Filmmaker
Yuiga Danzuka

Interview

What Do You See 

When You Look Out Over the City?

Walk through the city and take in the landscape around you. In Shibuya, for example, seemingly endless redevelopments continue around the station. Advertisements became shifting images, while LUUP scooters now running through the streets of pedestrians and cars. Hachiko Square, once a classic meeting spot, has been replaced by MIYASHITA PARK as a gathering place for young people, filming TikTok videos. Planned and unplanned intermingle, while the urban landscape—and the ways of which it is used—continues to change from day to day.

Filmmaker Yuiga Danzuka turns his camera toward the city, searching within it traces of inhabitation, as well as for something resembling a kind of nature, and trying to grasp these through cinematic languages. When a camera focuses upon the city, advertisements and LUUP scooters unintentionally enter the frame. Perhaps watching digital signage in the city is not so different from watching a forest of trees swaying in the wind.

Even a place given a single name as one city or neighborhood may, when experienced on foot, reveal boundaries of opaqueness and fluidity, extending as a kind of gradient. The city and its moving images, urban development, signage and technology, nature within the city, anonymous places such as highway service areas—there seem to be many more perspectives from which these can be reconsidered.

What do you see when you look out over the city?

Taking on this question, which emerged from an editors’ meeting with Danzuka, as a point of departure, we invite critical essays on cities and architecture.

Architect
Nile Greenberg

Text

Architecture Is Becoming Blurry. 

What Do Architects Make Now?

“Architecture is hard to see at this moment, and so it is unclear what we are writing about when we write about architecture. It is this loss of sight that I believe needs to be addressed. Criticism is, after all, an act of seeing—and that is where we might begin.”

The question posed by New York–based architect Nile Greenberg asks us to look again at the increasingly blurred contours of architecture, as social, economic, and other forces overlap within it. What do architects actually do when they design? How do those actions become manifest in buildings, and for whom—or for what—do they operate? And is architectural criticism still capable of recognizing those actions and the “forms” that emerge from them?

As discussions of architecture increasingly focus on its relationships to society, economics, and the environment, what is architectural criticism seeing today—and what might it be failing to see? Or, surrounded by conditions such as capital, institutions, clients, and environmental concerns, how far can architects actually design? These questions might also be approached through the conflicts, negotiations, and experiments that architects themselves encounter in the act of designing today.

From the position of the critic or from that of the designer, we invite you to consider, from any perspective, what it means to “see architecture” today by evaluating exactly what there is to see.