Several years ago, before ever having visited Tokyo, I decided that before my delirious vision of the place was contaminated by the rigors of actual observation, we'd better do a project there. Although we've called the building Godzilla, it isn't mean to be sinister, just large: a building with presence. Perhaps it would seem less threatening had we called it Barney.The project's affinities with Godzilla, however, are not merely morphological but conceptual. Just as that monster (I mean the term not pejoratively but genetically) stand for a certain intensification of Japanese post-nuclear anxieties, so this building represents, for me, an intensification of Tokyo-ness. In it, the tangled skein of the city finds a critical mass and erupts into form, a verticalization of what I took - from my distant vantage point - to be the fundamental (dis)order of the city.
