the one who said this. And no, you are clearly wrong.

This area not only has had a historical dock in the same place but this dock was one of the most important ports in maritime history.

Yokohama is the most populous city in Japan. The population density in Downtown Yokohama is 24,993 people per square mile. That qualifies as "hyper density."

It has some of the largest factories in the world and some of the busiest docks in Asia. The Bayshore Route of the Shuto Expressway generates hundreds of thousands of car trips weekly.

Yokohama been continuously expanding for nearly two centuries. Other than Edo (Tokyo), Yokohama has been one of the biggest cities in Japan for centuries.

You're right, it's not the Guggenheim. Overt subjective contextual schema are inappropriate for the specific location if the scheme override the functional nature of a terminal port.

for me, local knowledge takes living in a place. that doesn't mean it is impossible to make judgments, only that they should be qualified.

for what its worth, i do live in tokyo. i do run an office in tokyo, and went to school here and teach here. actually the university i just joined as a studio crit (architecture) and researcher (urban planning) is not far from yokohama. but i wouldn't claim local knowledge of the area.

still I can absolutely say that i love the FOA building and that many share that point of view. Honestly I love it most because it is one of a handful of buildings that are better in reality than they look in the magazines. There are so few buildings out there that meet that standard and are not hundreds of years old....

anyhoo, for what it is i think it fits into the context well, but like UG said, there is not much around it that a pier can claim to be context-ing with.

as far as ridiculous bubbles go, what is even more ridiculous is that the wee little project took more than four months to put together and involved all kinds of negotiations and hand wringing and so on, much of it with local community groups (after which i still don't claim any local knowledge). I think it was a success and while i don't claim authorship am glad to have worked on it, ridiculous though it may be ;-)

most important takeaway? I learned that adding a bit of sugar to soap makes the bubbles from a bubble machine last longer. how cool is that?!

Unicorn Ghost:

Right, these kinds of projects cost money, and who is the client? They are certainly not remote academics basing their understanding of context off speculations from an internet connection and pseudo scientific design ideology... What I'm really saying is, generalizations without doing the hard work of research (meaning in many cases really understanding what that place is like, what would work for people there, and what the social contexts and specific needs are for that development to be a success) is needed, and quite honestly it needs to be understood through actually seeing the place. If you go there, if you walk or drive to that location, you would understand that this is not hyper density at that site... This is not a site that is hugely pedestrian in the first place, there are waterfront sort developments there but they are not like urban urban like tokyo at that location. Yokohama has some density, and growth, etc. but how the ferry terminal works in relation to that is a little more complex than a quick google search of a density figure which doesn't really translate into an understanding of the vicinity of that particular site... Its not that densely occupied at that location... There's just not much around there... lol... Go there and tell me different... :P

It doesn't work to do a broad shallow impression of a "city" and make generalizations based on a removed speculation on the thing, that isn't research.

Re: "subjective context". Actually what I'm saying is, your "objective understandings" are no researched, and in many cases models which pretend to be scientific based on data are in fact over simplifications that ignore real data which can only be gathered through a more inovolved analysis of a place, what actual social, cultural, economic, legal, and political contexts are... Living in a place is in fact a far more accurate data pool than any surface number crunching or removed internet research could ever be simply because the data set consists of a lifetime of hard evidence based on lived experience. Like: you could do a huge amount of number crunching or reading and spend hours researching how many people drive and what their commuter patterns are in a city without having ever been there, and still your numbers won't tell you something about the best way to get from A to B that somebody who actually takes the train there can tell you in 10 minutes just based on personal experience... Also it won't tell you why people "like" taking the train, and what the cultural contexts are around taking the train in that particular city. So I think local knowledge of context are simply far better understood by actually going to a place, whether visiting or actually living there... This is not subjective. This is real data...

regarding the facts and cultural references you dropped, what i'm saying is they seem a bit off... stereotypes and the broad generalizations about the city dont mean anything in regard to specific locations... like, they missreal obvious realities that come from actually knowing what location in a city we are talking about, who actually visits it, and what economic factors are at play, and what cultural facts and identities are of relevance to people there, the people who actually use the cruiseship terminal... designing a cruiseship terminal to look like a foreigners stereotype of "japanese architecture" isnt really site conscious...

its sort of like saying the airport in rome should look like the colliseum to fit in with its context... WHY?!!

Cite sources. Show examples. Demonstrate knowledge.

You're doing nothing but trying to run around in conversation circles to prove me wrong despite the fact that someone who has visited the location knows less than someone who spent 25 minutes studying the location.

Third post on this thread and my post:

Pro-tip: Ports, whether they be airports, seaports or even train stations, have no real cultural context to landscape. The only real context ports (or transportation hubs) should have to their surrounding are is 'ease of access.'

