Decaying but beloved, Tokyo’s Capsule Tower faces uncertain future | Hacker News Reader

Decaying but beloved, Tokyo’s Capsule Tower faces uncertain future

theguardian.com

89 pointsvijayr0275 comments

Here's a recent video with a peek inside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SwvtBxxp2w

>But almost half a century on, time has caught up with the structure

My heart will always have a softspot for metabolist architecture and their stupendous vision of the future, but always seemed like a maintenance nightmare, even on paper. 50 years isn't a long time.

I love Tokyo and can't wait to go back. In the meantime, the Norra Tornen (northern towers) in Stockholm is pretty much complete and shares some resemblance :) Had our previous office closeby so was fun seeing them take shape during construction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norra_Tornen

>“Europeans understand the need to preserve buildings like this, whereas Japan is still guided by a pull-down-and-rebuild mentality,” says Maeda

It's actually incredibly admirable that affordable, modern housing is regularly built in one of the world's largest cities. Contrast this to the biggest American and European cities, where housing supply stagnation is the norm in service of promoting "neighborhood character" to demonstrably racist ends.

I think the issue is more subtle than this, and I would also not put European cities in the same bucket as North American ones.

In North American cities, there's a clear low density issue at play. Most of the previously dense urban cores were completely hollowed out to make room for roads, highways or parking lots. One can argue that the current reluctance to the pulling down and rebuild mindset is a direct consequence of the misguided development policies of the post war era. So much damage was done—and continues to be done—that people get very cynical of large scale development/infrastructure projects.

Whereas big European cities like Paris are very dense already. Maybe we could make them even denser, but I think at some point you start getting into negative return territory. I'd personally hate to see a bunch of magnificent 7 floors Parisian buildings getting torn down just to build sky scrapers. (Note: Sky scrapers are cool—but I don't think they are a scalable solution to housing, and by nature tend to require big developer involvement with political connections which then lead to perverse incentives—my personal preference would be to have a lot of smaller developers working on a lot of medium density projects, rather than very tiny number of big developers with very large pockets working on very few projects).

The focus should instead be on bringing areas surrounding the old city limits to the same level of density than the city proper—which is actually starting to happen in Western Europe now that we're starting to roll back some of the car centric policies of the past.

European cities that are not Paris do indeed have some density issues. It's nothing like the North American shit show, of course, but it still shows an issue.

Fine if you want to keep your historic downtown, but you should build a modern dense "La Défense".

UK fails, Anglosphere housing shortage issues too. London is not dense enough and has no strong CBD proportional to its size.

Germany fails, as Berlin should be bigger than Paris if it weren't for WWII and the division. Germany is full of bad austerity and the "polycentricity" is simply a failure to catch up after development was interrupted. (Consider if they properly developed Berlin maybe there would be fewer AFD issues in the former East.)

Not sure what the situation is with Milan.

I know La Defense well and I don't think this is the solution. La Defense is not dense from a housing perspective. And it was built with a car-centric mindset. The Esplanade itself is public transport friendly (thank god) but the surrounding area is a shit show. Thankfully most of the recent developments in the area are trying to reverse past decisions, but it's hard.

Also, it's obviously very subjective, but to me La Defense is an ugly concrete jungle and not a nice place to live. Fundamentally, my core issue with la Defense is that it was centrally designed and planned with an Ivory Tower type of thinking.

Today, we recognize the design was deeply flawed. But for some reason, we think we can play the same game again and design a new place from scratch and not make awful mistakes.

I'd much rather see us grow existing cities and areas organically, making them progressively denser, rather than pursuing more of these big money-type projects that don't end up creating places people want to live in.

I don't disagree with those specifics, but fundamentally marjor cities need dense high rise focal points.

We should have less ugly architecture, and certainly not car-oriented development, but I will take ugly concrete density over no density.

> “Europeans understand the need to preserve buildings like this, whereas Japan is still guided by a pull-down-and-rebuild mentality,” says Maeda

Mr Maeda has a direct financial incentive to the financial preservation of this building.

I don’t see what’s wrong with the pull down and rebuild mentality. We can appreciate and admire something’s aesthetic qualities, but it doesn’t mean it has to last forever. Atleast to the Japanese and Buddhist nihilism, everything is impermanent anyways. Why try to preserve a fleeting cherry blossom or autumn leaves, when it’s meant to be appreciated in the moment.

The autumn leaves or cherry blossoms come every season on their own. I guess it would probably be surprising to most Japanese people to learn they have no interest in attempting to preserve their history.

There has to be some middle ground between building no housing and bulldozing your historical patrimony to build an aquarium for the benefit of Chinese tourists.

> affordable

That’s sort of debatable. It’s certainly possible to buy houses, but that’s mostly due to the incredibly low interest rate.

Old houses that used to have a small sized garden are torn down and replaced with two or three much smaller houses filling the entire plot.

It’s nice that there is enough housing available, but the character of the city is definitely changing.

People can’t live in “character.”

In Japan there no law stopping racial discrimination by landlords, so they don't need to hide it behind any urban planning laws. Meanwhile the lack of caring about neighborhood characteristics means the affordable housing is pretty bleak to actually inhabit.

There absolutely is a law preventing racial discrimination by landlord.

Reference? As far as I’m aware there’s nothing explicit and despite prospective tenants regularly (anecdotally, the majority of landlords) getting rejected explicitly based on nationality/ethnicity, there has been exactly 0 consequences so far.

(I’d love to be proven wrong but my understanding is at the very least it’s murky and has never been tried in court)

It has been tried in court [0], at least for discrimination against foreigners. However, nobody really want to take the landlord to court, and moreover, you don't want to live in the housing that the landlord specifically don't want you. So while everyone let it slips, it's actually illegal and there is an existing cases.

0: https://invest-online.jp/qanda/qanda-trouble-32-16916/ among other reference you can Google using the keyword in that article.

Thanks for pointing that out. Still it doesn't actually stop anyone from discriminating.

It would be interesting and worthwhile to expire the architectural features that led the residents to develop a sense of community. Was it just the iconic nature of the structure? Was it the way that the common spaces work? The very constrained space?

Seems like valuable knowledge.

Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27299363

Might as well take a look at Habitat 67, Montreal, Canada

That seems like quite different design / construction ?

Drop City and Los Angeles, while we're at it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com