Landscape of the international city of Tokyo

Under these circumstances, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is moving forward with creating a beautiful and dignified capital city by adding three basic principles to the approach set out in the Landscape Law: (1) creating a landscape worthy of a capital city in cooperation with Tokyo residents and businesses, (2) further developing Tokyo by stimulating exchange and creating new industries, and (3) improving the value of Tokyo by passing on its history and culture and creating new attractions.The Tokyo Metropolitan Landscape Plan, which sets standards for creating a landscape, such as the placement, form, and color of buildings, went into effect on April 1st, and goes into more specific details than ever before.

I fully agree with this basic principle. However, I would like to see careful application of landscape design standards, particularly the color standards that regulate the exterior wall colors of buildings. The Munsell scale, used to express color standards, is a numerical symbol that combines hue, lightness, and saturation in the Munsell color system, a color representation system devised by American artist Albert Munsell (1858–1918). Incidentally, the Munsell scale for the exterior brick wall of Mitsubishi Ichigokan which will be restored in Marunouchi, is 10R5/6, while the exterior wall of the Tokyo Marine Building, designed by Kunio Maekawa, is 10R4/6. When comparing these exterior wall colors with the color standards for the basic exterior wall colors of this large-scale building (lightness 4 or higher is saturation 1 or lower), the saturation actually does not match significantly. Known as "One Block London" and beloved as a symbol of Westernization, the development of Marunouchi began with the Mitsubishi Ichigokan, completed in 1894, and culminated in the completion of the red brick Tokyo Station building, designed by Tatsuno Kingo, in 1914. I have serious doubts about the landscape color standards that make the red brick color, which could be said to be the historical color of the Marunouchi area, incompatible.

The colors of the town, which have a deep sense of history, are a reflection of the culture that the local people have built up over many years. In the first place, people's sense of color is largely subjective. Sensuous culture does not lend itself to being regulated by numerical symbols, and it is not a black-and-white issue. In fact, there are various opinions, both for and against, regarding the issue of the Italian Cultural Institute mentioned earlier.

When red brick Western architecture appeared on the streets of wood, clay walls and roof tiles, the English poet Joseph Rudyard Kipling, who traveled back and forth between East and West, wrote the poem "East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet." Nearly 120 years have passed since then, and in today's society where globalization is progressing, clashes with different cultures are inevitable. Rather, we should aim to create new cultures by blending with different cultures. To what extent should we accept new cultures, what parts of our traditional culture should we preserve, and what kind of landscape should we create? These are the challenges we have been given.