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 ...

Maybe your image of Tokyo coincides with one of two stereotypes, both mistaken. 1. Old, thatched and wooden dwellings with 'partitioned' space created by sliding screens and modular tatami mats; or 2. A fantastic mess of soaring and colliding ...

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 ...

Tokyo was pretty when it was uglier.

East Tokyo, around the Sumida River and Tokyo Bay, is where throngs of men in suits gather in packs on weekday evenings, for after-work drinking sessions at Tokyo’s izakaya (essentially pubs with better food). There isn’t much else to do in this part of the city. People work, and get fed and watered after they’re done. It’s a two-sided economy. Meanwhile, across town in West Tokyo, there is a creative ghetto, centered in what some people still call the ‘high city’. It’s a corridor of fairly gentrified areas like Harajuku, Shibuya and Ebisu. There are cafes, design studios, and boutiques strewn up and down the Yamanote Line that connects these towns. Some of Tokyo’s more brazen and plasticky architecture, the fantastic concrete and cyberpunk towers that emerged out of a string of foreign commissions from the Bubble Eighties, mostly got built in the west of the city.