this kind, the panelists offer open-ended views. What is interesting for this research is that this debate is entirely led by and structured around a Western view of Tokyo. Yes, Kurokawa is part of the debate, but the whole debate is constructed around the concept of how different and unique Tokyo is compared to Western cities. Most of the arguments are generic, or at least by now have become generic, and are common for these kinds of debates: a city without a center, no hierarchy, chaotic, small spaces, and public/private space. These comments are followed simultaneously with judgment, fascination and admiration for the wonder called Tokyo. After the debate follows a text by Yoshinobu Ashihara titled “The Hidden Order - Tokyo through the 20th Century.” Ashihara belongs to the first generation of post-war architects. He is a modernist and many of his buildings have been published in the early 1950s and 1960s presentations of Japanese architecture. This article is a presentation of Tokyo and, through it, Japanese cities. It is an article built on the dichotomy of Japan and the West. The first part of the text argues that asymmetry is an integral part of Japanese culture, and randomness and amorphous shape come from the resistance to give up freedom of movement (Ashihara 1994, p.22), whereas Western cities have little freedom to differ from an already established formal language. The second part of the text is focused on the amoeba form of the city, and discusses historical aspects of the condition, coming to the idea of a hidden order that is based on the local organic recombination and re-formation of the physical structure. Ashihara’s last chapter talks specifically about the articulation of Tokyo’s morphology. For him, architectural space is built either by subtraction or addition. First, with examples, he focuses on the “subtractive” approach characteristic of Western thought, where a composition is subordinated to the overall formal appearance, and then presents the Japanese “additive method.” The additive approach, or the concept of a “sub-whole” as Ashihara calls it, comes from the cultural and philosophic background of Japan, based on Buddhism.
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