chronofile

bye bye tokyo

2005-05-02T19:46:00.000+09:00

last weeks in tokyo

2005-04-30T21:27:00.000+09:00

last weeks in tokyo, spent as much as possible in the real world. some pictures, in retrospect.

cafelatte break with seiko at eva, her colorful vintage boutique in daikanyama. seiko on the phone, planning her promo photo shoot.

a classic for who knows my brother, a good introduction for who doesn't - pieter working his way through a chunk of nan with four chopsticks at the malaysian expo pavillion, undisturbed by a team of nagoya television.

only recently I found this underpass, an alternative route to bypass the shinagawa train tracks on my way to work. with its length of a couple of hundred meters, its with of roughly one car and a bikepath, and its height of not more than 1 meter 50 (5 feet), this tunnel is a very bizarre space. extra scary when trains are rattling overhead... a favorite with cabdrivers, and at rush hour with walking salaryman - the usual outfit of smart suit and suitcase, but with heads tilted. the tunnel connects the reclaimed islands of industrial konan on one end with the hilly part of shinagawa - trees, temples, old residential quarters - on the other end.

"Tokyo is a place-by-place place - how each location relates to the last remains obscure. Lacking vistas and grand plans, you have no sense of travel between points: rather, you leave an experience and start another somewhere else. The intervening motion is out of place and time."
(Thackera, 1989)

sneaking out a day into bozo hanto, the peninsula that encloses tokyo bay. biking through deep shades of green, and through japan's fascinating countryside.

nagisa party in odaiba, and sushi for lunch during facade engineering sessions, piloted by tim, our glass facade specialist from australia.

yoyo walking to the dressing rooms for the taishi nobukuni fashion show at the national stadium, and a snapshot at roppongi hills. below, two more shots of the nobukuni show.

early morning shots in shinagawa

shrines and rural vending machines in bozo hanto

sant'aichan in castello

the third floor of robata, just a long staircase removed from busy blade runner streets of yurakucho, yet a distant universe of surrealistic paintings, multiple stages of delicious food, stacks of books, and the eponymous fireplace.

with virginie, polle, tomi and pieter at the world expo in aichi.

fuji view from the shinkansen on the way to the expo - most convincing display of nature's wisdom during the entire day...

seiko knows what she wants as she's dressing up one of the models for the photo shoot. a well conserved secret where she keeps finding those clothes...

early shot at sayonara party. appetizers and men in concentrical circles around the flower in aichan's hair.

sunset over aichi. night falls, also at the expo.

shinagawa sequens

2005-04-28T05:44:00.000+09:00

kind of lookalikes

2005-04-09T05:22:00.000+09:00

sometimes I had the feeling that for everyone I know, there's a japanese version out there. usually the subway is a great place to spot lookalikes - not the best place to record or document them though.

so what about this one?
the construction site manager of the jibica clinic versus françois pignon, actor from "le dîner de cons"...

annoying

2005-04-08T03:11:00.000+09:00

growing old
even the cherry blossoms
a bit annoying

haiku by Issa, 1811

flowery

2005-04-07T11:15:00.000+09:00

"Cherry trees all over Japan will burst into clouds of pink blossoms in early April to thrill once again the hearts of the Japanese people with their ancient glory and liveliness."

trying to find out more about sakura as turning point in the traditional japanese calendar, I came to this page, answering most of my questions in romantic, innocently nationalistic yet informative prose - this is where 'flowery' got its original meaning - as native to japan as the sakura itself. let me slice it up for you and add essential imagery of postprandial scenes around meguro river shidarezakura (weeping cherry trees).

people gather on a bridge over meguro river

"Sakura trees are planted on mountain sides, parks and gardens and most notably along many river embankments. When the blossoming season comes, these trees on winding river embankments turn into gorgeous belts of blossoms extending many miles. It is said, ancient people started to plant sakura trees on river banks, so that people would be lured to come and their walking on the embankments would solidly pack the earth to make it strong enough to withstand the flooding water in autumn."

a glass of sakura champagne at hanezawa garden

so far in japan I hadn’t noticed any more cherry yogurt or jam or coke than anywhere else - made me wondering what happens to all those japanese cherries... yet

"Beautiful as it is in bloom, the Japanese cherry tree does not yield fruit like other cherry trees. A critic once remarked that the Japanese cherry tree does not have to produce a market crop because it is a born aristocrat and its single mission is to be beautiful."

