発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo

← Hakken Archive

World Landscape Architecture

Pavilia Farm | A Network of Community Spaces and Urban Farming

October 12

With the completion of Sky House, the final clubhouse at Pavilia Farm, Snøhetta’s vision for a unique urban community centered around nature, wellbeing, and collective ownership is now realized in…

Read at World Landscape Architecture ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Pavilia Farm | A Network of Community Spaces and Urban Farming

More from World Landscape Architecture on Hakken

Haitang River Eco Park II | LOLA Landscape Architects World Landscape Architecture

Hong Kong to host the IFLA World Congress as rising seas redraw Asia’s coastlines World Landscape Architecture

Landscapes After Dark: Time, Fear and Coexistence in Mumbai World Landscape Architecture

Student Project | Oyster Islands, Living Seas World Landscape Architecture

City of Childhood | Mérida, Spain World Landscape Architecture

Uralla Racecourse Lagoon ecological restoration stage 2 planting completed World Landscape Architecture