What disoriented me about Tokyo was not its size — I knew it was big — but its discontinuity. Every neighbourhood has a completely different aesthetic, atmosphere, scale. Asakusa has the temples and the souvenir shops and the rickshaws. Shibuya has the luminous screens and the most photographed crossing in the world and the kids running. Yanaka has the wooden houses, the cats, the quiet cemeteries, an idea of Tokyo that belongs to the 1950s. These are not different faces of the same city: they are different cities sharing the same metro network. Tokyo has solved the problem of urban identity not by looking for a synthesis, but by accepting multiplicity as the normal condition.
What interests me, from the point of view of architecture, is understanding how Japanese building tradition — wood, modularity, relationship with the landscape — coexists in this city with the contemporary experiments that have made Tokyo one of the most fertile architectural laboratories of the twentieth century.
Senso-ji Temple in Asakusa — the tradition that survives
Senso-ji is the oldest temple in Tokyo — founded in AD 628 — but what we see today was rebuilt after the American bombing of 1945. It is not a detail: it is the Japanese norm. Traditional Japanese timber architecture is built in the knowledge that it will burn, that it will be destroyed, that it will have to be rebuilt. Form matters more than matter — the plan, the proportions, the building system are transmitted through reconstruction, not through the conservation of the original stone. It is an idea of heritage completely different from the European one.
Architecturally, what is worth observing at Senso-ji is the system of roofs at several superimposed levels, the wooden brackets (tokyō) that distribute the roof load, and above all the relationship between the built volumes and the open space of the courtyard. Traditional Japanese architecture does not define space by enclosing it: it defines it through sequences of thresholds, openings, floors that change material. You do not enter a space: you pass through a series of transitions.
Nakagin Capsule Tower — Japanese Metabolism
Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower was demolished in 2022, after decades of struggles between the owners of the capsules, the residents and conservationists. It is one of the most painful cases of lost modern heritage — but it is still useful to understand what it represented, because Japanese Metabolism is one of the most original architectural movements of the twentieth century and Kurokawa was one of its protagonists.
The Metabolist idea was that of an organic, replaceable architecture, capable of growing and renewing itself like a living organism. The Nakagin was composed of 140 prefabricated capsules — each capsule a complete living unit of 2.5 by 3.8 metres, designed for a “salaryman” who had to sleep near the office — attached around two concrete towers. The theory was that the capsules could be replaced individually as they wore out. It never happened: the connection mechanisms oxidised, maintenance costs were prohibitive, and the project slowly degraded. Metabolism had a brilliant theory and a practical problem it did not solve.
Tadao Ando's 21_21 Design Sight — concrete that thinks
21_21 Design Sight in Roppongi is one of my favourite buildings in Tokyo — and it is not one of the most famous, which helps. Tadao Ando designed this design exhibition space in 2007, together with the fashion designer Issey Miyake. It is almost entirely underground: from the street, you see only a low roof of Cor-ten steel emerging from the ground of the Midtown Garden. Then you go down, and the space opens up.
Ando uses concrete with a precision I have not seen elsewhere. It is not Le Corbusier's béton brut — raw, marked by the formwork, avowedly material. It is a smoothed, almost silent concrete, that does not draw attention to itself but creates a neutral field where light can move. The slits between the walls and the ceiling, the corners where light enters from above, the few materials used with extreme consistency — everything produces a space where silence is physical. It is an architecture that has learned from the Zen garden.
Prada Aoyama — Herzog & de Meuron, glass as skin
The Prada store in Aoyama — Herzog & de Meuron, 2003 — is a hexagonal prism clad in alternating convex and concave glass panels, like the cells of a honeycomb of variable geometry. It is not a transparent envelope: it is a surface that distorts, reflects, absorbs the surrounding city differently according to the angle. The goods displayed inside become visible and invisible depending on where you are outside. The boundary between interior and exterior is not the glass: it is perception.
In the Aoyama district — luxury boutiques, quiet streets, architecture commissioned by the world's most important brands — this building holds its ground. It does not shout, it does not seek attention with colour or bizarre form. It uses glass as an intelligent skin, as a membrane that filters and transforms.
Contemporary Japanese architecture and its relationship with tradition: Kengo Kuma — material and place and Toyo Ito — lightness as structure.
The city that remains
Tokyo always leaves me with the same impression: that complexity is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited. The city does not seek stylistic coherence, does not seek a unified visual identity, does not try to tell a single story. It contains everything — the seventh-century temple and the 2003 luxury store and the 1972 prefabricated capsule — without anything cancelling anything else out. Everything occupies its own space, respects its own system, works according to its own rules.
It is a lesson in urbanism that Europe struggles to accept, used as it is to the idea of the master plan, of historical coherence, of aesthetic control. Tokyo has understood — or perhaps has not even thought about it — that a living city does not need to be coherent. It needs to be useful, safe, connected. The rest is done by the people who inhabit it.