Friends, I've been quite absent from the Archinect lately, and fully missing each and everyone of you that I've ever cared about - which may be few, but it's something.
Anyhow, I've quit debating whether I wanted to or not, and finally booked a flight to Tokyo in late July to visit a friend who teaches English there.
I'm super excited, never been there before and only travelled to France before as far as other overseas countries go.
Told myself that I had to figure I'd never go there on my own, and having someone live there is pretty much priceless.
So - I know there are some older threads here about Tokyo, but maybe you can suggest some good stuff to see, new architecture projects, great sites for photos and such.
I think we'll be going out of the city a few times, seeing some older things, maybe hiking at Mt. Fuji.
I have heard ALL ABOUT the humidity there in July, but it was the best time I could go since my friend is out of teaching for summer.
jinguemae is btw the front door to omotesando, with herzog and demeuron's prada, ando's very shitty omotesando hills, a sejima or two, some toyo ito thrown in, and tonnes of random niceness under a tree lined street. worth a look.
i took an old prof there last week and he swore it cured him of japanese architecture forever, which i can understand, but it is great to see anyway...
ueno park has a fairly nice building by le corbusier, and a very fine museum by taniguchi (MOMA-dude), much better than his work at MOMA, as well as a shitload of asia and western artwork. and the park is quite nice.
but the main thing is that it really depends on what you think tokyo should look like. over the years i have noticed that visitors here are never satisfied until they see their vision of tokyo made real, even if it only exists in a three block area. luckily with more than 30 million people here you are bound to find something you like; from prewar coolness, to 60s metabolism (Tange is my fav on that part; if you can, def check out some of his work), to shinjuku-kukiness, dense suburbs, corbusien housing blocks in takashima-daira, fashion woderlands in omotesando and ginza, crazy goth kids in harajuku, huge fish goings on in tsukiji, new housing campuses by starchitects in shinonome. it's ALL here.
I'll be there in two weeks but only for a day and a half. I, uh *cough* don't suppose your friends no where to uh, stay away from those fashion health things, eh?
hahah. man, i have been here WAY too long. stuff like that totally passes me by now. used to be soapland, now its fashionhealth. hah.
but you know, the truth of the matter is that sexual mores in Japan are NOT EVEN CLOSE to what you might be familiar with in the states. it's like the 70's and 80's over here. sex is free and no-one really gets uptight over it (doubt they ever did), long as you aren't some freaked out old geezer like you see with the poor kids in bangkok. paying for it is too wierd...:-) feel sorry for anyone who is that desperate.
But if its what you are looking for go to a bar frequented by foreigners and i am sure you can find a willing partner of either sex...was never my thing, but the number of times i have been propositioned by cute chicks over here is embarrasing (things like that almost NEVER happened when i was growing up on the canadian prairie). what a world.
Do where "good shoes" in the sense that I wore flip flops...NASTY.
True about the bar thing. My friend and I went to see a movie in Roppongi Hills one night in Tokyo. Some of our other classmates went to this bar in the same area and it was mostly foreigners (which for some reason seemed creepy after mostly seeing Japanese for 6 weeks). But there were maybe 5-10 really attractive Japanese girls hanging on these NASTY white dudes. Like just fat, gross, stuffed shirt dudes. My friend and I didn't stay long because neither of us are into the bar scene, but Jump lies not. On the walk home we also saw a woman in a business suit passed out in an alley with her head on the curb (some guy was sitting with her, although he wasn't in good shape either) and basically just a wealth of totally blasted business people lurking around at like 2 am on a Tuesday. Maybe that's why the subway kinda smells like a frat party in the mornings.
