Introduction

Acknowledgements

Preface

One

Suspending Judgment: The Post-Industrial City Transformed

The Japanese Urban Continuum

Industrial Archipelago

The Port of Nagoya

Interchange

Enterprise Zone

Terminal

Kinjo Pier Logistics Terminal

Interface

The Bridge of Hesitation

Strategies of the Void

Workplace

Two

Generic City

The Ville Radieuse Legacy

The Radiant City in Japan

Agents of Transformation and the "Death" of Urbanism

Nagoya’s New City

Mobility vs. Proximity

The Problem of Quantity

Preeminence of the Decorated Shed

Dead Space

Defunct Strategies

The Fourth Skin

Trauma of the New Interior

Death of the Façade

Zero-Degree Architecture

The Workplace Revisited

Three

Staging Uncertainty

Vivicities

Infratecture

Unveiling the Hidden Order

The New Fringe

Cité Post-Industrielle

Wiring the City

Complex Program

Eye of the Storm

In Place of the Public?

References

introduction

"It’s time we junked those conical hats with the stars and crescent moons, and strapped on our motorcycle helmets."¹

As a way to alleviate record levels of urban congestion in Japanese cities, urban planners have developed extensive land reclamation projects in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, and other major ports. Initially planned as centers for heavy industry and distribution, these landfill sites are gaining popularity as new live/work environments. Without the geographical constraints and overwhelming density of the mainland, these zones serve as a veritable tabula rasa for new waterfront development.

The port of Nagoya offers a particularly promising site for new city planning, as it has remained largely untouched by the kind of less-than-successful new projects built in Tokyo and Osaka. However, current plans for a highly sophisticated enterprise zone complete with a new international airport, train terminals, office parks, housing blocks, and hypermarkets are characterized by the all-too-familiar imagery of the outdated Western city plan (as has already been implemented in Tokyo and Kobe).

In fact, one could generalize that large-scale development outside every major city in the world has assumed a similar homogeneous, atomized quality; and yet a substantial amount of business is now conducted outside of traditional city centers by an increasingly itinerant work force. Moreover, the nature of construction in these environments has assumed a greater scale, an increased level of complexity, and a shorter time-frame, with architects playing less of a role (if any) in the whole process.

In response to these challenges, I have attempted to develop a small, interdependent prototype for a business substation within a proposed transportation terminal in Nagoya Port as a way to consolidate the various necessary programs into a conscionable unit. Conceived as the insertion of a new kind of urbanity into this horror vacui, the BSP would be inextricably tied to - and defined by - the greater infrastructure of the site, and as such would merely be a small hot spot of activity within the nervous system of the new city. The implementation of the BSP would require that the architect become a kind of specialist, working in conjunction with planners and engineers throughout the entire process of development. Thus, the potential for the architect is to help conceive the fundamental systems that shape the new city at a tangible level (rather than providing a limited, cosmetic service toward the end of the process). In this way, the BSP provides not only an alternative work/live design model, but also a new strategy for architecture.

¹Sterling, Bruce, from Foreword in Wieners, Brad and Pescovitz, David, Reality Check (San Francisco: Hardwired, 1996)

Images: 1. Infratecture

A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell.

Copyright © 1998 by Blaine Brownell. All rights reserved.