Men with technical minds made in Japan, England, and America were talking about my city, and me, at the A/cute Tokyo symposium, and I wanted to stand and shout shut up.  You architects aren’t so bright.  You’re human computers hired to build the problems you condemn.  I already knew life in my city of thirty million is high-tech tough, and the house I struggle to pay for is half the size of those in other wealthy countries, and I don’t feel good as I should since I work and commute so many hours I sleep less than six a night, like seventy percent of us, and speak to my wife fifteen minutes a day if at all, and amid all this the population inevitably declines as it ages in a tragic society that divides families in tiny boxes or drives them into separate residences, and I don’t believe, as you claim, that your grand designs will turn this into something positive.

You use a lot of convoluted and sterile terms I won’t regurgitate here but tell you I’m unamused by the developer who wants a block of buildings now unavailable to him so acquires what land he can, a sliver running one to six feet wide, and hires one of you to there build a structure high as a billboard to obscure the area you want people to forget before you level it.  And level it you must because “new is good in Tokyo.”  New is so good flavors of local Kit Kat candy bars change every six weeks and novel concoctions of sushi morph each day.

One of you seems insulted most of Tokyo is occupied by small detached homes, and their miniscule yards and gardens are not being used, that is they aren’t being smothered by buildings and instead grow flowers and grass.  You want to extirpate everything alive and demolish the old small homes and replace them with something smaller still or with sardine units in elegantly-wretched buildings that mar the sky.  Jam everything in.  Let no space breathe.  Make every store a glutton for merchandise so overwhelming the structure that contents become structure.

Another of you scholarly fellows notes that in Tokyo a man may have worked or drunk all night, you can’t tell which and probably don’t care.  More importantly you’ve taken photos and downloaded others of a man asleep on the street, and a woman passed out on a bus, and a man snoozing on the subway, and a comatose family collapsed against each other on the subway, and a man, shoes by his side, on a sidewalk.   That man is me.  And all this you say is very fine since in Tokyo there’s no shame or scorn for sleeping all night in public.  The sleepers are safe and know it and so does everyone else in this gun-less metropolis where there’s a sublime sense of order amid ceaseless bombardment by “visual data and sounds” that tire even architects who, one is confident, manage to avoid sleeping, however safely, on the streets of frenetic Tokyo.

Source – Highlights from first half of the A/cute Tokyo symposium of architects at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on May 2, 2009.