Fluid Permanence: A Shotengai-Archive in Tokyo

Abstract

Today Tokyo stands as a “brand new city”. Buildings are regularly uprooted to make way for new buildings that completely wipe out traces of the previous structure. The idea of a propelling monument, as described by Aldo Rossi in Architecture of the City, is the means by which we can begin to rethink architecture’s relationship to time and history. This thesis questions the notion of linear time and deals with concepts of adaptation and modification. It explores propelling permanence that provides a past that can still be experienced and is attached with the present everyday reality. It asks the question: How can we construct an architecture that allows us to explore the intersection of past and present and to rethink the notion of active history? Can public space be repositories of collective memory and achieve propelling permanence in a city that is constantly changing? This thesis contains a plurality of functions in dialogue, bringing the informal next to the formal, the institution next to the everyday, and extending its influence beyond its architectural footprint to the larger urban context. The juxtaposition of two programs—the archive and the shotengai, and the crossing of the new with the existing construct an architecture that preserves, presents, and promotes historical and cultural resources without fossilizing them in time. The past and future are captured here in the present moment.