City as Museum in Motion: Edo in Tokyo

With the new Architecture Park, Jinhua now has its own outdoor gallery of starchitect commissions. Just like how Design has become marketed as recreation and lifestyle in a way that art once was, this may be architecture’s terminal fate: folly-parks for curated leisure.

For now, though, while China busies itself with new civic buildings and landmarks to grace its showcase cities with, Japan has stuck with a less fanfarish approach to the notion of an architecture “theme park”. In an obscure but green suburb of Tokyo, there is an artificial city that is postmodern in its conception (buildings from different eras sharing one space; history compressed into an afternoon’s excursion), but old-fashioned in its individual parts. The Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum is next to Koganei Park, a generous space with meandering cycle paths, picnic grounds, and a now-defunct locomotive service whose tracks and station platforms have been lovingly retained as a nostalgia monument behind latched gates.

You walk through the gates - although the demarcation betwen the “regular” Koganei Park and the “themed” one isn’t clear - and marvel at a 1920s cosmetics store with a stonewashed facade and Ionic columns carved out of its surface, a public bath with handpainted landscape murals on mosaic tile and original hand-dyed noren (flappy curtain-like drapes at the entrance), an Art Deco photo studio, Taisho period (1912-1926) western homes with heavy oak and mahogany furniture, late Meiji (1868-1912) farmhouses with thatched straw roofs, sagging eaves and a simulation brazier.

The Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum treads that treacherous line between respectful preservation and joke museumification. It’s like Siena or Paris, cursed with the brittle charm of intact history. The residents are publicly proud to live in an ancient tenement wearing its stains gracefully, but in secret they will tell you what a terrible drag it is to have to deal with creaky staircases, sagging plaster from the ceiling, the seasonal moulting of the paintwork.

Koganei’s mini Edo inherits this tradition of the museum city, without the pesky residents who actually live there. The actual preservation of the buildings in situ was passed over at first, but following their demolition, Japan began to make its peace with reckless development. Exhuming all its defunct native architecture at one stroke, Koganei reassembled it into a Legoland for posterity. As opposed to Singapore’s facade treatment and adaptive reuse, Koganei decided it would not foist modernity on its pre-modern hardware. Little Edo accords history the respect it is believed to deserve by removing it entirely from the context of our everyday lives. Architecture becomes venerable only when it is dead.

Architecture has this additional irony - it either becomes its own self-iconic exhibit, or is forced to disappear completely. Unlike most fine art, which survives being stuffed into a museum, architecture is intensively localized and essentially unmoveable. Once dismantled, it has not much of an elsewhere to be.

Except, of course, in this sort of theme park setting, where it testifies to its own demise by archiving itself, in the nowhere and no-context of an “architectural museum”. Refurbished with period furniture, tools, and the other clutter of daily routines, the architectural museum disguises its fradulence by branding itself a “real” simulation, of life as it authentically was back then. Accusations of kitsch are effectively negated, because architecture claims that it has no other chance to recirculate, except as an archive.

So there is this stage-set quality to much of the park - except that without the cast and crew hanging around, you actually manage to feel the time slip away and around you as you walk around. The eastern side of the park, for example, is a restaging of mercantile Edo, except with more generously spaced buildings (by some accounts, downtown Edo was the densest settlement in human history). Suddenly, you cross over into the Meiji “zone” where you can wander into 120 year-old machiya (townhouses) and various provision shops. Further along, you find yourself shuttled back to Showa times (1926-1989), with its characteristic kanban kenchiku (”signboard architecture”) and angular shophouses (not unlike the Malayan Chinatown-colonial sort, with their narrow frontage, two- and three-storey construction, and Art Deco facade treatments). The city is constructed so that the visitor can saunter through a century of architectural history within the space of an afternoon excursion.

Admirable as it is, aren’t many of our supposedly living cities themselves architectural museums (if not theme parks)? They are archives-in-progress, haphazard accumulations of buildings from different eras, each out of phase with the other.

Maybe Tokyo is different. Relentlessly renewed for the past sixty years, the city’s architectural archive has been extracted from the living and re-zoned here. Who would’ve known that Tokyo’s hoary old buildings would have ended up reunited in this quiet suburb, washed up next to some railway tracks in a no-zone.

Photos: Justin Lau

Darryl is a translator in Japan and has a deep love for the built environment.