Articles | Features

Broadway…Bigness for the Masses!

By Darryl Wee on February 13, 2008

Metabolism started in Tokyo in the sixties, coinciding roughly with the activities of other experimental and theoretical urban cell-groups, like Archigram and its “plug-in city” projects. The Metabolists rejected orderly town-square layouts, claiming that they were poorly adapted to the reality of mass housing pressures and dwindling space in downtown areas. In postwar Tokyo, reconstruction and unprecedented urban growth, together with pre-Olympic infrastructural improvement and a newfound consciousness of design and planning issues - Japan hosted the World Design Conference in 1960 - all prompted the Metabolists to work out how to cope with a rapidly densifying city.

Metabolism’s heritage was Modernist, but had little patience for pure aesthetic reflections on space, light, and transparency; the self-contained detached Miesian glass box was an indulgence, and even Corbusian public housing was something built to the scale of a moderately dense French port city (Marseille). Too settled, too single-noted, and ill-equipped for Tokyo’s monstrous proportions.

Perhaps what was needed was a certain Dis-unity of habitation, expanding on the utopian promises of Modernism without too much of its hygienic order.

In trying to respond to the particular demands of 60’s Tokyo, Kikutake Kiyonori, one of the founding Metabolists, made ambitious proposals for modular capsule structures snaking wildly over existing buildings, towering over traditional low-rise residential neighborhoods. On paper, they looked like a modern reworking of Piranesi with the same sort of Gothic splendor. Height and vertical building extensions were key. Apartment towers that pranced like DNA helixes spiralling out of control.

They were awesome propositions, but of course most of them were bluntly rejected by the relevant authorities.

Metabolism promised to be ad-hoc and spontaneous. It proposed an organic, contagious movement of cities and their buildings that were a metaphor for runaway economic and demographic growth, growing fungus-like to match demand and circumstance. Instead, it ran up against walls of building codes, sunlight ratio and height restrictions.

The original manifesto was typically overambitious, as manifestoes are prone to being. Although not much of it got realized in Japan, Metabolism found favor far from its original intent and context. When Kisho Kurokawa visited Singapore in the 1960s, marvelling at People’s Park Complex, William Lim’s Golden Mile Complex and Paul Rudolph’s Concourse, he found himself in the awkwardly pleased position of an originator whose disciples had run away with the scripture and freestyled with it.

Back home in Tokyo, an early pioneer of the mixed-use Metabolist highrise was the Broadway complex in Nakano, three stops and five minutes by train west of Shinjuku. Completed in 1961 by Miyada Keizaburo, it had one storey below ground and ten above. Miyada had studied in Washington and been impressed by the shopping malls, apartments and supermarkets of postwar America, and when he returned to Tokyo decided to incorporate these modern comforts into “mansions” (which actually means “condominiums” in Japanese English). These equipped cells for modern living were never more than a short walk away from amenities and “connectors” like public corridors, atria, and plazas for dawdling and gossiping with one’s neighbors.

Broadway housed restaurants, fish markets, clothing stores, rooftop gardens, an outdoor pool and a golf range. Whereas what Miyada saw in Washington was a horizontal spread of urban amenities spaced with greenery, traffic routes and pathways, Broadway flipped those dimensions sideways and reproportioned them to fit the narrow scale of the vertical city-complex.

Broadway is still possessed of that time-warp charm, marooned in the sixties with its linoleum floors, Formica countertops, fluorescent tube lights, and distinctly claustrophobic corridors, bracing shoppers with the smell of mouldering merchandise. It even has glaring design defects that make it hell to navigate but which everyone’s come to love anyway - from the ground level shopping street, Sun Plaza, you are whisked urgently up to the third floor; and then, as required: up one flight of stairs to the fourth, or down one flight to the second floor.

The weekend mobs are more like Kowloon than Omotesando. Families throng the basement food halls and huddle in hawker concession booths for greasy octopus balls, soft serve ice cream, barrels overflowing with pungent pickles and dessicated fishes.

Something like how Singapore’s Golden Mile Complex turned - and some would say, degenerated - from an avant-garde drawing-board scheme into a noisy ethnic supermarket and congregating grounds for the Thai expat population, Broadway’s messiness proves the accidental genius of “Metabolic” development, thriving long and clamorously, far from the blueprint of its original conception. When first completed, Broadway was a coveted address for media personalities and other celebrities, a kind of proto Roppongi Hills. These days, its reputation is quite different, and it attracts quite a different demographic. After Akihabara, Nakano has become Tokyo’s second most important concentration of manga-related merchandise.

Architects are guilty of this betrayal: they wish only good things for the “civitas” of our public spaces, trying to encourage humane interactions in places we can proudly call “commons,” but whose vision of the public is this? Certainly not the public’s. Left to sprout and flower by itself, Broadway acquired a vitality beyond any reasonable original expectations, a classic exercise in hands-off dirty populism, left to languish or flourish according to use value. Golden Mile did the same, but just like with so many other unscripted functions in scripted Singapore, the men holding the blueprints are itching for a rewrite.

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