later that day

on the verge

it's been pretty cold the last couple of days, and dark and rainy, so it looks like we need to wait just a little longer for botanical fireworks. this morning, skies over tokyo burst open, sakura buds along meguro river almost. it's all in the dna...



"In especially popular places it is common practice to reserve a picnic spot long before the party is held. The typical praxis is to spread one's picnic sheet early in the morning and either mark it with the group's name and party's starting time or to have somebody positioned there during the whole day until the rest of the group arrives after work."
Beginner's Guide to Cherry Blossom Viewing




[elders]

soccer

akira (behind the lense) rented a car and brought us out of the city, to watch the iran - japan soccer game at the place of mori, his iranian friend.

tomo (soccer freak, second from left) came all the way from osaka for the event - first he had considered flying to tehran... to get us in the mood, mori (left) dished up persian sweets, fruit and tea.

after the match (iran won 2-1, decent match, deserved winner) we watched the video of moki's wedding. for more then ten years, moki used to live with mori, in this same tiny room north of tokyo, but he returned to iran last year. akira went to teheran for moki's wedding, mori couldn't... one day, rather sooner than later, mori will return too. here you can download akira's documentary about moki and mori.

caroline (right) runs a macrobiotic table d'hôtes in brussels. through wwoofing she spent a month at different organic kitchens around japan to master the gentle arts of kaiseki, food cutting and presentation, slow food, and even chaji, the traditional tea ceremony. a very effective way to discover japan in depth - appetizing stories from the fascinating west. caroline was frying tamagoyaki at the time last week's earthquake hit kyushu, in a kitchen only a couple of kilometers from the epicenter. "het begon met een diep gerommel en dan begon alles te beven in de keuken, we moesten ons vasthouden aan de muren. alle glazen en borden vielen uit de rekken en het duurde enkele minuten. het was een grote ravage want echt bijna alles was gebroken."

next game for iran is against north-korea - soccer along the axis of evil... and next one for japan is bahrain.

choose a logo

pj productions made it to the front page of De Krant van West-Vlaanderen aka tkortriksandelsblad. read more on page 7.

and pieter made it to korea (and back) where he met up with rod and gladys. and redbook buddy tomokazu made it to new york where he met up with dida and silvia at krista's stain. we're all astronauts aboard a cozy little spaceship called earth.

lesson number two

breakneck speed

"Today, architects are often involved in gigantic projects going at breakneck speed, whether they like or not."
maki must be talking about projects in asia...

wouldn't call our yakitori tower a gigantic project (recent changes made it dip just below 100 meters), but designing speed flirts with breakneck. whether we like it or not. competition won in december - yet construction drawings due mid april, six weeks earlier than initially planned. engineers and specialists even contractors have joined in - lots of hungry mouths to feed with a continuous flow of updated plans. right now I'm working on the joint details of the glass facade. 't is ne keer wat anders...



still yakitori dynamics are no match for the regular surprizes from our projects in china. the civic center we designed (at breakneck speed) over the summer for a new town near wuxi, is currently under construction.

the construction drawings for every chinese building have to be produced in china. therefore, as a foreign firm, we can only develop our chinese projects up to schematic design, which we have to hand over to one of the official 'design institutes', remnants of china's strictly centralized planning machine. riken yamamoto and koolhaas shortcut this regulation (to maintain control over their chinese projects) by setting up shop in beijing. as we were expecting some bureaucratic delay from the drawing institute, picture our astonishment when the stack of construction drawings for wuxi arrived barely two weeks after our submission.

for the shanghai headquarters of our chinese developer/client, we haven't finished schematic design yet. our latest submission included a model, rough plans, area calculations, some shady perspectives. only days later they sent us the creations of their in-house renderers... click to enlarge - it's worth it.


view on an interior courtyard


flyover from southwest

those images are product of the full-force-ahead chinese workforce (in my mind a huge assembly line with thousand of uniformed renderers), definitely, but also of the romantic chinese, masters of illusion (look at their gardens and decorated temples). a good match with japanese austere detailing + building efficiency and european conceptual design approach? in theory, yes.