"The true lover of cherry blossoms is more particular in his enjoyment of this seasonal offering than the general public. He feels the season is at its height when the buds are little more than half open - for when the blossoms reach full-blown maturity there is an intimation in them that bespeaks the beginning of the decline of their beauty."

samurai with sword in horizontal position

"The cherry blossom symbolizes the national character of the Japanese. This is because the life of a samurai of feudal times was proverbially compared to the short-lived cherryblossoms, which last 'no more than three days', for our samurai was always fully prepared to sacrifice his life at any time in the cause of his master."

"The Japanese people would never have been essentially so jubilant, cheerful, optimistic and youthful were it not for the beauty of the cherry blossoms."

pink perspectives

during times of the gates, rennie reported a remarkable increase of orange in new york's streetscape. same here with unavoidable pink during sakura season...

hanami at 5:30 am, marginal advantage of overnight drawing work

"When the cherry blossom season begins, many people who wish to enjoy flower viewing in a quiet atmosphere, make visits as early as 8 or 9 AM before the regular crouds arrive to begin their boisterous merrymaking."

[elders]

giant life size fashion chimp

2005-04-06T04:45:00.000+09:00

sakura not only marks the traditional turn of the year - school's out, taxes due, rice to be planted - but also the presentation of tokyo's fashion collections for next autumn and winter.
it all started a month ago, when taishi nobukuni walked up to me in a restaurant around the corner with the question whether I'd be ready to "walk" for the takeo kikuchi show. an extra audition, a couple of fittings, a visit to the model agency (hobbies: urban design) and a hair styling session later, I ended up doing two shows: avant-garde street- and surfwear for nobukuni/kikuchi (on the running tracks of the national stadium), and the more classy catwalk outfit for mon tsuki. big fun - lots of new (exclusively foreign) mates (some faces strangely familiar... from ads around town), flashing polaroids, flamboyant stylists ("more... intensity") - and some extra bucks.
grabbed this sequence with fitting shots from the montsuki make-up table - hope professional pix of the shows follow... find the amateur chimp!

later that day

2005-03-30T23:40:00.000+09:00

on the verge

2005-03-30T11:13:00.000+09:00

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

2005-03-27T02:10:00.000+09:00

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

2005-03-25T16:06:00.001+09:00

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

2005-03-24T00:44:00.000+09:00

breakneck speed

2005-03-24T00:03:00.000+09:00

"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

2005-03-17T15:54:00.000+09:00

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

2005-03-15T16:18:00.000+09:00

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

2005-03-07T20:28:00.000+09:00

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

2005-03-05T23:46:00.000+09:00

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.

hakone

2005-02-19T10:55:00.000+09:00

we took rennie and louis to hakone, region of steaming valleys dotted with hot springs and hiking trails - the well-established resort area for tokyo shoguns. after a month of touring around in china, they could use a relaxing bath we thought, and some fresh air before kicking off a new life in san francisco.

tomo introduced us to the holiday life of a tokyo real estate agent, recovering from a week at the company in the members-only resort hotel... of the company. a real treat though, including in-house onsen, a tatami room with floor to ceiling views over the valley, and yukata for all. on the balcony at night (strong smell of pine trees) I thought the last time I saw a sky full of stars must have been from a mongolian haystack.

after breakfast we met up with akira, the guide for the hike, at gora station.
on a first break, in a clearance after a steep climb through bamboo forest, with the view of the picture above in front of us, we were wondering in which direction mount fuji was hiding. we decided it was still behind the hill we were climbing, until all of a sudden we focused and saw this. like finally finding your glasses right on your own nose...

soon we came to a ridge, offering views on both sides, leading to the top of the 'bright star mountain'. clouds refused to dissolve - so hazy fuji belonged more to the sky than to the earth for the rest of the day.

on top of bright star mountain

going down - back to the bright valleys of the inhabited world

with subways and trains and buses and cable cars smoothly interconnecting it feels like public transportation can take you to virtually every corner of the empire - making day trips from tokyo perfectly worth the hassle. the switchback trainride to gora is the steepest in the world.

zonnige groetjes uit shinagawa

2005-02-15T09:13:00.000+09:00

and shaky greetz from shinagawa... heaviest earthquake for me so far, shaking me up this morning at 5 o'clock. simply no way to get used to those creepy surprizes... in magnitude not as strong as the one in niigata last fall, but significantly closer, in ibaraki prefecture, just an hour by train northeast from tokyo. appetizer to the big one locals are expecting? there's something like the 70 years rule for big earthquakes, and the last one was in 1923.

