BDES1020 Continuous City <Yumeng,Zheng>

Abstract

Asakusa is a relatively traditional part of Tokyo, which includes the most popular tourism attractions-Asakusa Temple, and Kaminarimon. Tourists pouring into Tokyo are not only curious about the Japanese old face, but also looking forward to ‘lose’ themselves in the modern Japanese fashion wonderland. This was the initial reason for choosing a shopping village as the program for this proposed project. My site L16 is located on the same spot of Asakusa Station, which is regarded as the heart core of the Asakusa district seen through both commercial and social lens. Thus, an incredibly large number of people are believed to move through this area. It offers me a great opportunity to incorporate with the infrastructure of the public transportation system. Public transportation in Asakusa, consisting mainly of trains and subways, serves as intricate but efficient lifelines for the city of Tokyo. To be attached to the Asakusa station, my shopping village is to direct a considerable stream of people into the shops, which is favourable. Driven by an underlying idea, which is that urban buildings are often shapers of the space. The building shapes can be secondary to the shape of public space, which can be read from this parti diagram. I’m trying to depict a strong-minded circulation, which shapes the figures of the floor plan configuration of this ideal shopping village, by implicating its experiential and aesthetic sensibility. Beyond a place for purchase, shopping is a site for social exchange, diversion, and entertainment. In this proposed project, I’m trying to convey an idea that shopping malls start to replace the parks and squares that were traditionally the home of free speech, as a result of high-pace Tokyo lifestyle. To this extend, it seems that not only tourists, but also the Tokyo citizens need a place to roam, to sit down, and to talk, whilst shopping. That’s why varied levels of rooftop gardens and a cafe are positioned in this street corner shopping village without creating any enclosure or boundaries. An incredible array of diversity, complicity, and flexibility in the structure and behaviour becomes apparent when one experiences the shopping village in a user-friendly way. Fluidity and flexibility, connectivity and continuity are crucial in this ecological web of shopping. So the proposed shopping village project is comprised of an assemblage of differently shaped individual brand pavilions distant to one another, forming inter-relative public spaces within this site as well as specifying its circulatory veins. These separated pavilions are not restricted by pathways in between them, but connected by undulations of a continuous circulation, which rises and falls to accommodate the shops area and roof top gardens, while allowing shoppers to cross this internal landscape. This approach largely satisfies the aim of creating a sense of fullness and experiential richness, which explains the name of this shopping village: VISIONARY HILLS. The structure of these assemblage pavilions is simply constructed by a family of different thickness pillars support the floors formed by concrete in reality, which enables these shops stay in a same constructive style. By understanding the Manifestations of the Japanese Aesthetic, which is that Simplification leading to richness. I’m using a symbolic Japanese material: Timber strips in every individual pavilion’s cladding, which has shown a variation of density and length to speak a language of Japanese simplified fashion. Other materials are there to indicate the specific branded style, while not disturbing the sense of a whole. It is precisely because the whole is present in the details that the details are able to keep their distance from one another and harmonize in the form of an aggregate consisting of details alone. These approaches of structure and cladding are tightly engaged with the connectivity and continuity of a shopping environment, which might provide the shoppers with a sense Japanese Style in a coherent visual language. At the same time the existence of those traditional Japanese elements addressed the shopping village into the urban context of Asakusa, other than being isolated as an individual piece of artificial landscape.