It rules. All of the trains have a song that they play when the reach the station. My friend (who is also a nerd) and I would saythings like "Power Up" or soemthing whenever we got to a station. The Shinkansen has game over music when you reach the final destination. It's so good.
i know it is sad, but even ando isn't too happy with that project (according to my buddy who works in his office). i was an ando groupy in the 90's and have visited dozens of his projects now. the church of light in osaka was slightly ok, but all in all his buildings have proven to be underwhelming...can't say why exactly. beautiful concrete, amazing gymnastics with space, but i find an old prewar building has more to offer.
as ando is from osaka there is actually not so much by him in tokyo, but luckily there are a few projects by him in omotesando apart from the omotseando heights project (which is SERIOUSLY bad ). anyway, collezzione is a couple blocks further down the road from prada (on the same side of the street even) and easy to get to, though every time i have been there it has been nearly abandoned so atmosphere is not what it could be.
more interesting is his recent hh style building in omotesando (on cat street, close to harajuku station). it is kinda interesting (perhaps for its lack of concrete), and as it is beside a sejima shop a good chance to hit two starchitects at once...
Jump, I too was underwhelmed by Ando. I never really got into him after seeing books etc. Then I saw the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis and though "OOOOH now I get it." So books started to make sense. I got really excited to see his stuff when I went to Japan, but what a difference a long camera exposure makes. The build quality is great and his buildings are relatively better than a lot of the structures around. But, in the end, I just wasn't as taken aback as I expected to be. When looking at books I would think "Oh yeah, that's going to be so cool to see that building" or "That space is going to be great." But in the end my eye isn't a 20mm lens and it's not 11:32 am on June 16th with 14% cloud cover. So in the end, he's not BAD, just not what I had expected. I thought the Suntory Museum in Osaka was awful. That thing was a POS. The HH Style was interesting since it was metal.
I had mixed feelings about the Yokohama Port Terminal (which is like porn to the teachers at Penn, god most of them have a creepy obsession with that thing). I thought it was both very awesome and very gimmicky at the same time. The outside has the weird spongey, continuous surface feel, but inside it's pretty average. But it's definately better than a typical port/airport. I guess maybe if I hadn't sort of been "pre-overhyped" it would have been more amazing. But yeah it was pretty rad. I'm just talking to myself at this point. Ok, no, it was pretty cool. I think more so the guy that wouldn't shut up about it is a guy that I really have no respect for, so maybe that tainted my view, but thinking back it is pretty cool.
I did however start to get really into Kuma. I met him actually in his $982348923 linen suit. We visited his office and he was stopping through and talked to us for a few minutes.
nice m. hasselhoff. especially the bit about kengo's suit. something about architects and their clothes eh...
kengo does nice stuf sometimes, ocassionally amazing work like this bamboo house in china (which i would LOVE to see in person), but then turns around and gets really commercial, as with his recent museum project in nagasaki...but it is nice that he remains a moving target with his work, always trying new things...
i rather liked the ferry terminal in yokohama, but have to admit my memory is mostly about the roof, which i loved. the folded structure is really quite smart and i was glad to see it all cuz i like that sort of engineering, but the space itself was surprisingly boring as you say. worth a look though. where else can you see such things.
I spent a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara last summer and i belive that the best thing you could do is just to walk around as much as possible. I had the luck of living quite close to the Tokyo Tower and from there you could easily walk around and find alot of strange things and still get a realistic image of what Tokyo is all about. You have to go to Harajuku, Omotesando and Shinjuku. It's crazy. I liked the museum MOT as well, not that easy to find though. I wandered around for an hour or so. They had a good Ceasar's sallad though.
I recomend Kyoto as well, it is small enough that you can acctually understand it. Pretty shrines as well. Nara is mostly for tourists.
I took about 1500 pictures with my digital camera when I was in Japan and most of them of buildnings so there are alot to see.
jump - i've been to the bamboo house, and was "underwhelmed." It's cool, but really just a one liner. The exterior space in the image is nice, but overall, it's just a bunch of applied bamboo, inside, outside, everywhere...BAMBOO RUN AMUCK!
The house is in the "Commune by the Wall," a quasi museum of modern homes by Asian architects, located near the Great Wall. In reality, it's a hotel campus...rent a home for a week style... There were 12+/- homes and a community center, all varying degrees of inventive, many poorly crafted.
