Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Growth and Structure of Cities Faculty Research Growth and Structure of Cities and Scholarship 2010 Shaping Tokyo: Land Development and Planning Practice in the Early Modern Japanese Metropolis Carola Hein Bryn Mawr College,
[email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/cities_pubs Part of the Architecture Commons, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons, and the Urban Studies and Planning Commons Custom Citation Hein, Carola. "Shaping Tokyo: Land Development and Planning Practice in the Early Modern Japanese Metropolis." Journal of Urban History 36, no. 4 (2010): 447-484. This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/cities_pubs/20 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Shaping Tokyo: Land Development and Planning Practice in the Early Modern Japanese Metropolis Carola Hein Manuscript submitted to the Journal of Urban History in August 2007, revised and resubmitted March 2008. When German architect Bruno Taut drove in 1936 along the major road linking Tokyo and Yokohama, he criticized the inadequacy and superficiality of the modernizing Japanese built landscape. He later wrote about his revulsion: "I in particular had heard so much about Tokyo that I had no desire to see the city on the spot. […] In passing through the Inland Sea we had absorbed scenery of such rare beauty, had found so little of vulgar trash 1 in such buildings as could be glimpsed, that we could hardly take in the crabbed pretentiousness, the ludicrous would-be modernity of the tin façades that confronted us, could not fathom the loud hideousness of this confusion of architectural styles.