thoughts on the Tokyo Fashion Town building
This building is one of my favourites in the whole Odaiba area. It looks like some kind of freighter spaceship straight out of an 80s Science Fiction film. When I walk past or through it, especially at night, I feel like I'm in the original Ghost in the Shell movie.
The Tokyo Fashion Town building (TFT building for short) was designed by famous architect Kenzo Tange and completed in 1996. It's right next to Tokyo Big Sight, and I usually visit it when I return from an event there.
Aside from the style of the architecture in general, another aspect that I find fascinating is its name, or rather its original intended purpose and how it clashes with the architecture. In the early 90s, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI, then under a different name) drafted up something called the "Tokyo Fashion Town Plan", which aimed to use fashion as a vehicle to open up new markets for the Japanese textile industry. The center of that initiative in the Tokyo area was determined to be Ariake (the location of the TFT building and its surroundings).
That's nice and all, but ... who then went ahead and signed off on the plans for this building? I mean, who looked at this "evil corporation from Blade Runner" ass design and thought "yeah, that's where fashion happens"?! (By the way, it's now used as a generic office building with a small integrated mall, which is a much better fit.)
Part of the reason for why this design went through was probably that at this point in time, Tange was already a world-renowned architect and no one had the guts (or political standing) to go up to him and say "actually, I think we should do it differently." I've done some digging on the Odaiba / Tokyo Waterfront City and its development starting in the late 80s, and apparently some of the people involved really didn't like what Tange was doing. But he was the big guy, and friends with the people in the prefectural government, so "it couldn't be helped" (to quote a typical Japanese phrase).
But I don't think that's all there is to it. Because to a certain degree, the whole Odaiba area has this weird "doesn't quite fit" vibe. The Tokyo Waterfront City, and especially the areas now colloquially called Odaiba (the old "Landfill No.13" consisting of Odaiba proper and Aomi, plus Ariake) started to be developed in the late 80s as a kind of city of the future. All these silvery-gray buildings based on simple geometric shapes (cuboids, trapezoid prisms, pyramids, spheres and combinations thereof) were not only how Tange, but the decision-makers at the time and maybe even the wider populace imagined the future to look like. But then the Bubble burst, everything had to be scaled back, and it turned out that things wouldn't be quite like that.
In a way, Odaiba is like a real existing versions of those illustrations in old magazines claiming that humans would be living on the moon in 2000, traveling around the lunar cities in their personal flying cars. That's why Odaiba is so fascinating to me. It has the retro-futurism, coupled with the subtle, sad tinge of shattered utopian visions that were never going to work out anyway and had to stay dreams (in some cases, for the better).