^My favorite of the lot, nicest spatially...by Antonio Ochoa
Other homes at the Commune by Shigeru Ban, Yung-Ho Chang, Gary Chang, Kanika R’Kul, Seung H-Sang, Kuma etc...
try getting the book " architectural map of tokyo", i am not sure whether you can get it in america tho.
it is a really great book, tons of info on buildings and maps.
have fun in tokyo :)
best place i have ever been was the rooftop of il duomo in milan, where a crowd of people were enjoying the sunshine and taking it easy above the crowds below. it was seriously amazing and had nothing to do with design...
2nd best place was the ol shopping district in seoul. amazing amazing place, also undesigned, but full of life...
it is places like that that i think of when rem writes about leaving room for the dirty and unplanned to happen in the city. and part of why i like living in tokyo. it is really a great wonderful mess...
Tokyo is a mess and it's awesome for that. All the cool little shops under the elevated walk-roads. You get high design next to a weird little noodle shack. I like that book "Pet Architecture." And how can you not like Tokyo when you can buy Calpis? Oh man, I can't wait for Calpis (although you can get it anywhere in Japan). VIVA LA CALPIS!
The big architects get called on to do the fancy stores, Hermes(piano), Opaque(Sejima), Louis Vuitton(Aiko) and Prada(HdM)
See the capsule hotel by kurokawa
Rossi did a funny little building called the Ambiente showroom and it is about 6 blocks from prada, check it out.
Definately go see Tange's St. Mary's Cathedral as well as the gymnasium he did for the olympics.
Vinoly's international forum
Taniguchi, father and son did museums right across from each other in Ueno park and both are pretty amazing. The son (Yoshio) also did a beautiful little visitor center at the sea life park
Hey Jump. I might be coming to Tokyo during Obon. We have that entire week off. I have a friend in Yokohama so I:m trying to plan something for that week. I wouldn:t post this if this was my real cellphone, but I have a Vodafone prepaid and it will be done in 7 weeks anyway. Send me some cute little pictographs sometime. Damn! My trip is moving too fast!
terribly embarassed to admit that i still haven't gotten round to figuring out how to do anything with cellphones beyond speak into them and listen to people daying likewise from the other side...;) sad isn't it?
haven't decided whether we will be going to the family home in the country for obon or not, but if in tokyo would be good to meet.
let me know how things are looking once things are sorted.
funny you should mention that genuwine. I have walked past the place a few times (it seems to be a wedding hall) and wondered if it was done by rossi or one of his imitators. It is not my taste but quite well done.
anyway it is nice to know finally who did it. cheers.
Jul 11, 06 8:00 pm ·
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Me + 10 Days + Tokyo + July + Your Suggestions = Awesome
Friends, I've been quite absent from the Archinect lately, and fully missing each and everyone of you that I've ever cared about - which may be few, but it's something.
Anyhow, I've quit debating whether I wanted to or not, and finally booked a flight to Tokyo in late July to visit a friend who teaches English there.
I'm super excited, never been there before and only travelled to France before as far as other overseas countries go.
Told myself that I had to figure I'd never go there on my own, and having someone live there is pretty much priceless.
So - I know there are some older threads here about Tokyo, but maybe you can suggest some good stuff to see, new architecture projects, great sites for photos and such.
I think we'll be going out of the city a few times, seeing some older things, maybe hiking at Mt. Fuji.
I have heard ALL ABOUT the humidity there in July, but it was the best time I could go since my friend is out of teaching for summer.
So any suggestions - I appreciate them!
Manteno...
What dates are you going to be there?
I am heading to Toyko the first week in August.
Currently planning my trip I will keep you posted, let me know what you see and any tips.
July 20 - 31.
