day 07&08_Kyoto_traditions and contradictions

day 06_Kyoto_Ando: Museum of Fine Arts

This is the first structure I have encountered by Tadao Ando.  I must admit, I was never a huge fan of Ando, although I have always admired his use of concrete, which has become his signature. But after visiting the Museum of Fine Arts (also known as the Garden of Fine Arts) in Kyoto, I am starting to change my mind. There is so much more to the building than perfectly smooth and detailed concrete walls. The whole museum is a scenic procession of framed views, disruptive walls, and calculated openings.  The replicas of famous art works are really just backdrops, so subtly ‘exhibited’ that one might not even notice them. What takes over is the building itself. Or I should rather say, the space delineated by the walls, since there really is no building. It’s a perfectly calculated composition of planes, all exposed to the elements. From the street, the space just funnels in, between the angled walls, strangely sucking the visitors in and down along the ramps. Once fully descended, there is a strange sense of emptiness and removal from the ‘ordinary’ life of the street above. It’s calming and frightening at the same time.

Street 'facade'

day 06_Kyoto_first impressions

The cultural heart of Japan – Kyoto – is a charmingly strange city. Very different from Tokyo in so many ways, with approximately 1.5 million people it resembles more of a village rather than the cultural capital of Japan. This is partially due to the fabric of the old city, which was not completely destroyed during WWII as it was in so many other Japanese cities. The inner city is laid out on an orthogonal grid, with narrow streets stretching out for miles. The buildings are typically two-three stories high, mostly residential houses, and tightly packed together. One can still see the traditional townhouses, called machiya, with typical tiled roofs, bamboo screens and timber construction, but the signs of modernization and capitalism are clearly visible on every corner.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Kyoto's streets are the infinite cable lines and electrical posts that stretch along the buildings, in many places creating a dense web above the streets.  It’s a strange feeling walking below this canopy of wires, intertwined together in massive knots, which obscure the view skyward.

day 05_Tokyo to Kyoto_'countryside'

After a few days in Tokyo, I decided to visit Kyoto and Osaka, hoping to get a better understanding of traditional Japanese culture and to see other Japanese cities in comparison to Tokyo. I will return to Tokyo for a second round afterward. The two and a half hour train ride from Tokyo to Kyoto was illuminating, revealing the sprawling development within this region. Low-rise houses were stretching far into the distance, with rice fields between and mountains in the distance at the far edge of the developments. But unlike the sprawl in US, the density of the developments was much greater and the houses were much closer to each other with very small yards (no large green lawns popping into the view).  From what I’ve heard and read, the north of the country is much less populated and developed, but this train ride felt like a journey through a never-ending Japanese village.

day 03&04_Tokyo_multiplicity of ground plane

The architectural idea of 'ground' is turned upside down in Tokyo. One might be walking for 15 minutes through a network of streets only to discover that what appears to be a ground is actually a roof of an underground mall or train station. Covered arcades transform streets into interior shopping malls and elaborate multi-directional elevated walkways duplicate the street network in the sky.

_ elevated walkways...

_ underground streets...

_ multilevel ground planes...

day 03&04_Tokyo_building typology

As I mentioned in my first post, I was very surprised by the overall structure of the city itself. Tokyo seems to have the high density nodes with high rise buildings concentrated around the main transportation hubs (such as Shibuya or Shinjuku), but the rest of the city is comprised of low rise buildings - mostly residential - that fill in the space between. They are closely packed together, with minimal gaps (ALWAYS a narrow gap between buildings, perhaps due to the seismic code?), typically with a one-lane street and no side walk. From above, it looks like a tightly-knit carpet that is covering the city as far as one can see. The city blocks and the individual buildings vary in size, so unlike Manhattan or Paris, for example, Tokyo does not seem to have an overarching order. Rather, it appears as if the city has grown organically over time, constantly changing, adding, destroying, and rebuilding itself.

day 03&04_Tokyo_stacked city

One building / one city...

... observation deck:

... theater:

... shopping mall:

... restaurant street:

... and of course offices on the top levels (not shown).