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?

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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).