I've already been threatened with a "fashion health" but I'm smarter than my friend thinks I am.
jingumae...try to find designer's republic, stumble upon random pieces of Architecture along the way...great neighborhood...choc full o'fashion...
jinguemae is btw the front door to omotesando, with herzog and demeuron's prada, ando's very shitty omotesando hills, a sejima or two, some toyo ito thrown in, and tonnes of random niceness under a tree lined street. worth a look.
i took an old prof there last week and he swore it cured him of japanese architecture forever, which i can understand, but it is great to see anyway...
ueno park has a fairly nice building by le corbusier, and a very fine museum by taniguchi (MOMA-dude), much better than his work at MOMA, as well as a shitload of asia and western artwork. and the park is quite nice.
but the main thing is that it really depends on what you think tokyo should look like. over the years i have noticed that visitors here are never satisfied until they see their vision of tokyo made real, even if it only exists in a three block area. luckily with more than 30 million people here you are bound to find something you like; from prewar coolness, to 60s metabolism (Tange is my fav on that part; if you can, def check out some of his work), to shinjuku-kukiness, dense suburbs, corbusien housing blocks in takashima-daira, fashion woderlands in omotesando and ginza, crazy goth kids in harajuku, huge fish goings on in tsukiji, new housing campuses by starchitects in shinonome. it's ALL here.
what's your poison?
and what is a fashion health threat?
"Fashion Health" is a 30 minute massage, capped off with a handjob.
I'll be there in two weeks but only for a day and a half. I, uh *cough* don't suppose your friends no where to uh, stay away from those fashion health things, eh?
hahah. man, i have been here WAY too long. stuff like that totally passes me by now. used to be soapland, now its fashionhealth. hah.
but you know, the truth of the matter is that sexual mores in Japan are NOT EVEN CLOSE to what you might be familiar with in the states. it's like the 70's and 80's over here. sex is free and no-one really gets uptight over it (doubt they ever did), long as you aren't some freaked out old geezer like you see with the poor kids in bangkok. paying for it is too wierd...:-) feel sorry for anyone who is that desperate.
But if its what you are looking for go to a bar frequented by foreigners and i am sure you can find a willing partner of either sex...was never my thing, but the number of times i have been propositioned by cute chicks over here is embarrasing (things like that almost NEVER happened when i was growing up on the canadian prairie). what a world.
lol ... Funny that they would call it "fashion health"!!
Manteno_Montenegro, ..
sorry about being an archigeek .. but here's something i found in architourist.com
be sure to check out the prada store from above ..+ I'm sure there are some good Tadao Ando works in Tokyo !!
I made a google earth file of the ICON architectural trail
http://www.0lll.com/pointingit/?p=28
basically it contains the string of shops in aoyama and omotesando
Sounds cool Ludwig - but what is a .kmz file - is that the google earth extension? I don't have that program installed.
Keep the tips coming, I really look forward to have a great journal with photos of my trip after I'm back.
if you're into sushi/sashimi etc, you have to do the Tskiji fish market in the early am (mentioned above by jump)...mmmmmmm....don't wear nice shoes.
Tsukiji!!!
Do where "good shoes" in the sense that I wore flip flops...NASTY.
True about the bar thing. My friend and I went to see a movie in Roppongi Hills one night in Tokyo. Some of our other classmates went to this bar in the same area and it was mostly foreigners (which for some reason seemed creepy after mostly seeing Japanese for 6 weeks). But there were maybe 5-10 really attractive Japanese girls hanging on these NASTY white dudes. Like just fat, gross, stuffed shirt dudes. My friend and I didn't stay long because neither of us are into the bar scene, but Jump lies not. On the walk home we also saw a woman in a business suit passed out in an alley with her head on the curb (some guy was sitting with her, although he wasn't in good shape either) and basically just a wealth of totally blasted business people lurking around at like 2 am on a Tuesday. Maybe that's why the subway kinda smells like a frat party in the mornings.
HEY MAN, JUMP,
I WOULDN'T CALL THE ANDO'S NEW OMOTESANDO HILLS "VERY SHITTY" SO EASILY.
