Designed and curated by Japanese architectural firm, Atelier Bow-Wow, a promising but ultimately underwhelming exhibition at the Japan Society in New York City extracts examples of architecture from the 1960s and 2000s, using six themes—stadium, station, retail, office, capsule, and home—that are intended to demonstrate both the development of urban life in Tokyo in the 1960s and how that life is being re-examined today. The episodic structure of MADE IN TOKYO: Architecture and Living, 1964/2020 impedes an easy comprehension of the larger narrative. Beyond a few special moments, what is interesting in the exhibit is that which is excluded or left unsaid. 

The exuberance and excitement of the post-WWII rise of Japan, national pride in transforming Tokyo for the 1964 Olympic Summer Games, and the shift in urban conditions via technology, has been tempered by the 1990s post-bubble economy and an aging population, and shaken by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The Olympic Games this time are coming in the wake of China’s rise, Japan questioning its future and a changing global climate, none of which are directly addressed in the exhibition. The results seem to reflect a lost way, or at least one of questioning without particularly clear answers. One gets the sense that the dynamic influence of urban infrastructure and technological progress on architecture in the 1960s has given way to a diverse, ad-hoc round of building and the editing of existing, aging infrastructure—partly out of economy and partly out of changing circumstances and technology. This sense could potentially be a result of the exhibition’s structure, using 1960s-era projects as a point of departure to assess shifts. Or it could reflect the particular interests and sensibilities of its curator/designers, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, who are well-known for their research into, and design of, small-scale, ad-hoc architecture that is human-focused.