The proposal speaks of a building in a state of flux. Flux is a dominating feature of the Japanese landscape whether rural or urban. Earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes are constantly reforming the landscape, while the buildings in the city have an average life span of only 26 years, due to the urban growth patterns. What's more, buildings in Tokyo never stand proud and solid, but they are always dressed in bright commercial advertisements that have their own short term recycling patterns.
At the moment, the volatile and immersive cityscape of Tokyo has managed to alienate people from one another leading some to an extremely lonely way of life. The Metabolist movement, while actively addressing the fluctuating condition of the culture in Japan, has perhaps enhanced the individualistic lifestyle of the nation. The capsule hotel, a typology proposed by Kirokawa, considers dwelling as the space needed for only one body and its essential functions, leaving human interaction abundant.
It is my belief that within this cultural fabric and its specificity of flux, lies the possibility of real human interaction. Through the event of transformation and the confrontation of new conditions people can be given the opportunity to interact and collaborate in order to create their new living arrangements. Via the exaggeration of this shifting landscape in the scale of a building (and with the appropriate scaling down of the timeline too), people can be pushed to work as a whole.
Community is the final objective of this project, which consists of a tower offering a few months accommodation to people in difficult times (unemployed-underemployed). It is my aspiration to do so in a Japanese manner; where destruction, a pivotal element of the culture, is often viewed as an opportunity for the creation of new bonds, in this case social.