HE IS MY HERO!
It is going to be so cool and cliche to play Super Mario Brothers on my friends NES while actually in Tokyo. Haha
It rules. All of the trains have a song that they play when the reach the station. My friend (who is also a nerd) and I would saythings like "Power Up" or soemthing whenever we got to a station. The Shinkansen has game over music when you reach the final destination. It's so good.
ha gogetter.
i know it is sad, but even ando isn't too happy with that project (according to my buddy who works in his office). i was an ando groupy in the 90's and have visited dozens of his projects now. the church of light in osaka was slightly ok, but all in all his buildings have proven to be underwhelming...can't say why exactly. beautiful concrete, amazing gymnastics with space, but i find an old prewar building has more to offer.
as ando is from osaka there is actually not so much by him in tokyo, but luckily there are a few projects by him in omotesando apart from the omotseando heights project (which is SERIOUSLY bad ). anyway, collezzione is a couple blocks further down the road from prada (on the same side of the street even) and easy to get to, though every time i have been there it has been nearly abandoned so atmosphere is not what it could be.
more interesting is his recent hh style building in omotesando (on cat street, close to harajuku station). it is kinda interesting (perhaps for its lack of concrete), and as it is beside a sejima shop a good chance to hit two starchitects at once...
Jump, I too was underwhelmed by Ando. I never really got into him after seeing books etc. Then I saw the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis and though "OOOOH now I get it." So books started to make sense. I got really excited to see his stuff when I went to Japan, but what a difference a long camera exposure makes. The build quality is great and his buildings are relatively better than a lot of the structures around. But, in the end, I just wasn't as taken aback as I expected to be. When looking at books I would think "Oh yeah, that's going to be so cool to see that building" or "That space is going to be great." But in the end my eye isn't a 20mm lens and it's not 11:32 am on June 16th with 14% cloud cover. So in the end, he's not BAD, just not what I had expected. I thought the Suntory Museum in Osaka was awful. That thing was a POS. The HH Style was interesting since it was metal.
I had mixed feelings about the Yokohama Port Terminal (which is like porn to the teachers at Penn, god most of them have a creepy obsession with that thing). I thought it was both very awesome and very gimmicky at the same time. The outside has the weird spongey, continuous surface feel, but inside it's pretty average. But it's definately better than a typical port/airport. I guess maybe if I hadn't sort of been "pre-overhyped" it would have been more amazing. But yeah it was pretty rad. I'm just talking to myself at this point. Ok, no, it was pretty cool. I think more so the guy that wouldn't shut up about it is a guy that I really have no respect for, so maybe that tainted my view, but thinking back it is pretty cool.
I did however start to get really into Kuma. I met him actually in his $982348923 linen suit. We visited his office and he was stopping through and talked to us for a few minutes.
hah,
nice m. hasselhoff. especially the bit about kengo's suit. something about architects and their clothes eh...
kengo does nice stuf sometimes, ocassionally amazing work like this bamboo house in china (which i would LOVE to see in person), but then turns around and gets really commercial, as with his recent museum project in nagasaki...but it is nice that he remains a moving target with his work, always trying new things...
i rather liked the ferry terminal in yokohama, but have to admit my memory is mostly about the roof, which i loved. the folded structure is really quite smart and i was glad to see it all cuz i like that sort of engineering, but the space itself was surprisingly boring as you say. worth a look though. where else can you see such things.
I spent a couple of weeks in Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara last summer and i belive that the best thing you could do is just to walk around as much as possible. I had the luck of living quite close to the Tokyo Tower and from there you could easily walk around and find alot of strange things and still get a realistic image of what Tokyo is all about. You have to go to Harajuku, Omotesando and Shinjuku. It's crazy. I liked the museum MOT as well, not that easy to find though. I wandered around for an hour or so. They had a good Ceasar's sallad though.
I recomend Kyoto as well, it is small enough that you can acctually understand it. Pretty shrines as well. Nara is mostly for tourists.
