Last week I chanced upon a candle lantern festival at the Ebisu Garden Place. We observed many college-age people in black t-shirts mysteriously setting it up in the daytime. They carefully placed colorful lanterns in various patterns. Continue reading
Cassina IXC
There’s a furniture store on the first floor of the building where I work out. They have designer furniture from the greats like LeCorbusier and Mackintosh. It’s like a museum actually. The cool thing about this store is that it has a café inside. So you can sit on $11,000 chairs and eat Vietnamese noodles and sip very strong iced coffee, served by silent black-clad waiters. I never entered before because it looks expensive and well, pretentious. But actually 1,000 yen will get you a very tidy meal, al dente. For directions click here.
There’s the usual pampered young Shibuya housewives with their ignored kids dressed in designer garb. And there are always groups of what looks to me like designers of some sort. They are dressed in dark clothes, wear ironically chunky glasses, and their haircuts are sculpted into well-placed disarray. And they always have at least one open laptop and some very important papers scattered about their tables.
Still, it’s a totally chill atmosphere. It’s never crowded, never noisy. There’s not even any piped-in music. The only sounds are the sounds of self-important chatter and the street noise outside. But it’s all absorbed nicely by the furniture.
I sat on the long counter, soaking in the first pleasant day of autumn. Scribbling in my notebook and then spacing out at the minimalist flower arrangement in front of me.
Recommended Company: your friends in ‘design’ and architecture to smirk at the latest fads.
Suggested Reading: biographies of mid-century modernists.
Likely Activities: sketching perfect curves and concocting self-referential parodies.
Photo from the Cassina website, until I can take a decent picture of the place. Click on the picture for the source.
On one of my breaks I wandered around Meguro station and stumbled across a row of building facades that resembled a New York tenement, and then a Paris row house. It was cool and unexpected, snuggled up against a run-down dress-making school, over the rumbling Yamanote Line.
I entered and found three floors of mostly furniture, every kind of furniture. There was furniture you might find in an antique store, an Ivy League library, a chic hippie café, or in a dusty attic.
Aside from the furniture, there’s every kind of household paraphernalia you might find in a typical American garage sale. I saw everything from gumball machines to surfboards to books organized by cover color.
The business is separated into two themes housed in the two main buildings. Ease New York houses Americana, and Ease Paris has all things European.
It’s just a crazy jumble of everything and nothing has a price tag. And that’s because nothing there is for sale. I was approached eventually by one of the casually dressed employees who started chattering away in Japanese. When I explained I didn’t speak Japanese, he proceeded to speak Japanese anyway but more slowly. What I understood was that everything there is for rent only. Most of their customers were photographers for magazines and ad companies who needed access to a variety of things that would be difficult to get and expensive to buy, especially since it’d be used only once.
I realized that even the building facades could be used in photo shoots. They could be customized, repainted or fitted with different doors as needed. There was even a charming little provencal garden between the two buildings.
I enjoyed nostalgically perusing all the things that reminded me of home, common to me but completely exotic in the heart of Tokyo. Foosball tables, nerf balls, banana skateboards, big wheels, and bean bags. It was all there. And for a furniture design fetishist, it’s hours of museum-quality exploring. For more pictures click here.
Directions: From Meguro Station, it’s a 3 minute walk. After exiting the station, go to the Atre 2 building. Go down the little street to the building’s right for a few minutes. It’s on the right.
Before the Japanese emperor regained control of Japan in the mid-19th century, the Shogun exerted control over the warlords through a variety of means. The most important way was to require his lords and their families to live in Tokyo. This allowed the Shogun to keep an eye on them, keep their families hostage, and make them spend a lot of their resources keeping two households while traveling back and forth.
What’s this got to do with the museum I’m about to review? The Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum is located in Shirokane, the neighborhood where many of those lords lived. The museum itself is housed in the former Prince Asaka’s mansion, a lovely and inspired use of an historical building. Completed in 1933, the house is truly an art deco masterpiece. There are murals by Henri Rapin on the walls, gorgeous glass reliefs by Rene Lalique, decorative ironwork by Raymond Subes, and sculptures by Leon Blanchot, among others. It’s a spectacular venue. Every so often, the museum has a special exhibition of the mansion itself, opening all the rooms to the public.