lesson number one

2005-02-12T15:55:00.000+09:00

counting in japanese is notoriously complicated.
japanese uses ‘classifiers’ to count or quantify specific families of objects. the ‘three’ in three pens (family of the cylindrical objects) is different from the ‘three’ in three cakes (family of the small chunky objects). classifiers roughly equal english words like ‘glassful’, ‘sheets of’, ‘pieces of’...

the list of families looks long and kind of whimsical to western minds. years of age, machines, floors, times, persons, animals, small chunky objects, cylindrical objects, glassfuls cupfuls, books, letters, days of the month – are all counted with different sets of numbers.

a couple of examples, for clarity.
sheets of paper and tickets, from the family of the ‘thin and flat objects’, are counted with ichimai (1) nimmai (2) sammai (3)... pizzas, however deep pan, belong to the same family. calzones (those folded pizzas no one ever orders) on the other hand are counted with hitotsu (1) futatsu (2) mitsu (3) ... the set for non-classified objects.
animals have a different classifier (ippiki (1) nihiki (2) sanbiki (3) ...). birds yet another one (ichiwa (1) niwa (2) sanwa (3) ...). but, rabbits are counted as birds – according to aichan because their ears resemble wings. wonder if it works the other way around for skiing ostriches... roadkill rabbits are again counted as thin and flat objects, like deep pan pizzas and tickets.

fortunately there’s minimix and point it around the bar for easy communication...

naive

2005-02-04T14:51:00.000+09:00

lots of new residential towers under construction around my new place, on reclaimed land in shinagawa. one going up right in front of us... only narrow slices of sea and shinkansen sliding by are left, as long as it lasts.

(tokyo, undepletable source of funky Tshirt prints)

(click)

miura hanto

2005-01-31T01:39:00.001+09:00

don't know about you, but I filled my international internet-free sunday with a walk along the coast of the miura peninsula with tomo, pieter and kana, lots of birds of prey and kitesurfers.

for a late lunch, we walked up to a small port, where waving hands invited us inside the clubhouse of what looked like the local guild of independent fishermen's women. for the hawaii style new year's party, with live music and well prepared flower dances.

intriguing how in the end those really local habits are the same all over the world. the faces of the women, the group dynamics, the way everyone is prepared and bound to have a good time ("there's only one new year's party a year" said one of the ladies to kana, while adjusting her make-up in the bathroom mirror) - we could perfectly picture similar scenes in a random parochial center in flanders.

kana and pieter, a little mashed after classic onsen at the end of the day. in a hotel this time, close to the southern tip of the peninsula, with a well designed outdoor bath, overlooking sagami bay under darkening skies.

water no get enemy

2005-01-29T18:33:00.000+09:00

two years ago, the columbia urban design squad passed through kao lak, on a bike trip from chumphon to krabi in southern thailand. I was flipping through some pictures the other day, wondering what has become of the places and people we met along the road. kao lak is one of the towns on thailand's andaman coast that suffered a lot under the tsunami.

while I had been on the road for two weeks (on the east coast), this was just day two for the buddies, on their first ever bike trekking... most of the day we stayed close to the ocean, for a relaxing ride on relatively flat coastal plains, scenery of chunky limestone outcrops in the distance.

jan and rennie during a shady break on the road, john and tomo on the beach at the end of the day, and marc with a mysteriously agressive itch-attack in the hut at night...

we rented two huts at one of the many resorts in kao lak - and more under construction as we noticed along the road - catering more specifically to the diving crowd, still less crowded and less concrete than nearby phuket.

the next morning, before heading down south to phangnga, we followed a rough guide suggestion and biked through several miles of rubber plantations for a superb breakfast. in a superbly peaceful place, on the edge of the water.
water no get enemy sings fela kuti...

silk route

2005-01-21T14:58:00.000+09:00

the life of a sweater... from the musty sports bag of an early eighties after hours soccer player of fc izegem, to the shelves of a vintage shop in tokyo today, waiting to be bought by a hipster for 9,000 yen.
the in betweens are left to your imagination...

you can find the vintage shop on a second floor gallery in a side street in nakameguro... the red building on the other side of the street is redbook, for those of you who need a point of reference.
izegem on the other hand, twenty kilometers north from where I was born, is known as the town of brooms and shoes ("stad van bustels en skoen"), and famous for its juicy dialect.

[elders]

risotto

2005-01-17T23:09:00.000+09:00

so great to find out that the magnetic table at the faramarz/margery mansion still works... ingredients are simple yet success guaranteed.

same goes for the risotto. let me pass you the recipe here - with the risk of no one showing up next time...