Dutch photographer IWAN BAAN is celebrated for his images of architecture around the globe. Seemingly the first to snap every starchitect’s newest icon, he has also captured startling views of the built environment in the midst of upheaval (a famous helicopter shot of New York’s blackout in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, for example) and produced long-term studies of buildings within their broader urban context. Here, Artforum presents a special portfolio of Baan’s never-before-published photographs of Tokyo, taken in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami and revealing a city whose constant exposure to a range of environmental hazards—including earthquakes, tropical storms, and tsunamis—has led to the development of some of the most advanced disaster-response infrastructures in the world.
Aerial view of Tokyo.
Overpass on Tokyo’s Metropolitan Expressway. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the city’s highway system was substantially rebuilt to maximize earthquake resistance, with updates including the wrapping of existing concrete piers with steel reinforcement sheets (visible here), rubber bridge bearings to dampen movement, and the introduction of redundant structural systems.
Metropolitan Expressway, Meguro, Tokyo. A number of the city’s elevated highway interchanges and on-ramps are enclosed in reinforced concrete structures as an additional safety measure, as shown here.
View of downtown Tokyo, where earthquake risk is distributed unevenly. Paradoxically, stringent building codes and advanced engineering have made recent high-rise developments (foreground) substantially less vulnerable to earthquake damage than older, low-rise neighborhoods characterized by close-set single-family homes (background). Many of the latter have been designated “priority development districts” as part of the current focus on efforts to replace existing housing with more fire and earthquake resistant medium- and high-rise residential buildings.
View of one of the city’s “disaster-proof living zones,” a dense urban neighborhood surrounded by a massive “firebreak” composed of high-rise buildings along widened roadways, a configuration designed to prevent fires from spreading to adjacent neighborhoods. These firebreaks divide Tokyo into hundreds of large blocks, each equipped with its own disaster-relief infrastructure aimed at making evacuation unnecessary in the case of an emergency.
Water discharge tunnel, Tokyo periphery. This subterranean structure runs for almost four miles under the outskirts of Tokyo. A series of five tanks, each 230 feet deep, collects water in the event of a flood; when the tanks are full, four immense turbines—powered by jet engines—almost instantaneously funnel the water into the nearby Edo River. The reservoir space pictured is larger than a soccer field and more than five stories high.