Shinjuku Flaneuring                      Between Muji and the Erotic Godzilla       

Date Spring 2023
Location Tokyo, Japan
Collaborator Kaicheng Zhuang
Advisor Joseph Godlewski, PhD
Exhibition Shinjuku Flaneuring, Syracuse NY
Awards Citation for Excellence in Thesis Design (Britton Memorial Awards)

supported and funded by the SOURCE Fellowship


Shinjuku Flaneuring looks at the material collisions between the Mujis and Godzillas, the former being the zen and hypermodern Japan-ness characterised by Isozaki, the latter being the exhibitionisms of Tokyo’s precarious red light district. As it stands, the municipality’s image of contrast is sustained by alternating on/off hours. So we wondered how can we activate these places of mediatic silence? What are the 0.5-degree activities that can emerge between the on/off binary? We turn to the flaneurs, translators, tourists as the architects of their own environments.




Consumption of Oversaturation and Contrast as Urban Tactic

To sustain the iconoclash between consumerist and godzilla, each half of the municipality take turns in switching off. Yet, locals don’t avoid these dark spots, so how do we program for the dividual spaces (Alamazan) that can exist in the gaps of mediatic silence?

In February 2023, we spent a week in Tokyo to document the site across different times of day. We concluded that Consumerist and Godzilla are two sides of the same coin – constantly surveyed, constantly butting heads through image making, programming, and strategic activation of certain parts of the city. The design question became how do we semi-activate these places of mediatic silence? What are the 0.5 places that exist in this urban binary? What are the strategies or programs that punctuate the ambience of moving through these streetscapes?

We reconstructed our walks through the city as linear narratives, the breaks between them are reflective of how they align, disentangle, and offer slippages at moments of inflection. Our interventions act as switchboards that glitches the threshold of what is consumerist and what is Godzilla. Even when it’s not your turn in the spotlight doesn’t mean that you stop being a part of the city. We are rejecting the notion that places are ‘either or’, but instead by hybridizing you develop the agency and image vocabulary to engage with both sides, to be included in a wider range of translations and experiences of the city.


Material Ecology: Point Clouds as Analytical and Generative

In thinking about the role of the translating tourist, or ‘gaijin’ (Japanese for outsider), our cataloguing and exhibition reproduce our flaneuring through Shinjuku as perceptual narrative arcs, evoking the situationists and Venturi + Scott Brown’s “Learning from Las Vegas” and “Two Naifs in Japan”. We are interested in the material culture, or culturally-laden materials, that specify respective visual, sensorial, symbolic experiences of different translations through the lens of iconoclash and resulting affect. The material reality of Shinjuku (furniture, railings, signage, facades…) are “things” (in the Liz Grosz sense, in which sedimented histories are flattened into images that communities organize around to make conventions) that coalesce into an ecology of artifacts that can be strategically re-written and re-embedded into the urban text that produces new translations of how contingencies and adjacencies between Consumerist and Godzilla are cognitively registered. The tourists’ new interpretations of the physical reality would encourage new modes of exchange and possibly unexpected adaptations.

By superimposing the scans of how a space is activated, we get a new image that shows the extended territory of originally separate programs. On the street scale you then start to understand how these territories glitch into one another. We assembled scenes into scenarios, mapped scenarios onto buildings, transplanted buildings onto other buildings, aggregated objects into new morphologies.





The Exhibition

Central to the presentation is a projection installation that stitches together the urban scenes as documented during their research trip to Japan in early 2023. The model consists of six CNC-milled fragments that each represent a block of Shinjuku, and projected onto them is a stop-motion animation that goes from day to night, pre- and post- design intervention. The block are abstracted representations of point cloud data and photographic documentation. The intention was to create flattened reliefs on plinths that bring the minature to torso level, so when the exhibition goer moves through the models, it simulates the perspective of occupying the street. The material lexicon of the site is catalogued and reproduced onto the models, a series of small hybrid artifacts represent the ecology possible variants that can be used to modify existing conditions or inform new designs.





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A special thanks to:


Review Critics
Professor Abingo Wu, PhD
Professor Britt Eversole

Installation Assistants
Shen, Yifan
Zhang, Yihan