Stephanie M. Kim

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Tokyo and stopped by the Ikebukuro district. It’s known for the Sunshine City Complex, which is a mall complex that combines several different malls that merge into common spaces at the top and bottom floors. The navigation was the opposite of a jolly time. Anyway, when I was heading back to the train station, I stumbled on this plaza and the pop of orange mixed with light teal, juxtaposed against the sinister looking office building in the back, stood out to me. I know every New Yorker loves people watching, and the framework undergirding that is beautiful architecture of the plazas that lets people interact with the object and space. My latest creative quest is to take photographs and create digital collage-like work with them, by traversing different materials like construction papers and digital images and create this uncanny effect. I stripped sidewalk, street, and the glass panels of the office building. I removed the pedestrians, and filled in the empty spaces. I also stripped the displays and the parking garages, in order to fill them with my own parking garage, disposal area, bathrooms, and entrance door. The most arduous part of this was stripping the stools and bar table on the wooden platform, and then replacing the empty space with a similar wooden pattern. I think this area took me the longest. The additional “realistic” layers were the bike ramp nested on the center left, the entrance door, and the two cars. I knew that I wanted more color with the stripped, homogenous window displays, but when I experimented with gradient colors or a brighter solid construction paper, it was super tasteless and disruptive to the environment. I referred back to my ongoing love for Le Corbusier, the papa of Brutalist architecture, and his major social utopian work: Cité Radieuse in Marseille, France.

Cité Radieuse, baby!!

I visited this site back in Spring 2024, and I was impressed by this government-commissioned building complex that spawned post-WWII to quickly address social housing and rebuilding. This massive housing and commercial complex was intended to operate as a city filled with all of the functions that you needed. This complex was built pretty quickly between 1947-1952, compared to the decades-long, dragging foot effort of the Barbican Centre. I was greeted by the famous concrete block with inverted pillars that looked like the edges of a boat, and the window units were neatly partitioned off by a combination of wall colors like blue, yellow, red, and green. I was pretty indifferent to Brutalist architecture at the time, being pretty reductive of its degrading material and erasure of Neoclassical and ornamental structures. The tour of the preserved unit was mind-blowing, because Le Corbusier separated each apartment in modules to face the sunlight from Northern and Southern directions. There was this “golden ratio” of this perfect man that he rigorously applied to the separation and measurement of each apartment unit as well. When you stepped inside, his fastidious planning was especially more apparent, with the functionality of each acre of this apartment intended for the resident to never have to leave the space. His designs imagined the American, consumer product technology, and smart home hell that Jacques Tati’s films like Mon Oncle and Playtime forewarned against, this gaping disparity between the spectacle of modernity and the observers floating aimlessly within it. Anyway, the original intention of the social housing utopia of the Cité Radieuse gradually eroded, with the units turning privatized and the residents turning boujee.

Wrapping Up

I added the cartoon characters against this seemingly pristine and functional residential utopia that should be filled with joyous and comforted residents and people, but I thought it’d be better to show the jarring effect of chaotic behavior against this backdrop. There’s a passenger getting slapped by his taxi driver, the woman pushing the man in front of a moving car, and a robber baron slowly crawling up the steel building like he’s Spiderman. More mischievous compared to his environment, a boy is seen untying the shoelace of an oblivious girl. A mom and her young son are blissfully smiling and unperturbed by the surrounding trouble. The cat fearfully hides inside the top branches of the tree, while the old man helplessly resigns himself to it all and just lets out of a sigh. There are three types of responses to their environment, disruptive participation, cluelessness, or resignation, and I love capturing those with these cartoon cutouts.