Tokyo, Japan
First exhibited at MoMA, The Phenomenal City was an effort to translate and make visible the secret, powerful, and intensely human patterns which make Shinjuku uniquely Japanese and uniquely modern. Shinjuku is a dense clutter of commercial activity at the largest interchange in Tokyo’s sprawling network of public transport. Every day, three million people pass through Shinjuku station, and close to one million stop to take advantage of a vast array of shopping and entertainment services. It is as if Grand Central Station, Times Square, and Greenwich Village were all woven into a single place and then doubled in scale. All this human activity is compressed into an area of about one square mile, its limits set primarily by the distance a person is willing to walk from the station.
The competition for this space is intense, and it is no surprise that land in Shinjuku is the most expensive in the world. The result is a complex multi-leveled composition, much of it underground. Rare among great urban places, Shinjuku has been little influenced by the designs of planners. Its public ways are labyrinthine, its private establishments of a baffling variety. Its commercial logic has created an environment where crowds, signs, and lights create architectural space. Formal purity of design yields to natural spontaneity at the same time that nature is subjected to human artifice. With the lens through which we conventionally view cities, Shinjuku appears chaotic. This exhibition was a search for a new lens through which to view the city everywhere.
