Darryl Wee

Like most recent art spaces, Kisho Kurokawa’s new National Art Center in Tokyo was designed as a place of public encounter, running in tune with a high profile cultural calendar. In its own little pocket in foreigner-friendly Roppongi, this NAC (not to be confused with the Singapore NAC) showcases sprawling exhibition halls — the largest single museum space in Japan, in fact; a satellite branch of Paul Bocuse’s high French cuisine; and an outpost of the heavily curated Tokyo “select” shop Cibone (Cibone typically sells a severely limited range of folktronica, artisanal stationery and other extraneous ingenuities).

The museum is priming itself to become the showpiece of the cultural part of Roppongi. (The pimps, foreign hostesses and off-duty military men can carry on frolicking all night in the seedy part.) At the time of writing, there was a very ambitious and rather flabby exhibition there on Parisian émigré art from the entire twentieth century. The flyer advertises tie-in promotions with the toniest brasseries and patisseries in the city in a mass celebration of French culture.

This new cultural hub has its own exit from Nogizaka station; you are spirited effortlessly through a series of engineered tunnels, following the trail of illuminated signs that ensure you don’t get lost or take the wrong exit. The polish is quite oppressive. It’s got that whiff of expensive remodeling, the tyranny of a perfect refurbishment.

Shimokitazawa, a kind of shabby-chic neighborhood with cafes, houses that are also galleries, bakeries, and art bookshops.

Our newest “public” spaces are guilty of this betrayal: they are anything but democratic, frequently under the whim and directive of some ambitious technocrat with generous funding, mostly spent on advertising its own image/imagination. It relies on this self-imaging to attract gawkers, who only stop to stare, and aspirants, who might actually move there.

Four years ago, Minoru Mori’s mixed-use Roppongi Hills complex, a spire of culture clad in concrete with its service apartments, modern art museum, international cuisine and lavish boutiques, was outdone only by the audaciousness of its ad campaign. Takashi Murakami got commissioned to design a series of cartoon posters featuring his terminally exuberant “Superflat” critters having a little romp around the playground of their “New Hills Lifestyle!”. Kurokawa’s NAC is its new accessory.

Kurokawa and his contemporaries began championing an urban model of organic rogue-like contagion in the ‘60s, outcroppings of Metabolist¹ architecture left to spawn itself throughout the city with little regard for the contained designs of urbanists and planners. Little of that extemporaneous spirit remains, unfortunately. Nowadays what makes the news are large tracts of land for well-funded projects, usually variations on the condominium complex theme, overseen by the singular utopian vision of a master planner.

Just a week ago, Mitsui Fudosan (one of Japan’s two or three national construction dynasties) launched Tokyo “Midtown”, the newest Babel on the block, that outstrips even Mori’s Hills — or any work of Manhattanite hubris, for that matter — a towering spaceship of service apartments, stern looking boutiques, the refurbished Suntory Art Museum, Muji’s crossover flagship store of expensively rethought vintage furniture, and even its own Midtown radio station sharing space with a huge Starbucks.

If we must be crabby about development, let’s at least acknowledge that it’s been awhile since we’ve enjoyed so much outwardly benevolent patronage for Art, in the marbled lobbies of investment banks, as showpiece centers for ailing provincial towns. Much of it, however, tends to be programmatic assembly work that feeds off a fantasy narrative of work-and-play downtowns. Real estate brochurespeak for people who enjoy buying (into) packaged identities. Kurokawa used to be known as something of a maverick, junking traditional urban planning for messy, erratic development. Now he’s switched to the more orderly model of “symbiosis”. Does he mean a harmonious relationship between man and his shelter? In any case, it’s quite a different ecology that comes to mind — a model of symbiotic power between corporations, developers, investors, advertising. Quite a world apart from the monstrous metabolic spasms of postwar Tokyo in the throes of rebuilding.

Despite this recent polish, Tokyo is a city that’s managed to resist wholesale refurbishment, the look of uniform newness that Singapore loves. It’s probably the last city — and certainly the only one in Asia — to have had the benefit of a relatively gradual transition to Western standards of modernity. Having fulfilled all its gleaming infrastructural ambitions forty years ago, Tokyo can now sit back and appraise its forty-year old patina.

A good part of it has that dated look from the ‘60s, lots of concrete and municipal-hall modern. This is its “authentic”. Large swathes of cobbled tile and concrete and aluminium in tofu blocks. Corrugated aluminium, polycarbonate screens, battered clapboards and weathered rain-stained cinderblocks. This unplanned jumble of cheap industrial bits and pieces. Littered with unpromising materials, Tokyo screams to be redesigned. Developers are starting with Roppongi. Some architects have been having different ideas, though. Atelier Bow Wow, currently the subject of an exhibition at Gallery Ma, appeals to a “practice of lively space: glocal detached house and micro public space”. Bow Wow are a vigilante husband-and-wife team of post-materialist Situationist rogue agents who like firing up the suburbs, sprouting subtle interventions in post-bubble Tokyo.

Two concrete blocks, plus one desolate tree stashed in a lonely corner. A typical post-Bubble sprout in Minami Aoyama.

