There is a moment on the highway between Narita Airport and Tokyo, when the road banks to the left, and you are elevated, floating above the bustling streets at dusk. You travel past apartment buildings, their fireproof metal panels beginning to fade with time, and clothes strung from lines creating a new, ever-changing mesh work facade. You travel past massive sporting complexes, their over-sized geometry creating wonder and mimicking the dance of bodies and equipment within. And you travel past sleek, glass office towers – even at this time of day, lit from within, the throng of well-dressed bodies moving around like ants in a child’s plastic farm.
At this moment, looking to my left across a perfectly green and manicured corporate garden, noticing how active the building looks, I simultaneously notice the second layer of activity: the Tokyo street below me, which I had almost ironically forgot existed. Then comes the third layer: the very elevated street I’m traveling on. As the journey continues through Tokyo, over the bay, through Chiyoda Ward, and out through the slowly shrinking buildings towards Kawasaki, it becomes obvious that although the size of the buildings decrease, the vitality of the city streets do not. Ward after ward, neighborhood after neighborhood, life thrives in this city. It matters not if its a weekday or weekend, winter or summer, 2pm or 9pm. People exist, people move, people live all around you, and it is this vitality that makes Tokyo, or any city, truly successful.
Having spent a good deal of time in four large cities in my life: Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. I have to admit that unfortunately, Chicago is the only one which does not posess this type of vitality. But recalling my time in Tokyo, L.A. and New York, my heart begins to beat faster, and the human in me (not the architect in me) wants to take it all in and live.
Tokyo’s is so obvious that one is almost knocked unconscious by it. New York’s is similar, although it certainly has more hot and cold moments. However, when you catch New York in one of its hot moments, when the weather is right and EVERYONE knows it and are taking advantage of it, it is truly magical. The street food, the constant ground-level retail, the labyrinth of underground secret passageways known as the MTA. This city is truly a living, breathing creature.
Los Angeles’ vitality exists in its underbelly. Los Angeles’ working class and imigrant population is its most powerful entity, and one that has truly overtaken it. Its this working class that gets completely overshadowed by the bright, plastic lights of Hollywood and Rodeo Drive. Visitors to Los Angeles often wonder how an entire city can survive only by the entertainment industry – as if there is no other industry in the city besides what gets magically beamed to their television sets every evening. But this working class is what gives Los Angeles its “buzz.” There is a dull hum to the city – an obscuring veil – which continuously informs you that while you are currently breathing its [sometimes thick and orange-brown] air, none of it really belongs to you and you are truly only one small part in a vast show that’s being performed behind the cameras and off the stage sets.
We all coexist on this Earth, in locations of varying shape, type, and density. Architecture, urban design, landscape: these are all simply means of ordering how we interact with one another. Without feeling like a small part to a larger whole, this life would be stagnant and lonely. I wish to celebrate the places on this Earth that make me feel like a human, by making the swarms of other humans around me a bit more sublime.