Architectural Photography
Most of the time, however, the main rooms of the mansion serve as galleries for other exhibits. The current exhibit is Remembrance of Places Past: Japanese Architectural Photography from the 19th to the 21st Century. This is an exhibit of Japanese photographers who’ve photographed architecture and western photographers who have photographed Japanese buildings.
Highlights include:
The ticket price includes the sprawling garden which has nice sculptures, plenty of places to sit and relax, a pond, and a teahouse.
And of course, what about the café? Café Sahsya Kanetanaka has big tables by the gift shop. It has the usual over-priced coffee, but this is offset by the stuffed leather chairs that were so comfy that the old man sitting at the next table was asleep. Later a young couple sat down at the table next to him and they also joined in the slumber.
The exhibit runs through the end of the month and is free with the Grutt Pass.
I like to look at the big picture. And that’s why I love a great view. When I’m hiking I find myself gravitating towards the highest point in the area, whether it’s a peak or a ridge. It’s the same in cities. I look at a tall imposing building and I want to see what the view is like from there.
So the other day I made an overdue trek to what was (until last year) the tallest building in Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, designed by Kenzo Tange. I’ll just call it the Tokyo Met. For years, since I first moved to Tokyo, the Tokyo Met was on my list of places to visit. It was the tallest building and it was free to get up there. Whenever I had some extra time in Shinjuku, where the building is located, I’d make a casual effort to try to find it. But I’d always run out of time or just got lost in the maze of streets that make up Tokyo. None of my Japanese friends were interested in taking me there.
Finally I strategized, found out which of the gazillion exits I had to leave from Shinjuku Station and then charted out a route. It couldn’t be that hard to find the tallest building in the area and it really wasn’t. It’s pretty much a straight shot out of the station.
Pho Break
Of course, it’s the journey that’s interesting, not so much the end destination. And on the way I stopped off for lunch at a chic little eatery with Southeast Asian cuisine. Sorry forgot the name. It had the obligatory GQ head waiter with the tarento smile, and that all important drink bar. The neighborhood is all business. Black suits and company name tags hung from everyone’s neck. But in the restaurant I only saw young women, perhaps job-hunting, reading little anonymous books. In short, I was completely out of place. But the food was good and reasonable.
The Ripe Peach Building
This area is the heart of the skyscraper district, and there were many interesting buildings around. One building stood out. It was still under construction but it looked like a terrible copy of the London Egg, with criss-crossing bands of gauze. But then I read the building description and found that it’s a future fashion and art design school. So the gauze made sense. I also liked the way the building is split open in the middle like a ripe peach.
The Peak
The Tokyo Met is a pair of towers that form a semi-circle around an expansive plaza lined with sculptures. I really liked the one that I call the Tree of Knowledge. And I liked the big open space of the plaza itself. It’s a shame though because there is no life there. No natural pedestrian traffic to really make it the kind of public gathering place where protests and celebrations and people watching can happen. There was nobody there except for one quasi-homeless person napping under one of the sculptures and some stray people hurriedly walking across the emptiness.
As I mentioned, getting to the observation deck of the building is free. It took about a minute on the elevator. You can go up the north or the south tower. I went up both, and the south tower is definitely the more interesting of the two. Because there were so many tall buildings nearby there wasn’t the feeling of being truly airborne like from Roppongi Hills. But you also don’t have to pay 1,000 yen either. The south tower had a very reasonable restaurant/café, and the north tower had a pretentious-looking restaurant/bar, but it too was reasonably priced.
On the day I was there the view was hazy, but I could still see faint outlines of distant mountains. Overall, I recommend going there because the whole complex and the interiors are designed in the art deco style, which I love. The art deco-ness is tempered with clean lines to make it more contemporary. It’s a beautiful building. Around the building, the area is lacking in vitality and general interest outside of architecture. So if you’re not a building or view fetishist like me, you’re better off in livelier neighborhoods.
