TAXI DEPOT WITH GOLF DRIVING RANGE

GOLF TAXI BUILDING
Tokyo, Japan
Documented by Atelier Bow Wow, 2001

Piggybacking Tactic
Inhabit a Niche

The so-called GOLF TAXI BUILDING is situated on the concrete banks of the Meguro River in the heart of Tokyo. Its lower levels comprise a two-story open-air parking deck for a local taxi company. Its upper level houses the Meguro Golf Club—comprising offices, a putting green, and a compact driving range. An inclined net provides a vertical separation between the two parts of the building: the net protects the parked vehicles from the flying golf balls above while simultaneously rolling those balls back toward the golf club. Originally documented in Momoyo Kaijima, Junzo Kuroda, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto’s landmark book Made in Tokyo, the Golf Taxi Building is a prime exemplar of what the authors deem a “sportive” building—a piggybacked condition where the conventional arrangements of sporting facilities are contorted to leverage the available spatial “by-products” of Tokyo’s dense urban fabric. In this way, urban sports and leisure in a city like Tokyo begin to “go wild” in the form of strange hybrids like the Golf Taxi Building.

Tokyo’s extreme density makes the city a natural laboratory for piggybackings. Meanwhile, Made in Tokyo was among the earliest efforts to celebrate the kinds of contemporary hybrid cultures that the Piggybacking Practices research project now documents in numerous cities and landscapes around the world. Ultimately, both projects champion the creativity and ingenuity of the ordinary urban dweller in the face of spatial and other resource constraints. Architects and planners would do well to take note.