TROPOLISM

Title: Minka: My Farmhouse In Japan
Author: John Roderick

Publication Date: November 1, 2007

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

ISBN: 978-1-56898-731-6

John Roderick leaves his metier of journalism (he was an Associated Press correspondent in Asia for almost forty years) and enters the much trickier realm of architectural memoir with Minka: My Farmhouse In Japan. It is his experiences as an American journalist in post-war Japan who purchases a minka, reconstructs it, and makes new home out of it.

Click Continue Reading for the full review.

Olafur Eliasson is apparently conquering the world. From Archidose comes the news of an installation of around 7,000 platinum-glazed ceramic tiles in a courtyard of a house by Tadao Ando, in Tokyo. You already know of our love for golden legos; this just brings us one step closer to our dream.

The original article at Architectural Digest focuses more on the building, and has a good slideshow of the project.

Another long-lost and favorite meme of ours comes back through reader mail (keep those emails coming, folks!) in the form of some links to abandoned theme parks, many in Japan. Making the exploration of these ghost parks even more thrilling, beyond the Joel Sternfeld-like eeriness of the pictures themselves, is that they are collected on sites written in either German and/or Japanese, neither of which we read.

Our favorite is the Shiga Spiral, pictured. Happy exploring!

If you are like us, with our love affair with Tokyo, and, like us, miss its special mix of stunning architecture that doubles as larger than life retail, you will appreciate these two flickr sets.

The first is by Ralf Dziminski and covers some of my favorite spots, including this corner on Omotesando, pictured above.

The second, larger set is by nouknouk and also captures the overlap of retail messiness and retail architecture.

Both pointed out by Jean Snow.

In a record two months, what was a totally free of commercial taint artwork (at Burning Man, you know it's pure if it was there), has been done in a very similar fashion (without the burning part) at the Lexus 460 Degrees Gallery in Los Angeles! Yes, the same artist whose minions took Greg Allen for task for criticizing his Burning Man project has designed the interior of a Lexus Showroom with the same motif. There is nothing that brings us more pleasure than the knowledge that unbridled irony still lives in this world.

Of course, nailing a bunch of 2x4s together in a sculptural way is hardly new: I draw your attention to Tadashi Kawamata's work in the 1980s, work of much more powerful shape, form, and beauty than of the references we've seen this year. And of site-specific relevance. The Lexus Gallery in particular seems strangely decorative in this context: it could well be a coffee bar, or an awning for a wedding, or a kitchen sales office.

Via CoolHunting.

We all know that Toyo Ito designed an installation for Mies Van Der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, for their upcoming Berlin-Tokyo/Tokyo-Berlin show. Right? Keep up speedy: We Make Money Not Art has a Flickr pool showing the installation in progress. Tropolism will bring you more as it develops.

Forget Apple's tired glass cube (leading to...basement!), we're interested in the completely freaky (and completely awful, but still) iceberg building in Harajuku. Glass shards abound. It's like the 1980s are here again. Jean Snow delivers.

Nothing brightens our day more than knowing that Jean Snow, our favorite Tokyo blogger, has taken a jaunt around our favorite neighborhoods in one of our favorite cities, and taken a bunch of pictures of new buildings. That's a job we can respect. Stay tuned to his Flickr pool for more photos of his tour.

Pictured is the new "iceberg" building, of which we know zilch. Readers, do tell.

Omotesando Hills, the Tadao Ando-designed shopping mall/old folks home complex, opened this week. Two reviews have popped up that are of interest. The first, from the New York Times', er, shopping critic, seems to think it's a quiet respite from the loud and flashy stuff that happens on Omotesando Avenue. We think that's a bit generous, but granted, we only saw it under construction.

The second is by our favorite not-Japanese-but-in-Japan blogger Jean Snow, contributing to Gridskipper as well as his own site. Jean doesn't have many good things to say about it, but he seems to be more unimpressed than anything else. His great Flickr set says a lot.

From both accounts it's clear that the building is a mall with a bunch of mall shops you will find anywhere. The part not being talked about is the rooftop garden (which is not accessable by the public), and the back side (pictured above), where the old folks live, bordering the quieter (and much cooler) hood behind Omotesando Avenue.

Much like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artist-itect couple Arakawa and Madelaine Gins never seem to fade away. They just build bigger and more outrageous projects. This we can respect.

Brand Avenue points us to an interesting article in the Japan Times interviewing Arakawa about a crazy gerbil-city of apartments he designed in Tokyo. He and his partner's work is obsessed with architecture that "defies death", in the sense of defying expectations, therefore bringing back to life original, direct sensory perception. In this case, it means hanging all your clothes from hooks on the ceiling (accessible by non-moveable ladder), light switches at your ankles, and bright colors. It really opens the place up, don't you think?

