Fukuoka: Design City

The NY Times has a great article about architecture in Fukuoka, which is just another reason to go there. I've already heard good things about the yatais (food stalls) and shochu (locally made potato liquor). I haven't been anywhere new in Japan this year and it's one of my goals to travel in Japan more. I don't see myself going any time soon, since I just got back from the Philippines and actually have to start to working tomorrow. But the article makes me want to go soon though:

In the early part of the last century, Frank Lloyd Wright traveled to Japan, where he designed a series of signature buildings: a regal Tokyo hotel as grand as an emperors palace; a remote hilltop villa in Kansai; and a girls school in a Tokyo suburb that seems monastic in its austere beauty.

Wright was perhaps the first superstar architect of the West to build in Japan, and one of many Western architects to have gone east to find fame and fortune. In the 80s and early 90s Japans boom period this stream of Western architects became a river. The countrys extraordinary prosperity meant that businessmen had enough cash to commission anyone in the world to build their dreams.

Perhaps nowhere in Japan was the fascination with Western architecture more pronounced than in Fukuoka, a provincial capital in remote Kyushu province. Nearly every time one of a core group of developers there broke ground, they hired a big gun of the architecture world. And so Fukuoka is now both a monument to Japans prosperous bubble period, and one of the best places in the world to see the works of world-class contemporary architects side by side.

From the futuristic Nexus World housing development with blocks by Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl to a bank designed by the Japanese luminary Kazuo Shinohara; from a stunning shopping complex by the mall specialist Jon Jerde to a seaside stadium development housing Cesar Pellis Sea Hawk Hotel, Fukuoka has so much interesting construction that it has quietly become a pilgrimage site for architecture students from all over Asia. The highest concentration of notable buildings is in an unlikely location outside the city, a dreary suburban district of ball fields and high-rise apartment complexes. A few minutes walk from a bus stop, still near enough to hear the din of the highway, lies Nexus World. The roster of names behind this development reads like an architecture hall of fame, with Koolhaas, Holl, Oscar Tusquets Blanca, Mark Mack, Christian de Portzamparc and Osamu Ishiyama all designing units.

Comments

[Edward]

I went there in 2004 when I had to do a visa run from Korea, (you may remember), and it does have a nice relaxed feeling to it. I didn't get to see much modern architecture, although I did spend a bit of time in the complex featured on your blog entry (in the photograph). Westerners may well know Fukuoka for it's architecture, but Tomo(nori) assures me it's known by Japanese as the sex capital of the country. It was my first time back in Japan (for more than a stop-over) since 98, and so I wanted to go see a few temples, and it does have a nice collection of temples near the centre of the city that you can spend a day walking around in a very zen like atmoshpere, with a few old houses thrown in to boot.