XL TRAVELOGUES, XS MANIFESTOS: MEDITATIONS ON THE CONTEMPORARY CITY.
2018
The studio performs passages between two fundamental extremes: XL and XS. The first refers to the city itself: “a supreme attempt” of the Japanese, in the words of Robert Park, “to reshape the world according to their own heart desires”. XL is a perplexing accumulation of content, a mosaic in an incessant need for analysis. The second exploits the possibilities of smallness as a folly, a house, a pavilion, a model, a furniture, or a minimal object. XS is amongst the most productive fields of exploration in the Japanese building context. Like a ‘micro-narrative’, XS is opinionated and calculated.
Our XL is taking an excavated land, from the tunnel of ‘Yamate Dori’ road in Tokyo, and to reclaim it. This amount of 13,000,000 cube meters of land will be used to create an artificial mountain in the middle of Tokyo. Our idea is to take the natural ground that is below the horizon, and to place it above the horizon, an artificial act in a shape of a real mountain. We decided to determine the heights of the mountain by understanding the two extreme points of the city. The deepest place is ‘Roppongi’ station- 42 meter under ground, and the highest place is Tokyo’s ‘Sky tree’- 634 meter above ground. These will be the heights of the lowest and the highest points of the mountain. in that way, the mountain will have two summits. By this action we are reshaping the skyline of the city. Our location is ‘Yoyogi park’. This park was relevant because of its size, and the fact that it is also an artificial forest. We took the actual geological stratas of the ground that is made of several types of - clay, sand and gravel, and sculptured them to the shape of our mountain. In that way we took a land that is about one billion years old, and shaped it into a 10 years old excavated mountain. We created inside our mountain, a system of sensors in a cone shape to measure earth’s movement, and prevent earthquakes- a rational mountain inside an irrational mountain.
In our xs, we did two actions- one is creating an empty cubical squares, and making them into caves inside our mountain, and the other is creating mountains from the excavated ground of the caves, and placing them around the city. The caves are created by subtraction from the existing material, in contrary to the mountains that were created by adding and framing. What guided us in creating our xs was to have an interesting relationship between natural and artificial, as we did in creating our mountain.
Led by: Dr. Erez Golani Solomon, Prof. Keigo Kobayashi and Eliran Mishal