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TOKYO!
Posted by: David Keech on 31st Oct 2007 in Opinion
Some call it a designer's paradise. I'm not going to argue. To be in this city is inspiring, bewildering, unnerving. Especially when those buildings start a-rockin'
The city is alive in a way that few other cities are. Architecture and street culture seem to evolve and mutate before your very eyes. Sitting on a balcony high up on the side of the sparklingly new Tokyo Midtown tower, eating a petite yet highly authentic version of a Brick Lane curry, whilst gazing down at ping pong-playing office workers and expensive looking civic sculpture, I could only think of one word: Utopia.
If Utopia is an imagined state or place where all is perfection then surely this new Tokyo development is close. But it's not the perfection part, it's the imagined part that comes to the fore. The traffic is there, but it moves silently without the honk of horn. People certainly throng, but a shout would be unusual. After a while you might start to yearn for a bit of good old dystopia.
And then you find yourself crazily high up in a tower hotel room, looking out over the nocturnal panorama at those blinking red lights that adorn the tops of all the skyscrapers. It's clear that they are navigation lights - waiting for the day that the population travels around in airborne hover vehicles just as Huxley predicted in Brave New World.
Posted by: David Keech on 31st Oct 2007 in Opinion
Some call it a designer's paradise. I'm not going to argue. To be in this city is inspiring, bewildering, unnerving. Especially when those buildings start a-rockin'
The city is alive in a way that few other cities are. Architecture and street culture seem to evolve and mutate before your very eyes. Sitting on a balcony high up on the side of the sparklingly new Tokyo Midtown tower, eating a petite yet highly authentic version of a Brick Lane curry, whilst gazing down at ping pong-playing office workers and expensive looking civic sculpture, I could only think of one word: Utopia.
If Utopia is an imagined state or place where all is perfection then surely this new Tokyo development is close. But it's not the perfection part, it's the imagined part that comes to the fore. The traffic is there, but it moves silently without the honk of horn. People certainly throng, but a shout would be unusual. After a while you might start to yearn for a bit of good old dystopia.
And then you find yourself crazily high up in a tower hotel room, looking out over the nocturnal panorama at those blinking red lights that adorn the tops of all the skyscrapers. It's clear that they are navigation lights - waiting for the day that the population travels around in airborne hover vehicles just as Huxley predicted in Brave New World.
