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2021
Unbuilt Ruin: Arata Isozaki’s Tokyo City Hall
Design + HTC Studio
Tokyo, Japan
Arata Isozaki & Associates. Section, New Tokyo City Hall, 1986.
1985— TOKYO—UNBUILT
This studio will focus on an unbuilt architectural work by Ararat Isozaki that was submitted for the New Tokyo City Hall competition, which was eventually won by his mentor Kenzo Tange. Although the competition committee rejected Isozaki’s entry, it challenged arrays of established architectural norms with a distinct awareness of the underlying social and political issues during the 1980s booming period in Japan before the nation ultimately busted into an irreversible economic crash.
The project will be used as a theoretical threshold to enter into larger complex issues of city, politics, culture, society, nation, and how Isozaki has struggled to contain and address conflicting architectural elements. The analysis of his proposal will reveal how he confronted architecture as a platform of the philosophical endeavor that aspires to reach beyond the simple task of constructing a monumental and utilitarian symbol of the city. His primary interest in architecture lies in its potential to initiate a set of questions that can instigate a dialogue not to resolve everything, but to problematize critical issues that need our conscious attention; it is about asserting and operating an additional layer of language in architecture that reflects the essence of the zeitgeist.
The competition also coincided with a crucial moment in his career when he was beginning to gain his first major international commissions, allowing him to develop a foresight to observe Japan from outside of its context. We will take an investigative journey to collect and decipher architectural fragments from the postwar to the high-growth era in Japan that significantly shaped the course of architectural development, leading up to the design of Tokyo City Hall.
The goal of the studio is to challenge our proficiency as thinking architects that is capable of acquiring a deep understanding of contextual issues in a given circumstance to test our literacy to utilize architecture as the construction of questions that can highlight the pressing issues of a specific time, provoking a critical debate across different fields; we hope to demonstrate reclaiming architecture’s role as the great cultural synthesizer of reality.
This studio will focus on an unbuilt architectural work by Ararat Isozaki that was submitted for the New Tokyo City Hall competition, which was eventually won by his mentor Kenzo Tange. Although the competition committee rejected Isozaki’s entry, it challenged arrays of established architectural norms with a distinct awareness of the underlying social and political issues during the 1980s booming period in Japan before the nation ultimately busted into an irreversible economic crash.
The project will be used as a theoretical threshold to enter into larger complex issues of city, politics, culture, society, nation, and how Isozaki has struggled to contain and address conflicting architectural elements. The analysis of his proposal will reveal how he confronted architecture as a platform of the philosophical endeavor that aspires to reach beyond the simple task of constructing a monumental and utilitarian symbol of the city. His primary interest in architecture lies in its potential to initiate a set of questions that can instigate a dialogue not to resolve everything, but to problematize critical issues that need our conscious attention; it is about asserting and operating an additional layer of language in architecture that reflects the essence of the zeitgeist.
The competition also coincided with a crucial moment in his career when he was beginning to gain his first major international commissions, allowing him to develop a foresight to observe Japan from outside of its context. We will take an investigative journey to collect and decipher architectural fragments from the postwar to the high-growth era in Japan that significantly shaped the course of architectural development, leading up to the design of Tokyo City Hall.
The goal of the studio is to challenge our proficiency as thinking architects that is capable of acquiring a deep understanding of contextual issues in a given circumstance to test our literacy to utilize architecture as the construction of questions that can highlight the pressing issues of a specific time, provoking a critical debate across different fields; we hope to demonstrate reclaiming architecture’s role as the great cultural synthesizer of reality.
Selected Design Works