This is a competition proposal from 1986, done in collaboration with colleague and classmate Toshikazu Ishida. The site is the Spain Zaka area of Shibuya in Tokyo. Inspired and challenged by the rapid and destabilizing real-estate development in Shibuya during the peak of the bubble period, we decided to embrace ahistoricity and non-contextuality. At the same time we decided that the existing urban mass onsite was somehow worth preserving, if partially, to be used as a literal foundation for proposed new structures. Two radically different approaches were allowed to coexist as a left-right pair. My proposal was to make new building plots on top of the existing buildings and allow homes, schools, and other structures to emerge organically. Ishida developed an extreme urban privacy using an industrial/modern vocabulary.
AZBY BROWN ARCHIVE