Their website has more hidden gems, including the weird-yet-in-East-Hampton Bioscleave House, and the weird-yet-great-website park called Site of Reversible Destiny (pictured above). The latter seems like a more suitable ground for this kind of exploration. It's like a jungle gym for adults. The living spaces, while interesting exercises, seem to dominate the inhabitants with the artist's idea of what constitutes living. Tropolism means taking pleasure in Habit.

One of the amazing things about Tokyo is the beadth and depth of creativity that goes into retail design. In the USA, we are only beginning to have something between high-end retail and crap. In Tokyo, there are a million little corners of beauty.

So it is with great pleasure, and no surprise, to see that our source for Tokyo love, Jean Snow, has linked to Tokyo design firm Wonderwall's newest and greatest projects. My favorite is the one pictured above, the Aoyama BAPE store, directly across from the kate spade Tokyo flagship I did in 2004. The store was a bit dated when I visited it a year ago; they've radically altered it.

It's the second week in a row with a Friday Omotesando Hills update. Time to celebrate! This time, it's on-the-spot pictures from the ever-on-top-of-it Jeansnow. Judge for yourself.

I think it's lovely, if a bit monotonous. It will probably work better when the storefronts are alive and contributing to the street. But it is a bit like the other starchitect buildings on the street.

While we here in New York talk about really important stuff, our peers in Tokyo are having an interesting, and elevated, debate about preservation on Omotedando. The editor of Tokyo's Metropolis told us how he really feels, while iMomus contributes a much more nuanced piece on the matter.

Omotesando Hills is another of Minuro Mori's Developments designed, of course, by Tadao Ando. The building is not yet completed. It was a hole in the ground a year ago, when I was there.

When I was young, I played with picture-puzzles. One of these puzzles was a psychedelic composition not unlike something you'd see in Heavy Metal. Each of the pieces was fascinating in and of themselves, because the drawing was so detailed that each puzzle piece contained complete little pictures. When snapped together, the puzzle formed a larger composition, and these little pictures simply became texture for the larger whole. Same with the Muppet Movie puzzle we had.

When I returned from Mukogaoka-Yuen, while walking through Shinjuku Station, leaving the Odakyu rail line, emerging into the Odakyu department store, I began to make new turns, not knowing where they would lead, making my way through another department store, and another, and finally emerging on another street with no name, and not knowing where I was headed. Yet I kept going forward, following my nose and the hair on the back of my neck, and Tokyo did not disappoint: there was something to see at every turn. In Europe, or New York, I might have considered myself lost. But here, the concept of being lost has become useless. There is no Lost, there is only being-where-you-are. The city, like the vernacular buildings I toured today, is composed of a bunch of puzzle pieces, assemblages that join together with no nails, details that I am content to study before I know where they belong in the larger picture. Each store, street, and cyclist is a picture unto itself. For me, just emerging from my jet lag, the pieces aren't strung together, except the four conjoined department stores I walked through today, and the pieces that were still together when I dropped them from the box. The continuum is implied, but not yet visible.

In short, the city picture already exists, but putting it all together is simply a matter of time and careful observation.

Last fall, on my first trip to Tokyo, I lifted the window shade on the plane, nearing the end of a fourteen hour flight, and thought oh. the sky is blue over Japan, too. Never mind that I had no idea what new color to expect of the sky: I had simply expected something different.

My boyfriend was at business meetings all week, while I was navigating a new an unfamiliar city on my own. Because of this, and because we are staying in the hotel that Lost in Translation was set in, I have wondered when my lost-in-translation moment is going to happen. I thought it walking around Ginza. In Shibuya. In Aoyama. In Mukagaoka-Yuen. At the park of minka-en. I even have little thought sentences that attempt to spur on a grand whistfulness about my life, and how the fact that I don't speak Japanese, or read more than 10 kanji, or read zero hiragana or katakana, may be taken as a metaphor that my lover does not understand me. The voice says hey! that was your lost-in-translation moment. But my life is not a movie, or an audition for a movie, and so this moment never happened. It will surely come as no surprise to you, dear reader, that none of the conditions that were documented in the film apply to me. I'm not unhappy that my boyfriend had business there: business is what enables us to visit, and to stay in such a spectacular hotel. I'm not alienated by being the only gaijen on a commuter train: after all, I live in New York, and it's not uncommon for me to be the only Caucasian on a train. I'm not frustrated by not speaking or reading the language: my French is poor enough for me to be mostly mute when I'm in Paris. And again: I live in New York, and it's not uncommon for me to be amongst those who speak no English. I have no desire to meet a washed-up soap actor at the New York Bar and Grill on the 41st floor of the Shinjuku Park Hyatt.