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Today Tokyo is the largest city in the world. The image of the city, notwithstanding the widespread globalisation process, is very different to...

Today Tokyo is the largest city in the world. The image of the city, notwithstanding the widespread globalisation process, is very different to what we are accustomed to in Europe, America and also in other Asian countries. The visual and cultural shock is strong: it appears extremely vast, uncontrollable, indecipherable, incommunicable, and chaotic.
Tokyo is one of the few global cities, and, like London, New York and perhaps one or two others, is part of a real trans-national system. It is an extraordinary capital of contemporary architecture and, at the same time, constitutes an exceptional urban phenomenon that is impossible not to study with great interest. More importantly is the fact that, behind an apparently abstract debate, the city poses a substantial problem: does it represent the final decay of the Western city or rather is it something completely different, a city with its own deep-rooted historical diversity and specific cultural independence that has not been substantially modified by the powerful and recent hybridisation with the West? And also, does the city interest us for these reasons or rather because it is/appears to be the city which – not being a part of the Eastern tradition – has, more than any other place, embraced the challenge of the new millennium and projected itself into the future, spurring rapid change with the energy, recklessness and aggression that is possible only in a place that has never been part of a tradition, to the point that it has substantiated a new symbolic form in the urban phenomenology of the twenty-first century?

Livio Sacchi, architect, and full professor of Architectural Design at the faculty of architecture at Pescara, the Università degli Studi “G. D’Annunzio” at Chieti. A member of the Order of Architects of Rome, he is president of the Lazio section of Inarch, the National Institute of Architecture, and is responsible for the Institute’s Italian architecture encyclopaedia founded by G. Treccani. Editor of the “Op.Cit., Selezione della critica d’arte contemporanea” magazine and deputy director of “il Progetto” magazine, he was one of the coordinators of the XVII Milan Triennial. His publications include: Il disegno dell’architettura americana, Rome-Bari 1989; La rappresentazione della modernità, in Richard Meier. Architetture, Milan 1993; L’idea di rappresentazione, Rome 1994; L’architettura del Rinascimento and L’architettura del Manierismo, in L’Italia e la formazione della cultura europea. Dall’architettura al design, edited by R. De Fusco, Turin 1994; L.A., California, Milan 1998; Daniel Libeskind, Museo ebraico Berlino, Turin 1998; Il Novecento, in Topocronologia dell’architettura europea, Bologna 1999; Franco Zagari. L’interpretazione del paesaggio, Turin 2003. For Skira Sacchi has edited, with F. Purini, the catalogue Dal Futurismo al futuro possibile nell’architettura italiana contemporanea, 2002; and the publication Architettura e cultura digitale, 2003 with M. Unali.
His projects and texts have been published in leading Italian and international journals. He lives and works in Rome.

The book is available at the Skira bookstore in via Torino 61 in Milan and from 17 November 2004 in all Italian bookstores.