Actually, I'm not trying to prove you wrong, although I disagree... Based on what I have seen at the site... Doesn't seem out of place if that is what you mean... And: no, there *isn't* all this stuff around there, the hyper density you are generalizing about Japan...

Regarding your "pro-tip": says who? Is this a manifesto? Key word in your post "should"... How is that objective understanding? Disagree.

Also, I don't think that is really true. Are you saying that airports, seaports, and train stations *should be generic* and have *no relation to cultural context or landscape*? Disagree.

You're the one stating things you read in a book as if it is fact, demanding that we site sources etc. I'm telling you, common sense... :P Talk about real people.

Anyway, whatever... It's okay, I'm not defending the project, just do not read it in the same way as you do, based on what I've seen, and people, who live in the city and people there seem to like it enough... Isn't that who it is for? Also: who says train stations and airports and say subways or ferry terminals or *even ferries themselves* or *trains* or *street cars* or whatever have no identity... Disagree... They do... They do contribute to the character and identity of a place, they do become landmarks. Absolutely. (IMHO)

okay fine, i get where you're coming from, here you go, googled it, haha:

http://www.google.com/images?q=yokohama&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&oe=UTF-8&rlz=1I7TSNA&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1345&bih=536

exactly what sensitive historic cultural context are we trying to match here?? what is this sensitive cultural context that the port terminal doesn't fit in with? must be nearby chinatown? man those steamed buns sold by street vendors were goood...

Thinking about the Yokohama Port Terminal a bit more... I'm not really sure if I can see that form in just *any city* to tell the truth... It somehow seems consistent and to fit in well enough in Japan, but I cannot imagine that form being in say most American cities, or in most European cities, etc. I think forms tend to fall in line with aesthetic sensibility of a place...

Even with modernism, Japan developed uniquely, its a bit different from Modern in Europe, or in the States... Maybe it has some thread that extends from the Metabolists, Kenzo Tange etc... A kind of logical approach to design that maybe got carried down from schools in Japan and then in offices? Or even Japanese Manga or futuristic fantasy culture in film and animation... But there is a regional aesthetic to it... Even when they have organic forms, or rapid growth, there seems to be a kind of underlying order to it... Repetitive modularity... large geometry...They like big moves, like diagrams, sometimes geometric, but broken down at various scales... Where there is a diagram that can be articulated... It is perhaps distinctly Japanes IMHO, a kind of culturally specific way of looking at things in plan view and then in section...

Like you could draw a cartoon of that yokohama port terminal, in plan and then in elevation, and then in section, and then when you are inside of it looking at the roof structure, it is repetitive and modular... Certain qualities that seem rather Japanese to me... Like... Its okay to draw a random circle or jelly bean in a square if you point at it and can call it "Jelly Bean"... :P or if you make a wavy organic structure, maybe it is symmetrical and then it is basically a rectangle in plan... Like there is some crazy stuff in Japan, huge creative open mindedness on the one hand, but somehow totally disciplined and then restrained and logical, simplified... As if the guy detailing that Jelly Bean must be anal retentive and lined up all the pencils on his desk...

I sort of wonder if there was a hand of a local architecture office working with FOA that influenced also? Or I wonder how design review boards and urban planners and the city operates, there seems to be a certain consistency in language...

there is no design review board in japan.

the consistency, such as it is, comes from performance based zoning as much as anything. for this project i imagine the criteria were pretty wide open.

i know one of the chief engineers for the project (not japanese) and he told me the structural idea of using triangulated folds came from foa themselves. which is to say the entire project is conceived by foreigners, from top to bottom, even the seismic engineering tricks. as foreigners they were exploring ideas popular at the time about flow and so on. I don't believe the site was relevant to that exploration and am pretty sure the hokusai wave they referenced to sell the project was an after-the-fact rationalisation....

actually the project was shelved for awhile and only went ahead when the world cup came to japan + korea. sometimes the things that really matter to a project are not related to the design or to the community at all. i find that sort of randomness much more interesting than the physical context somehow. i mean really, this brilliant building designed to move people on and off boats was ultimately decided by a football club...? fantastic.

I see... so the project was basically wholey foreign designed... including structural, etc... hmm yeah maybe any aesthetic connections are purely coincidental...

anyway yeah i think it's is a cool building, well executed, sensible aesthetic wise, doesn't feel out of place the way in some places in China for example, like in areas of Beijing or Shanghai, you feel like some of the foreign designed icon buildings are a litter of hood ornaments on a lawn... I don't get that sense here...

I really enjoy the building form. I like its horizontality (ship) and how the roof passages counterbalance this (waves). It is a good comparison for a project I worked on involving a body of water, fluidity, and a floating park.

I have never been to Yokohoma.

Out of all of the ペチャクチャ above, the best information I got out of it was adding a bit of sugar to soap makes the bubbles from a bubble machine last longer. Thanks jump.

Yokohama..... told you I've never been.