"The Chinese Architect is the most important, influential, and powerful architect on earth. The average lifetime construction volume of the Chinese Architect in housing alone is approximately three dozen thirty-story highrise buildings. The Chinese Architect designs the largest volume, in the shortest time, for the lowest fee. There is one-tenth the number of architects in China than in the United States, designing five times the project volume in one-fifth the time, earning one-tenth the design fee. This implies an efficiency of 2500 times that of an American architect."
from Great Leap Forward (Koolhaas + Harvard Design School Project on the City)

back to work. let's close the gap.

sakura forecast

even the frog's eyes
can't turn away...
cherry blossoms!
haiku by Issa, 1805

in between allergy sneezing salvos, lately the word sakura has been heard regularly around aichan's bar. with almost magical effects - allergy masks are put aside, moisty eyes widen, irritated faces lighten up, spring memories are shared, party plans are made. no measures are too modest for sakura worship. the other day, a suited guy invited me with a voodoo like performance to one of the upcoming under-the-blossom parties - standing up from his barstool, eyes to the sky, arms up like branches, shaking his stretched out fingers like unfurling cherry blossoms. in any case the enthousiasm is contagious - hope my first sakura season will live up to the expectations...



stay tuned with weekly updates from the 2005 sakura front at japan meteorological agency. and look, some early blossoms hovering over my siesta spot in a daikanyama park. definitely not cherry, maybe plum?

[elders]

downtown countryside

as green usually comes in pots in tokyo (or in bags), it didn't take me long to notice this small stretch of countryside, close to the office, on the slope behind hillside terrace. back in july, on one of my first lunchbreak walks, I remember wondering how this triangle could resist tokyo's building pressure. nine months later, it's on my drafting board...



maki sensei, designer of hillside terrace (the the highly acclaimed low-rise trigger development for the area), is still regarded as some kind of architectural godfather of daikanyama. big development plans in the hood pass through his hands for approval, giving him the position of an unofficial city planner. by contracting maki's son-in-law kobayashisan to develop a first conceptual urban design scheme for the triangle, the city and district governments (land owners) try to "smoothen" the process.

for a program of cultural facilities, senior flats, retail, public spaces and parking, I developed the three basic schemes you see flipping by below: one with a tower on the southeastern corner, one with building volumes perpendicular to the slope, one with buildings parallel to the slope. all have an FAR (floor area ratio) of 1.3. the blue variants of each scheme (bottom right) represent a maximum buildup of FAR 2, making it significantly harder to capture and reframe the feeling of countryside with slope and green.

pj productions

some 'forces' in my home town kortrijk are bored with the city's current logo and decided to launch an alternative version - a logo displaying a golden spur, the symbol of the city.

een 'bruisende' stad moet beter kunnen, en ik kan de forces eigenlijk geen ongelijk geven. een eerste opdracht (en een kleine moeite) voor pj productions - enkele ideetjes uit brussel (het gulden spoor verder verbasterd tot een knipoog naar het texas van vlaanderen) en wat knutselen in tokio - een wereld van verschil?
heb er vanhieruit geen zicht op of de apocriefe brouwsels al zijn opgedoken in het kortrijks handelsblad/straatbeeld. hou me op de hoogte.

haiku

spring rain
the ducks that haven't
been cooked quack
haiku by Issa

"A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition."
David Lanoue's webpage

for those who are getting worried about my recent interests in blossoms and japanese poetry - both sakuramania and haiku actually speak of the same thing: the experience of seasonal change, unavoidably present in a daily life in japan, right under tokyo's neon surface. kana told me that up to today, every japanese letter is opened with a reference to the season - “as we are eagerly awaiting the cherry trees to bloom, ...”

the big horse
rubs his butt
on cherry blossoms
haiku by Issa

issa kobayashi, one of japan’s most famous haiku MCs, crossed the country two centuries ago, producing thousands of haiku poems. the funny associations, direct imaginative language, and fascination for animals that ring through issa’s poems come very close to “the sheer excitement and unaffected honesty about every cultural phenomenon” I like in the songs of wesley willis. both issa (°1763) and wesley (°1963) are truly original rock and rollers, impossible to imitate in their joyful celebration of the ordinary.

The electric eel shocked the hell out of me
He also blew me out of the water
He did, thanks to his ass
Wesley Willis

"The haiku has this rather fantasmagorical property: that we always suppose we ourselves can write such things easily. The haiku wakens desire: how many Western readers have dreamed of strolling through life, notebook in hand, jotting down ‘impressions’ whose brevity would guarantee their perfection, whose simplicity would attest to their profundity (by virtue of a double myth, one classical, that makes concision a proof of art, the other romantic, which attributes a premium of truth to improvisation)."
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs

sake drinken
en haiku schrijven
geliefde zonden
gevonden op wikipedia

join me and download hundreds of haiku to your iPod. here you can find some of wesley’s lyrics.
and through a recent movie called Koi wa Go Shichi Go (love is five seven five), high-school haiku is on its way to become cool again.