Tokyo is one of the largest and most complex cities in the world and represents an intriguing proving ground for new ideas on architecture and urbanism. Working in Tokyo means working in the future, and often two sets of rules seem to apply to projects in Tokyo-on the one hand the city's growth is as protean as that of LA or Mexico City, yet this growth is channeled by Japan's rigid adherence to norms and rules and Japanese architecture's embrace of the theoretical and new. This book presents Tokyo as seen through its growth and design from the 19th century onward with a special focus on highlighting the deep roots of contemporary trends in Tokyo architecture.
Tokyo is the largest city in the world. The image of the city, notwithstanding
the widespread globalisation process, is very different to what we are
accustomed to in Europe, America and also in other Asian countries. The visual
and cultural shock is strong: it appears extremely vast, uncontrollable,
indecipherable, incommunicable, and chaotic. Tokyo is one of the few global
cities, and, like London, New York and perhaps one or two others, is part of a
real trans-national system. It is an extraordinary capital of contemporary
architecture and, at the same time, constitutes an exceptional urban
phenomenon that is impossible not to study with great interest. More
importantly is the fact that, behind an apparently abstract debate, the city
poses a substantial problem: does it represent the final decay of the Western
city or rather is it something completely different, a city with its own deep-
rooted historical diversity and specific cultural independence that has not
been substantially modified by the powerful and recent hybridisation with the
West? And also, does the city interest us for these reasons or rather because
it is/appears to be the city which – not being a part of the Eastern tradition
– has, more than any other place, embraced the challenge of the new millennium
and projected itself into the future, spurring rapid change with the energy,
recklessness and aggression that is possible only in a place that has never
been part of a tradition, to the point that it has substantiated a new
symbolic form in the urban phenomenology of the twenty-first century?
