TOKYO

THE CREATIVE POTENTIAL OF CHAOS

Cities today are undergoing greater changes than ever before. (...) We must first understand what is unchangeable or resistant to change in order to reach a true understanding of what we must or can change.

To foreign visitors and even to many residents, Tokyo appears to be a paradigm of urban chaos, spatially confusing and structurally illegible. Nevertheless, every city with a long history possesses an internal logic in its physical form, however unclear or inconsistent this logic may appear at first, and Tokyo is no exception.

Fumihiko Maki in Nurturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City

--

Japanese architects specialize at creating original architectural objects with unmatched level of craft and sensitivity to details. However, until very recently, relatively little has been done in the realm of the Japanese public space. Various publications on Tokyo popularized the topic in the past 10-15 years, but very few of them would take a more critical or analytical approach that could help designers work with the organically evolving city. My year abroad in Tokyo gave me a unique opportunity to support the reading with personal research, that led to the publication of a thesis that was a record of my own experience with the Japanese city and culture.

As opposed to strongly intentional public spaces in the West, the ambiguous border between the public and the private in Japan is typically not controlled by either. Tokyo evolves constantly, one can witness it being reinvented, rebuild every few years. How to grasp the essence of a space this dynamic, organic and significantly different from everything you ever experienced?

Master Thesis / Tokyo, Japan

ENSA Paris-Belleville & Shibaura Institute of Technology Tokyo

2016