PROTO-ARCHITECTURE

“Asakusa (浅草?) is a district in Taitō, Tokyo, Japan, most famous for the Sensō-ji, a Buddhist temple dedicated to the bodhisattva Kannon. There are several more temples in Asakusa, as well as various festivals.”¹

This was the first of several religious sites I intend to visit during this trip.  It was a very rainy day (as you can tell by the photographs) but the sun did poke through after a while. I really enjoyed the site.  The Kaminarimon “Thunder” Gate was packed with people and performers despite the poor weather.  The shops along the walk to the temple had the usual wares, but I did get a change to sample a toasted rice cracker which was very good.  You pass through the Hozo-mon Gate, past the incense burner (pull the smoke on yourself for good luck) and then into the main hall.

The Kinshicho Olinas project was one of the many international projects I worked on while a junior designer at a previous firm, circa 2000.  We produced design development drawings which were then passed on to the local Japanese architects for construction document production.  We built hand models of the main entry space (the gold drum atrium) and I did a lot of 3D modeling of the interior spaces in AutoCAD 2000 (yeah…it was as painful as it sounds).

The main mall straddles two office towers, and offers a curving interior space that intersets with a pedestrian mews bisecting the site.  Because the project was going to dominate the lot, we felt there should be a clear point of pedestrian access through the building.  This was achieved by the pair of facades curving inward toward one another opening up at either end to embrace the users.

It was pretty cool to get to see this project now, nearly a decade on from when I was involved in it’s design.  I was really happy to see that the color schemes made it through the documentation process.  They are very bold, but enliven a portion of the city that is rather drab in tone and materiality.

Our first full day in Japan we woke up to the lovely garden of the Miyama family.  The family has owned the nearby land for nearly 400 years, and can trace it’s history back through that time.  Mr. Miyama, in fact, represents the 19th generation of his family and his children, the 20th.  Their house was originally built as a farmhouse, over 100 years ago, with an adjacent building for storing rice from the farm.  They have since added onto the house, and the barn has been converted into Mr. Miyama’s office space, but they maintain a large portion of the house in traditional Japanese fashion, with tatami mats on the floor a shoji screens dividing the rooms. The site is beautiful, you access the ground via one of two gates, and walk through an ellaborate and well tended garden.  It is in stark contrast to the surrounding city, and while we slept the night before we could only head the sounds of crickets.  We slept on the floor, in traditional fashion, after converting the room from dining to sleeping by removing the chairs and laying down mats.

The garden has several meandering trails, and a natural brook that comes from the adjacent hillside filling small koy filled ponds.  We sat outside, drank coffee and got ready for the day.

Mr. Miyama happily greeted us at the airport and drove us immediately to his home in Chiba, on the outskirts of Tokyo.  Our flight had been delayed, and by the time we’d arrived it was getting dark fast.  Once at his house, Mr. Miyama reasoned that the first order of business was to get some food, and he took us to a local Tempura Restaurant.  Owned by the chef and staffed by his wife and daughter, he cooked the tempura in front of us as we sat at the bar.  I rather thought the clams were the best thing on the menu. They were an open shell tempura clam fried whole.  It was delicious, tender and a little nutty like fried mushrooms.  Unfortunately he didn’t have very many left, but he gave Brian and myself the last two.   Additional items included eggplant (also excellent), asparagus, a purple Japanese sweet potato scallops and oysters.  Of a more exotic flair, he served tempura fish (can’t remember the species, but it was a white fish) with fried backbone and a fried shrimp head.  Both were very good.

In May I was fortunate to learn that I’d been awarded the HOGI Traveling Fellowship through the Dallas AIA and the Miyama family.

I am pursuing an investigation into Japanese transit centers in an attempt to understand their success and hopefully, to help the profession apply those concepts to TODs and mixed-use developments in the U.S.  Unlike in the U.S. and many western cities whose town planning centers around civic buildings and historic (or reinvented) town squares, many Japanese communities have evolved around the train station, which functions not only as a hub for mass transit, but also as a center for social, retail and other vital communal functions.

You can view my original proposal here which details the stations I plan to visit, and why I selected them.

There are two portions to the trip.  The Miyama family has been gracious enough to arrange a tour of Tokyo through the first half of the trip, which will include visits to Japanese architecture firms, developers and project both complete and currently under contruction.

To start off this blog, I will be documenting each day of my trip (internet access permitting) with thoughts, photographs and observations.  You are welcome to follow me here or at my Twitter account @mondo_tiki_man which I will also be updating.

Comments are appreciated.