Will Tower Condos Become Ruins? Riken Yamamoto on the Time Housing Has Lost

The Problem Is at the Foot, Not the Height

What stays with me in Yamamoto's critique is not the shape of the tower itself, but his attention to its foot.

Redevelopment is often described with language about renewing the city: aging buildings, disaster prevention, liveliness, international competitiveness, urban function. None of these words is simply false. But when you look at the space left after they have done their work, it becomes a little unclear whether a city is really there.

A city is not made only by floor area. It is made by routes from the station, shops you can drift into, corners, shade, benches, school routes, people whose faces you know, places where light remains at night. It is made by small connections like these.

Large-scale redevelopment erases those connections once. Then it designs new connections in their place. But designed connections are not the same as old alleys or storefronts. They come with management, terms of use, asset value, photogenic planting, and places where you are not supposed to linger.

So the issue is not whether a building is tall or low. It is what kind of relationship the building forms with the life around it.

Housing Starts Wearing the Face of Securities

In the video, Yamamoto criticizes the structure created by real estate securitization, in which buildings are made not for the local area, nor for the people who live there, but for the people who buy the securities.

This feels important.

Housing is originally a long-duration thing. You wake up. Hang laundry. Hear the neighbor's sounds. Children grow. Someone ages. Repairs are made. Shops change. The bodies of residents, changes in families, and the memory of a place layer themselves over time.

But when housing is treated as a financial product, that time is cut short. Can it be sold? Can it be rented? What is the yield? How many minutes from the station? Does it have a brand name? Will the price rise? These measures come forward.

Of course, housing has always had asset value. The problem is the moment when asset value makes living subordinate. At that point, the room becomes a vessel for numbers before it becomes a vessel for life.

From the upper floors of a tower condo, the city may look like something owned. But from the city at ground level, the building can sometimes look less like part of the neighborhood than like another system placed on top of it.

Community Is Not a Pretty Word

"Community" is a little dangerous because it is too convenient.

Governments and companies use the word quickly. Resident exchange, local cooperation, multigenerational coexistence, creating liveliness. With language alone, it can all be made bright. But the community Yamamoto speaks of is not the name of an event.

The Pritzker Architecture Prize's official page introduces Yamamoto's work as a reconsideration of the boundary between public and private realms. Yamamoto defines community as a "sense of sharing one space."² Yokohama National University also notes that he researched "Local Community Area Principles" at Y-GSA.³

This kind of sharing does not mean everyone gets along.

It is closer to the fact that people who do not fully agree with one another still have to use the same place. Meeting in a corridor. Passing through a courtyard. Standing in front of a shop. Hearing children's voices. Having the road slow down a little to match the walking speed of older people. Being reminded every day that someone else's life exists outside your own.

That can be troublesome. But that trouble keeps the city from becoming a mere collection of real estate.

The Provocation of a 200-Year House

The "200-year house" that appears in the latter half of the video becomes too narrow if we hear it only as a technical discussion of long-life housing.

To think seriously about housing that lasts 200 years is to stop addressing only the current buyer. It means bringing the next resident, the resident after that, people not yet born, repair workers, nearby shops, roads, self-governance, disasters, and aging into the time of the house.

This is where it connects back to the critique of tower condos.

Housing that maximizes short-term asset value treats the future thinly. Once it sells, once the yield appears, once the price rises, it has succeeded for the moment. But the building remains afterward. Elevators age, exterior walls wear down, management associations grow older, and residents' incomes and family structures change. Being high-rise only increases the difficulty of maintenance.

When Yamamoto uses the word "ruin," I do not think he is only pointing to a future image. He is pointing to the fact that the subject who will take responsibility for that future is hard to see.

Who will repair it? Who will keep paying? Who will rebuild the relationship with the neighborhood? Who will make living there something more than ownership?

What Remains as the Afterimage of the City

What remains after watching this video is not only anger toward Tokyo.

Rather, the ground of the city you usually see begins to look a little different. A small shop beside a large redevelopment project. A bench in an open space. A plaza that seems easy to enter but somehow is not. Seasonal decorations at a condominium entrance. Managed greenery. Old stairs. A messy bicycle parking area. These things begin to look like the real expressions of the city.

After the Fade mainly writes about music, film, books, and games. Architecture sits a little outside that center. But this video is not just a discussion of real estate. It is a cultural question about whose time a city preserves and whose time it erases.

Tower condos may become ruins quickly, or they may not. That is better left as a question than received as a prophecy.

How many years of time is this housing built to imagine?
What does the building return to the neighborhood?
Is the person who lives there a guest of the city, or a member of it?

Yamamoto's strong language is not only there to condemn Tokyo. It asks us to look again at housing, which we usually see through views, distance from the station, and asset value, as a vessel for living in the same place as someone else.

What remains is not the view from the upper floors.

It is whether someone can stop at the foot of the building.

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