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October 10, 2003
This is urban reconstruction on a grand scale.
Some visuals and corporate descriptions can be found here.
Some comments can be found here and here.
The development rejects the sprawling low-rise density typical of the city of Tokyo. Development such as this is going to change Tokyo from a horizontal city to a vertical one.
Roppongi Hills promises to be an efficient, well-designed future--like that envisioned by the modernist American developers in the 1950s.
Update
Is this an example of Japanese modernist architecture? It does contain a vision of modernity with its rejection of the old. Does it gesture back to the early modernist avant garde programme that modern architecture contains the potential for building a new world?
Or does it work with a new sense of space and time? One in which buildings are no longer rooted in the ground but float above it? A conception of space time in which the social and political connotations have been purged along with all reference to social experiments and the revolutionary aims of modernist architecture? A conception of a synthesis of space time in which developments in architecture correspond to a deeper level of reality behind the chaotic appearances.
It is an integrating architecture that is dislodged from the old modernist European avant garde, with its manifesto of negation and destruction.
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I assume you're being ironic?