After the moneyed fever of ‘80s development died down, clients became more sober and stopped demanding kitschy fiefdoms with Roman capitals and marble verandahs (Singapore unfortunately hasn’t quite outgrown this). With less money and more restraint, clients went in for modestly outfitted and compact boxes in prefabricated materials and plasticky finishes. This is the sort of place that goes unremarked, quietly commissioned by sympathetic clients, nestling anonymously in a sea of huddled one or two storey houses. Post-bubble, this is Tokyo’s recessional wabi.² Buildings are treated as independent allotments, micromanaged and rearranged as you like.

Bauhaus dies hard in Tokyo (Kichijoji, Nakamichi Street). The unfinished concrete aspires to look ever more weathered as it ages. Those aluminium window fittings and mesh screens are really there because of earthquake considerations.

Back home in Singapore, I wonder when we will have the luxury of distributed development — anything at all, really, to contest the bland official line on global cultural renaissance urban downtown masterplans, etc. We’re not alone in this, of course. It seems to be Asia’s particular lot to have to face the ruinous effects of compressed modernization. It’s difficult to escape the tyranny of regulated development and pre-integrated lifestyles, ambitiously assembled by government advisory boards and developers. The proliferation of chain stores and international franchises. Superbrands have turned most city centers into High Street corporations. We tend to get the cityscape we deserve. If nobody’s going to stand firm and insist on more graceful aging and kinder environments, we can look forward to more and more arrogance and invasiveness.

Singapore has generally been on a bit of a tighter schedule than Tokyo. So many things torn down and trashed at one stroke, before they had the time to fray, crumble, crack and peel, in installments, and then acquire a seasoned patina. Peeling paint, rain-stained concrete, vine-riddled fences. Patina is one of the few things remaining to us that still resists being dematerialized, reduced to an image or a lifestyle advertisement (I discount here the sort of urban quotidian-pastoral school of photography that fetishizes unkempt alleyways and their rusty pipes and crumbling brickwork). You either have it or you don’t, and recreations rarely have that same carelessly disheveled and worn-in look. In Singapore, where we threw patina out the window at first and now clamour to get it back now that our surroundings are radiant and our infrastructure is spotless, the cause is even more hopeless. Is there some middle ground between toy-bright Chinatowns and cloistered playground waterfront Integrated Resorts and yachts and condominiums? If we haven’t had the time to unfold gracefully, do we have an alternative to one-stroke corporate-funded refurbishment?

What is Singapore’s authentic? Its native Gothic? If you disqualify HDB public housing stock, our foreign starchitect showpieces, and cheapened heritage conservation areas…. Still, I can think of a couple of examples: SIT first-generation flats in Tiong Bahru or Queenstown, row shophouses in Joo Chiat or Yio Chu Kang, colonial bungalows in Seletar or Tanglin. There was a beautiful short film called Take Me Home a.k.a. I Saw Jesus (directed by Gözde and Russel Zehnder) that kicked off RESfest in Singapore last summer that knowingly captured our very own Tropicalia.³ A kind of urban pastoral walk in the park, the Super 8 film stock saturated with heat fatigue. The sepia tones shimmered with late-afternoon languor. A girl dawdles in a corner of Siglap; hangs out in the forlorn coffee shop with cruddy windows; returns to her grandmother’s ancestral terrace house and its garden overtaken by weeds; cycles aimlessly in a stranded carpark. Lots of shifting light on mosaic tile, homages to formica tabletops and melamine tableware.

Children frolicking in a garden full of hokey exotic bushes and Taro Okamoto’s baroque stone petal and sun-motif sculptures, in the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum in Minami Aoyama.

This is part of our “authentic”, although no one with any pretentions to more glamorous stereotypes will care to admit it. At the moment, while everyone’s preoccupied with visions of gleaming financial parks and zones of designated leisure, who’s going to tend to our more humble hangouts? Already I think some of these “native” inspirations are being mined — look at Dempsey Road and Rochester Park’s boondock-colonial backlanes being taken over by wine bars and villas-for-dinner. (The locals are taking back the colonial bungalows, moving back into the deserted plantation and having their own little version of Sunday bridge and tea-on-the-verandah.) In Tokyo there is a long and cherished vein of nostalgia that prizes the messy, meandering alleys of the old downtown (下町、shitamachi) as well as the forty year old shabbiness in areas that somehow escaped Bubble redevelopment.

Magazines routinely memorialise derelict public housing compounds, time-warp shopping arcades, and the sort of department stores that we used to have (Tay Buan Guan, Oriental Emporium; fluorescent tubes and squeaky linoleum). It took Tokyo one boom-and-bust cycle to start reappraising itself. When developers finally finish carving out our shiny showpiece New Downtown, plus all the waterfront condominiums and IRs, maybe enough people will flinch and retreat to the drowsy Nanyang humidity of our more neglected neighborhoods. There’s so much we can reclaim from the old kampung ways.

1. 1960s Japanese urban movement that championed large scale, flexible and extendable modular structures that extend cities organically with little formal planning. [↩]
2. As in “wabi-sabi,” (侘び寂び) a restrained aesthetic that makes a virtue out of poverty and shabbiness. [↩]
3. 1960s Brazilian cultural movement that rejected European cultural borrowings and instead championed local (and especially native black or mulatto) traditions. [↩]