So, it looks like Fukuoka is an architectual marvel......Hmmmm...sitting in my concrete bunker, can't say that I agree! Actually, Ryan and I took a bike ride through the pretty parts of Higashi Ku (our area) and there are some awfully nice buildings. What makes me laugh though, is that the following article from the NY Times says to start your tour at the Kaikan (where we live). Seeing as another student's girlfriend almost ran screaming away when given their keys the other night, I think they should consider another starting the tour elsewhere!
NY TIMES
The Cultured Traveler
In Japan, a Time Capsule of Modern Design
By TOM DOWNEY
Published: September 24, 2006
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 emperor’s 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 80’s and early 90’s — Japan’s boom period — this stream of Western architects became a river. The country’s 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 Japan’s 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 Pelli’s 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.
The Koolhaas blocks look like enormous reptilian spaceships, but inside the central courtyard each unit has a small, luminous garden foyer. Steven Holl’s clean lines seem to promise the best combination of beauty and livability, and Mr. Ishiyama’s scaffolding-strewn structures make you feel as if you’re living in a piece of conceptual art. Only one small sign, tucked away in a corner of the complex, with both English and Japanese map references, identifies the buildings and their architects. When real estate prices bottomed out during the recession, many local architects snapped up these properties for themselves.
There are no organized excursions to view the architecture of Fukuoka — it’s a strictly do-it-yourself affair — but that’s part of the pleasure. Hidden in the suburbs and the side streets is the physical record of a dialogue between Japan and the West about materials, methods and visions, a dialogue evident in striking housing blocks, sushi joints and majestic greenhouses.
One way to begin an exploration is at Fukuoka’s most centrally located and best-known structure, the Acros Building, designed by the Argentine-American Emilio Ambasz, where terraced step-gardens on the side of a high-rise spill over into an adjacent city park. Toyo Ito’s glass-covered half-subterranean greenhouses, part of the new Island City project, could easily be the next new stop. There are few tourists gazing at these buildings, though Nexus World residents are familiar with occasional architecture groupies angling for an invitation inside their homes, then pondering Mr. Koolhaas’s dark enclaves and Mr. Holl’s rectangular waterways.
Back in the center of town, the Daimyo district has few conspicuous buildings, but its narrow, converging streets shelter some of the city’s hottest night spots and most exclusive boutiques. Since Daimyo originally served as a buffer zone around the city’s castle, the streets mostly end in T junctions, a deliberate strategy to slow down potential invaders that now makes Daimyo feel cozy and contained. The neighborhood has its share of global designer places, as well as local vintage clothing stores. Look for the graceful, slick Comme des Garçons store, or Taco-yaki Sake Akatan, a bar done in the naturalist wabi-sabi style that serves fresh, hot octopus balls.
Daimyo contains the city’s two best bars, cocktail specialty places that take advantage of the Japanese talent for precision and perfection. Bar Oscar (named after Oscar Peterson) is perched on the roof of a building filled with tiny nightclubs and run by a serious cocktail artisan. Nearby Bar Kurayoshi features a dark room pierced by a bright spotlight shining down on a gleaming wooden bar, the place where a master mixologist creates superb cocktails.
Fukuoka is also home to a small-scale architecture and design wonder: yatai, small street stalls unshuttered and assembled each night to become fully functioning restaurants. Scattered throughout Fukuoka are clusters of yatai where office workers sit down after a night on the town to hot bowls of hakata ramen or sticks of yakitori. The best setting for yatai is the banks of the Naka River, near Nakasu Island, where you can glimpse the glittering neon of the night. Two of the most unusual yatai are located nearby, next to Reisen Park. At Hakata Yatai Bar Ebi-chan, a cocktail yatai, the only limitation is that the bartender, Akio Ebina, serves all chilled drinks on the rocks, not straight up, since he doesn’t have enough ice to refill his shakers all night.
Next to the cocktail bar is another oddity, Kikuya Yatai, whose chef and owner once worked in one of the city’s premier French restaurants. Now, with just a couple of gas burners and a tiny countertop, he whips up wonderfully fresh French-inspired cuisine.
Fukuoka isn’t famous for its sushi, but there is one sushi bar, Yamanaka Sushi, worth a trip for both its strikingly fresh local fish and its unusual design. The master architect Arata Isozaki, who designed this restaurant, is best known for his enormous public works projects, many of which dot Kyushu province. Mr. Isozaki knew the sushi chef at Yamanaka and loved his fresh fish, so Mr. Isozaki decided to take on this job, a much smaller commission than he was used to. He brought a large-scale sensibility to the task. Most sushi restaurants are intimate, nearly claustrophobic places. The space Mr. Isozaki built has a vast, beautiful countertop carved from light-colored wood and sweeping 20-foot-high ceilings. The seafood, like kuruma ebi, shrimp harvested in the waters of the nearby Sea of Genkai, matches the grandeur of the environment.
Fukuoka has three hotels designed by internationally known architects — one each by Michael Graves, Cesar Pelli and Aldo Rossi — and a brand-new boutique hotel by the Japanese designer Ryu Kosaka. Mr. Rossi’s Il Palazzo still maintains the same glorious pinkish stone facade that made it an instant icon in the 90’s, but the rooms inside are looking worse for wear. It’s illuminating and a little disheartening to read the coffee table book published when the hotel opened in 1987, which extols the transformative possibilities of architecture and predicts that this striking new hotel will reshape the neighborhood around it. But the most basic transformation so far has been the construction of many “love hotels” nearby, where couples rendezvous for a three-hour room rental. That’s not the sea change Mr. Rossi had in mind.
