Tag Archives: Japan

Monkey Business

It is said that when you would put enough monkeys behind a typewriter in the end they would produce something like Shakespearian prose. According to a test done by Plymouth university giving six monkeys a computer and produced five pages of text, consisting of mainly the letter S, and later the letters A, J, L and M crept in. OK, ok, QED : monkeys don’t write works of shakespeare. So what do monkeys do in an office then? Well, Pan-kun, Japan’s favourite chimp does pretty much what many people do in the office: ignoring strangers, wasting paper, and trying to become invisible.

 

Why is Tokyo so ugly, but how can it still generate such fantastic architecture?

The question for 2008, and here is my (easy) answer:

1. Japan has the highest pro-capita rate of architects, of the 1.2million registered architects world-wide Japan has over 300,000,

2. There are very few aesthetic regulations: anything goes,

3. In the chaos architects work hard to make their buildings stand-out,

4. Tokyo has some of the world’s most daring and cash-rich clients,

5. Japanese construction companies (not only the major ones) are the world’s most advanced,

6. Buildings have an average life-span of around 30 years,

7. The city has been destroyed many times over (and most likely will be again soon).