I took about 1500 pictures with my digital camera when I was in Japan and most of them of buildnings so there are alot to see.
I'll second MOT, good exhibits, cool space...
jump - i've been to the bamboo house, and was "underwhelmed." It's cool, but really just a one liner. The exterior space in the image is nice, but overall, it's just a bunch of applied bamboo, inside, outside, everywhere...BAMBOO RUN AMUCK!
The house is in the "Commune by the Wall," a quasi museum of modern homes by Asian architects, located near the Great Wall. In reality, it's a hotel campus...rent a home for a week style... There were 12+/- homes and a community center, all varying degrees of inventive, many poorly crafted.
^My favorite of the lot, nicest spatially...by Antonio Ochoa
Other homes at the Commune by Shigeru Ban, Yung-Ho Chang, Gary Chang, Kanika R’Kul, Seung H-Sang, Kuma etc...
try getting the book " architectural map of tokyo", i am not sure whether you can get it in america tho.
it is a really great book, tons of info on buildings and maps.
have fun in tokyo :)
ha, AP.
figgers. architecture is often underwhelming in person ennit?
probably why i stopped buying archi-mags...
after being underwhelmed at some archimeccas, though, it makes the ones that really get you that much more exciting doesn't it?
for the really good ones, i always want to go back to try to determine if it's really the place or just my headspace at the time.
someday i'll see tokyo.
let me know if you do, steve.
best place i have ever been was the rooftop of il duomo in milan, where a crowd of people were enjoying the sunshine and taking it easy above the crowds below. it was seriously amazing and had nothing to do with design...
2nd best place was the ol shopping district in seoul. amazing amazing place, also undesigned, but full of life...
it is places like that that i think of when rem writes about leaving room for the dirty and unplanned to happen in the city. and part of why i like living in tokyo. it is really a great wonderful mess...
Tokyo is a mess and it's awesome for that. All the cool little shops under the elevated walk-roads. You get high design next to a weird little noodle shack. I like that book "Pet Architecture." And how can you not like Tokyo when you can buy Calpis? Oh man, I can't wait for Calpis (although you can get it anywhere in Japan). VIVA LA CALPIS!
Hey there everyone, I've just a little more than a week before I leave and really appreciate the suggestions!
Got any more?
i've got some more
first go to this website, it will give you addresses of some of the buildings http://www.jnto.go.jp/eng/arrange/attractions/practical/archi_ginza.html
The big architects get called on to do the fancy stores, Hermes(piano), Opaque(Sejima), Louis Vuitton(Aiko) and Prada(HdM)
See the capsule hotel by kurokawa
Rossi did a funny little building called the Ambiente showroom and it is about 6 blocks from prada, check it out.
Definately go see Tange's St. Mary's Cathedral as well as the gymnasium he did for the olympics.
Vinoly's international forum
Taniguchi, father and son did museums right across from each other in Ueno park and both are pretty amazing. The son (Yoshio) also did a beautiful little visitor center at the sea life park
Hey Jump. I might be coming to Tokyo during Obon. We have that entire week off. I have a friend in Yokohama so I:m trying to plan something for that week. I wouldn:t post this if this was my real cellphone, but I have a Vodafone prepaid and it will be done in 7 weeks anyway. Send me some cute little pictographs sometime. Damn! My trip is moving too fast!
09017178923
hasselhoff,
terribly embarassed to admit that i still haven't gotten round to figuring out how to do anything with cellphones beyond speak into them and listen to people daying likewise from the other side...;) sad isn't it?
haven't decided whether we will be going to the family home in the country for obon or not, but if in tokyo would be good to meet.
let me know how things are looking once things are sorted.
funny you should mention that genuwine. I have walked past the place a few times (it seems to be a wedding hall) and wondered if it was done by rossi or one of his imitators. It is not my taste but quite well done.
anyway it is nice to know finally who did it. cheers.
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