Past and Future in Contemporary Tokyo

Sometime around 1980, Tokyo emerged as a place visitors came to see the future. Despite being reset to zero twice in the 20th century, devastated first by the Great Earthquake of 1923 and then by WWⅡ bombings in 1945, the city had already caught up with other major metropolises within a generation, under the tonic of an official “income-doubling plan” of 1960 and the 1964 Olympics. By the 1980s, the city was accelerating into its own alternate future, boosted by a surging yen and a frenzied real-estate bubble.
Filmmakers, with their sensitive cultural antennae, were among the first to pick up the scent. As early as 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky had found in the expressways of Tokyo material for his brooding science fiction epic Solaris; a decade later Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner projected imagery drawn straight from Shinjuku 1981 to imagine Los Angeles in 2019.
Architects and designers followed, drawn by seemingly unlimited budgets and almost complete aesthetic freedom. By the time the bubble economy burst in 1991 the city was awash with baroque extravagances, of which the golden excrescence atop Philip Stark’s 1989 Asahi Beer Hall stands as the crowning example.

In the early years of the 21st century, after nearly two decades of sluggish economic growth, the pressure of the future feels far less urgent in Tokyo than in cities like Shanghai and Dubai. But perhaps in a sense the future has already arrived. The urban environment of Tokyo today is filled with all the paraphernalia and atmospherics of the futurist’s copybook – artificial islands, building-sized video screens, machines that talk to you, trains for setting clocks by, plastic and neon and flawless off-form concrete.
Greater Tokyo remains mind-bogglingly vast, with a population in excess of 32 million and an economic output that outstrips all of Russia, making it seem more like its own urban planetoid rather than a city. Yet, confounding the dystopians, Tokyo is clean, orderly, efficient, surprisingly green, and eminently livable.

Having reached this point, attitudes toward time in contemporary Tokyo have palpably shifted. The future today, if it is invoked at all, is colored green and looks backwards. Urban redevelopment now typically emphasizes reconstruction of talismans of a mythologized past, rather than projections of a glorified future. The responses that architects, hardwired by modernism to aspire towards the new, are making toward this condition is one of the ongoing dynamics within contemporary architecture in Japan.

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, we find in Tokyo a place of motion without movement, incessantly changing, yet preternaturally calm. The notion of ‘chaos’ that was widely used before the 1990s in an attempt to grasp Tokyo’s peculiar energies is behind the times in both theory and reality. Instead, there is a quietude in contemporary Tokyo that suggests maturity, satiation, even contentment.
At the time of writing, as the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, the present appears as a refuge from both the deprivations of the past and the uncertainties of the future. After the orgies of destruction and frenzies of construction that this city endured in the 20th century, is this calm of post-bubble and population decline the end of the show? We think not. As the tumult subsides, architecture becomes more capable of thought, and its softer voices become audible again.

In these conditions, architectural value emerges not through the production of dramatic forms or the staging of private languages, but through carefully calibrated gradations of architectural meaning. Contemporary Tokyo presents an open platform for Sejima’s lightness, Ando’s purism, Ito’s constructivism, Kuma’s pulsations, Maki’s universal grace, Aoki’s layerings and wrappings and numerous other explorations of space, form, and occupation.
This diversity does not result in chaos, but a kind of ecosystem of responses to the cities conditions and possibilities. There is here the basis for a rapprochement between architecture and the city, though one far removed from traditional notions of “urban design”.

Whatever the future holds, perhaps Tokyo at this moment – advanced yet modest, tightly ordered yet insouciant, complete yet ever new, strange yet comfortably familiar – offers visitors a model not of a possible future, but of an alternate present.

* Excerpted with permission from "21st Century Tokyo: A Guide to Contemporary Architecture" by Julian Worrall and Erez Golani Solomon, photography by Joshua Lieberman. Published by Kodansha International. Available January 2010 in Japan, May 2010 rest of the world.