The Pillars of Tokyo

If Fernando Galli Bibiena, famed scenographer, designer extraordinaire of endless, receding, Baroque pillared symmetries, with trick halls and mirage-like backdrops—



—were cloned next year, raised in Hollywood, and hired to remake Total Recall, he'd probably make something like this:


It's Tokyo's massive "G-Cans Project," a subterranean system of polished concrete viaducts built "for preventing overflow of the major rivers and waterways spidering the city."

This emergency overflow-sewer is apparently "the largest in the world," with "five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos which are connected by 64 kilometers of tunnel sitting 50 meters beneath the surface. The whole system is powered by 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second."


The G-Cans Project reveals the quasi-mythic splendor of grandiose civic infrastructure, something the United States is ridding itself of entirely—yet also something Japan is now all but entombed within.

A "construction state"—or doken kokka—has effectively taken over the Japanese economy, according to Gavan McCormack in the New Left Review. The doken kokka, McCormack writes, "is opaque, unaccountable, and therefore hard to reform. Essentially, it enables the country’s powerful bureaucrats to channel the population’s life savings into a wide range of debt-encrusted public bodies—those in charge of highways, bridge-building, dams and development initiatives," and that means "promising new public-works projects," thus "concreting the archipelago."

Under construction right now, in fact, is "a grandiose [national development plan] calling for the construction of new railway lines, express highways, airports, information systems, no less than six new bridges between the islands, large dams and nuclear installations and, last but far from least, a new capital city... to take over many functions from Tokyo."

The article is pretty amazing, actually, even shocking—though I do have to say that some of the projects it describes would be an engineer's dream. But it comes with the realization that all this frenzied global construction may be more than just a bubble—see recent analyses of China's own building boom, for instance—or Dubai—but a kind of hysteria, a building-pathology.

One wonders, in fact, if there might be a disease, something Freud discovered, a neurosis of some kind: suddenly you start building things, and you don't stop building things. You move beyond talking—building, building, always building—and soon you're like the father in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with mashed potatoes all over your hands and there's a mountain in your living room. That, or you've just built the world's largest sewer.

(See earlier on BLDGBLOG).

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think these are fakes. Some of the texture scales , and especially the photos, seem a little fishy. If so, it was still worth it as it generated your prose.

October 24, 2005 1:11 PM  
Blogger cemenTIMental said...

They're not fake... it's a real project. Whenever I've seen these posted on blogs/messageboards people think they're fake, or often at first glance mistake them for screenshots of some next-generation first person shooter!

G-Cans Project was used for locations in the recent Tetsujin 28 live action movie, as a giant robot hanger! The movie looks pretty cheap from the trailer tho, hopefully someone else will shoot something better there one day; it's such an amazing structure it's a shame to have it just unseen and filled with water. :)

October 24, 2005 2:58 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

perhaps the original site, if you can read japanese_ http://www.g-cans.jp/

more pics_ http://gcans965.rsjp.net/intro/07photo/

October 24, 2005 10:20 PM  
Blogger Geoff Manaugh said...

Cementimental - it'd make for some killer scuba-diving, though. Take whole tours of the place, flippering about, shining your torch. Avoiding giant robots...

October 26, 2005 12:37 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You see what happens when a country no longer has an army. Imagine if the US stopped pouring money into wars and spent it on projects like this.

October 28, 2005 4:12 PM  
Blogger Rico said...

These tunnels were used as the location for a drive-through in the recent Land Rover commercial. I doubt they would have gone to all the trouble to CGI their vehicle into someone's fantasy, when it was easier to just drive it through a real construction site.

April 22, 2006 8:51 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Khazad-dum.

May 23, 2006 12:09 PM  
Blogger Ben W. Brumfield said...

Reminds me of the Basilica Cistern at Istanbul.

August 21, 2007 6:50 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

haha yeah, that's no sewer system they plan on mining for Mithril.

September 10, 2008 6:38 PM  
Anonymous fritz said...

it's definitely real ;) I've been there recently, quite impressive if you're standing in this huge hall:

http://tokyofotosushi.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/die-untergrund-zitadelle-von-tokyo/

December 13, 2009 10:25 AM  

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