"This project is located in an urban renewal district in the midst of a group of high-rise buildings. Our concept was to bury as many of the demanding program elements as possible underground to create a complex that would compliment the adjacent Shonandai Park ... The above ground massing consists of a grouping of symbolic forms. The civic theater takes on the form of a sphere (representing the primordial creativity of primitive outdoor performance spaces under the modern, artificial sky)... A forest-like line of small hut forms, whose rooftops open like blooming flowers, surrounds a hard-surfaced central plaza." - Itsuko Hasegawa: Selected and Current Works
This blog is not a part of the travel blog canon, i'm taking a journey back into design criticism to provide a neutral photographic account of this obscenely eccentric post-modern building.
I'm very surprised that this building isn't more famous. Perhaps Japan is loaded with secrets like this, but this seems to be more highly eclectic, if not pioneering, than anything of common notice in Europe. My review of the postmodern pionner Les Espaces d'Abraxas is a scathing account of my current opinions on these kind of structures, but this year is about learning and reflection and it is not my ambition to meander back into manifesto making.
Having said that though, it is a very shocking and visceral building and certainly something that provokes architectural discussion. It's contents, a Civic Administration office, a theatre, planetarium and a children's museum, and its focus on craft materials, give it ethics points, which means it isn't the same kind of socio-polical easy target like the LVMH Foundation building. But we are already seeing signs, a mere 26 years after it's completion, of surface maintenance issues, something this large and complex is less than immune from, not to mention it's stylistic irrelevancy.
Buildings are not clothes.