snow on omotesando

the trees behind harajuku station


prada store


omotesando, tokyo's champs elysées






and look who I met, on snowy omotesando...
(lots of) sharper images later in 2005!

redbook

this is aichan. ai means love, that's what she said when I first walked into her bar, someday last summer. and chan is diminutive. aichan runs a bar called 'redbook', a tiny stain in nakameguro (coolest tokyo neighborhood according to wallpaper*), just down la rampetta from the office, where she dishes up a great carbonara, good old hoegaarden, and some gainsbourg now and then... she's a living database of good tunes and movies and belgian fashion designers. and just like krista in brooklyn she loves painting walls and doing things herself.

from that first day, I like hanging out at redbook - guess I've become a regular by now. there's only one small table for two and a couch close to the window, but plenty of seats around the bar. just great to sneak out of the office, walk down from hilltop daikanyama into nakameguro, and find regular or new faces around the bar, or just aichan, for lazy talks about nothing in particular. redbook is the bubble where stranger jansan finds familiar minds and thoughts and sounds and tastes, feels less stranger.



aichan beeru kudasai / crab pasta (oishi) / kamidekun


fuzzy coulds over la rampetta

miss q'n

zap mama at blue note tokyo yesterday night
with "the soundtrack to your imagination" as marie daulne described it herself...

Zap Mama gibt Soul und R'n'B die Ursprünglichkeit zurück. 'Ancestry in Progress' ist demzufolge der vorläufige Höhepunkt eines Prozesses, der hoffentlich noch lange nicht abgeschlossen ist. Denn 'extrem funky und soulig und mit starken Anleihen im HipHop ist [das neue Album] ein wahres Kraftpaket.
ein kraftpaket... couldn't agree more with the buddies from darmstadt.

and beatboxing behind the turntables - reprazent - wim "dj Grazzhoppa" verbrugghe! great to see that (baby)face again, grazzhopping around, mit starken Anleihen im HipHop...
check out the video on his site.




meanwhile, at kmdw...
imagination without soundtrack with kasorix' prehistoric viewmasters.

maki sensei

on yesterday's schedule was the long awaited reviewing session with fumihiko maki. for the shanghai office project.
pretty interesting for me, maybe not in the first place for what the master said (my japanese is still far from business meeting level), but for experiencing another chapter from the japanese customs book - "how to host a sensei" (a master).
everyone in the office - so not only who is working on the office project - was expected to attend the tributary gathering in the annex. initially only maki was sitting, surrounded by two concentrical belts of vassals. the samurai - chinese client mister fu, kobayashisan, tsushimasan, and naomisan (daughter maki/mrs kobayashi) - bringing the gifts and doing the talking, with kmdw warriors (katosan, kamidesan, kasorisan (in utmost "yokataaa" admiration), antoniosan and jansan) bodyguarding around, legs a little apart, hands together behind the back. later the inner circle could take a seat. the meeting lasted one hour and went well, as we could witness laughter and consent around the table.


a kmdw extended family picture.
now you know everyone... (katosan behind the lense)

so fu back to shanghai, with an updated draft for the Vanke headquarters, and, at least as valuable, with pictures of the meeting.
while making an interior view of the entrance lobby, I played around a bit with ImageReady (after PhotoDeluxe the most underestimated graphic software around) - click on the images for low-fi animation...

dag op dag

tien jaar magik magda...
moet er daar een frietje biezin?
tel het juiste aantal houthakkershemden en win een raider, u backstage aangeboden door fan van het eerste uur odile depreutere.

en net zoals toen in 94 - het volgende nummer wordt opgedragen aan de moeder van pieter, vandaag jarig. take this waltz...

kata

a couple of primal screams from kobayashisan, just before the friday afternoon clean-up, way earlier than 'expected'...
“jansan!”
“we won!”

soon the “kataaaa” (we won) phonecalls, tsushimasan rushes back to the office, everyone with an improvized beer in hand, faces with ear to ear smiles but radiant with disbelief. slowly (but quickly) we try to realize what’s going on... baby duck kmdw kicks the combined asses of pelli, rogers and ban, and wins a project for a one hundred meter tall tower, downtown tokyo...
let’s print the email. and reread it.



tsushimasan and kobayashisan with a preliminary victory sign during model pix session

only a day before, the four of us had carried the model, projector and booklets to omotesando to present our project to the developer and his engineers. we were not even sure if they would conclude the review sessions before the end of the week...
after imagining and drawing and presenting a lot of invisible buildings and cities over the last couple of years, it’s hard to believe this one now really gets built. somehow the logic escapes me...

some more thoughts as the dust has settled.

XII 5

knew there was something more going on between funky weather and december fifth... and indeed - first snow of both my new york winters arrived on december fifth. left 2003 (picture taken on december sixth), right 2002.

fujimi fire stairs

this ain't no cheap photoshop, but twenty four degrees on december fifth. for real.
tokyo’s not on the equator (35ºN), only a little closer than rome and new york. last week had been pretty cold actually – up to the point I got me some pairs of socks with separate toe compartments (a new sensation). but there he was again, superbly scheduled on a lazy sunday morning, the föhn, gusting down at 74 km per hour from the slopes of fuji and hakkone.
amazing how a surprize like this – a summer day in winter – makes your body wave like the bandy bandy snake, walk out the door and forget about deadlines.

last week kobayashi invited me to sit in a review of an urban design class, as a guest critic. next to me was professor jinnai, who turned out to be a friend of both grahame shane and bernardo secchi… il piccolo mondo. the students (exchange students from washington university) were asked to investigate the history of specific sites in tokyo and make urban design proposals. while commenting on the way they translated their initial observations into design ideas, I learned a lot about the invisible structures of tokyo, since the students eagerly used jinnai’s very revealing black and white drawings in their analyses.
just to tell you that street patterns of a lot of neighborhoods (even ginza’s) and samurai hilltop mansions of edo (tokyo before it became tō kyō, “eastern capital”) were laid out according to mount fuji view corridors. hills that slope to the west were often called fujimi zaka, “fuji view hill”. a mountain to look at, not to climb, remember?

to the left an edo period view of of the fudo temple grounds and the hills around fudōmae, and to the right an 18th century view of fuji as seen from one of those hills, by hiroshige (both images from jinnai's "ethnic tokyo").

so why not trying to catch a glimpse of fuji today? sunday afternoon dérives around fudōmae had taken me to hilltops before, to rise a little above narrow tokyo, to catch a stretch of horizon in a city lacking large river banks or monumental boulevards. with mixed success, as the hills are no longer a match for the surrounding highrise… and skies were never chrystal clear as today.



so this time I start walking up fire escape stairs of residential buildings, a lot of which have no locks nor doors - inviting upward extensions of the sidewalk. each roof terrace offers nice views – people like high places. crisp light on roofscapes, even stronger warm gusts through my dreads - but no clear views of fujisan. always a taller structure in the way, always another staircase to climb…


same view (opposite of hidden fuji) - down there up there



then finally, from a thirteen story building…



my first view of mount fuji.
not in full glory, but hey, it's a start.
needless to say I got lost by then...



220 degrees panorama (fuji flashed out by sunlight)

shinjuku blowup

nakameguro, later that day, on the way to the office...