JUST across the river from Il Palazzo is Nakasu Island, the city’s red light district. At night, local businessmen flood into the tiny place, which packs about 2,000 restaurants, bars and street food stalls — and most likely as many “massage parlors” and “soaplands” — into a few rows of narrow alleys. Nakasu also houses Nakasu Dining, an unusual restaurant and reason enough to brave the sordid isle.
Owned by a man who once worked for Royal Host, the Japanese equivalent of Denny’s, Nakasu Dining specializes in perfectly executed versions of comfort food served inside an old wooden house overlooking a bright green garden.
Opposite Nakasu Island are the Canal City Mall, designed by Mr. Jerde to mimic the canyons and waterfalls of the American West, and the adjoining Grand Hyatt Hotel. In the Hyatt, guests can sip a cocktail in the downstairs bar overlooking the artificial waterway that runs into the shopping mall. This could feel horribly tacky, the Japanese equivalent to hitting the lounge at any chain restaurant attached to your local shopping mall. But somehow it doesn’t. A Western jazz pianist takes requests, then croons out standards, and late at night, the deserted, beautiful mall next door is a strangely haunting backdrop, as if you’re illicitly drinking, after hours, inside a place you’re not meant to be.
An enterprising hotelier bought two cookie-cutter businessmen’s hotels in Daimyo and then refurbished them as well-priced boutique properties: the Plaza Hotels. You can still see the outlines of what these two buildings once were, but the end product is somehow more interesting. The ghosts of businessmen past seem to haunt the halls of these boutique havens. The Plaza Tenjin Hotel houses a dark, atmospheric bar called Bacchus where you can sample well-mixed drinks or in summer eat a spectacularly sweet local mango that costs 3,800 yen, or about $32 at 120 yen to the dollar.
The two Plaza Hotels offer a different approach from the architectural vision of the bubble period, when it seemed to make the most sense to just tear things down and start fresh. This new style — using what’s already there to create something new — seems to correspond to the sensibility of today’s Japan, a country dipping in and out of economic recession but experiencing a cultural renaissance. It probably won’t be long before the architectural legacy of the bubble period is also, somehow, recycled anew. Given the overwhelming power of nostalgia in Japan — a Tokyo teenage hip-hop fan once told me he wished he had grown up in the Bronx in the early 80’s — you can just imagine people soon yearning to relive the boom years by gazing on the wondrous buildings from that time scattered all over Fukuoka.
VISITOR INFORMATION
GETTING THERE
The flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka takes 90 minutes and costs about 15,000 yen, or $127, at 120 yen to the dollar, each way. In a country where airports are often far from the cities they serve, Fukuoka’s airport is only a 10- minute subway ride from the city center. The flagship train of Japan Railways, the Nozomi, speeds from Tokyo to Fukuoka, a distance of more than 700 miles, in just over five hours.
WHERE TO STAY
Plaza Hotel Tenjin, 1-9-63 Daimyo Chuo-ku, (81-92) 752-7600; www.plaza-hotel.net. Doubles from 11,550 yen, about $98.
Plaza Hotel Premier, 1-14-13, Daimyo Chuo-ku, (81-92) 734-7600; www.plaza-hotel.net. Doubles from 13,125 yen.
Grand Hyatt Fukuoka, 1-2-82, Sumiyoshi, Hakata-ku, (81-92) 282-1234; www.grandhyattfukuoka.com. Doubles from 33,495 yen.
Hotel Il Palazzo, 3-13-1, Haruyoshi, Chuo-ku, (81-92) 716-3333; www.ilpalazzo.jp. Doubles from 25,410 yen.
WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK
Hakata Yatai Bar Ebi-chan (Cocktail Yatai), Hakata-ku, Reisen Koenmae, (81-90) 3735-4939. Drinks from 1,200 yen.
Kikuya Yatai (French Yatai), Fukuoka-shi, Hakata-ku, Reisen Koenmae, (81-90) 9561-5238. Dinner from about 2,500 yen.
Akatan, 1-13-12 Daimyo, Chuo-ku, (81-92) 738-3253. Drinks from 500 yen.
Yamanaka Sushi, 2-8-8 Watanabe-dori, Chuo-ku, (81-92) 731-7771. Dinner around 7,500 yen.
Nakasu Dining, 2-6-3 Nakasu, Hakata-ku, (81-92) 283-5338. Main courses from 1,200 to 1,800 yen.
Bar Oscar, 1-10-29 Daimyo, sixth floor, Chuo-ku, (81-92) 721-5352. Cover, 500 yen.
Bar Kurayoshi, 1-3-32 Daimyo, La Corte 7F, Chuo-ku, (81-92) 726-9405. Cover, 530 yen.
Bacchus (third floor of the Bassin restaurant), 1-9-63 Daimyo, Chuo-ku, (81-92) 739-3288. Cover, 500 yen.
WHAT TO DO
Nexus World is the place to see many of the world’s great architects in one location. Sadly, none of the apartments are open to the public, but you may be able to persuade a friendly resident to let you take a peek. To get there, take the No. 22 or 23 bus from the Tenjin post office to the Ryugakusei Kaikanmae stop.
Also worth visiting is the new Island City development. The highlight is Toyo Ito’s greenhouse complex. In the center of Fukuoka is Emilio Ambasz’s Acros building, where you can climb up an exterior trellised with green plants. Jon Jerde’s Canal City shopping mall has a water display in the center and the usual consumer offerings.
Fukuoka Now, published by a Canadian expatriate, Nick Szasz, is a good online English-language source of information about the city; www.fukuoka-now.com.
