Moon Tower is a skyscraper complex accommodating a hotel in the Izumisano-shi district of the Prefecture of Osaka. The hotel contains three hundred rooms, entertainment areas, a huge gambling facility and a museum. According to Takamatsu, "Skyscraper" is not really the right word for describing this tower, since it is really more like a "blessing" of the sky. The tower is designed in what we might call the shape of prayer. It is called the "Moon Tower" because a shining moon, measuring ninety metres in diameter, has been placed on top of the tower to house the museum.
This is not the first time Takamatsu has interacted with the moon. A housing project he built in 1986 and a sabre he once designed are both called Killing Moon. There is no hiding the reference to Marinetti's Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna (Kill the Moonlight): Takamatsu has always acknowledged the disruptive force of Italian Futurism and its courageous attempt to turn its back on tradition.
When, in an interview he once gave, he referred to "ether" as a space with dynamic density and polarisation characterised by fluctuation and fullness, a space in which particles that have lost all weight are free to move as they please and the interviewer then asked him if his work was now like going from the earth to the moon, he replied that: "if by going to the moon you mean that the transition is irreversible, you may well be right".
The moon has always been a decisive image for Takamatsu. His architectural space has always had cosmic connotations: the universe is its ideal extension.
This image takes on concrete form in the Moon tower. "The client clearly specified that a room had to be provided for displaying Dimasio's paintings. This room would be Dimasio's own private property. We proposed the idea of an exciting, cosmic space called 'Dimasio's Crystal Hall'. A space measuring 9x27x30 metres would be covered by a mirror and Dimasio's paintings could then be displayed on the ceiling. The paintings will reflect in three-dimensional space and visitors will share the experience of Dimasio's cosmic world".
The building's practical functions - accommodation, entertainment and cultural activities, all the topoi of contemporary mass society - vanish before the luminous globe that hovers over this thirty-four storey construction, the largest Takamatsu has ever designed. Despite the complexity of its carefully gauged structural and functional elements, this one single symbol captured the architecture in all its various facets and projects it into another space, the space of imagination, spirit and that sense of abstraction that delves to the very depths of meaning.
As in all Takamatsu's projects, lightness is the key to this design. Italo Calvino traced the contours of "lightness" when he included it among the most important qualities of literature. Calvino quoted from a story written by Giovanni Boccaccio, the great XIVth-century Italian author. Boccaccio tells us of a poet, Guido Cavalcanti, who one fine day finds himself surrounded, in a place in Florence decorated with large marble sarcophagi, by a band of rich and arrogant noblemen who begin taunting him for being a loner with a wild imagination. The noblemen circle him with their horses,, but Cavalcanti, "finding himself surrounded by the noblemen, suddenly retorted: 'Gentlemen, you can call me whatever you like on your own land'; and with that he placed his hand on one of those large sarcophagi and , light as he was, bounded over to the other side and went off on his way".
According to Calvino the most surprising thing about this story is not so much Cavalcanti's witty remark as "the visual image the Boccaccio evokes", or in other words the poet's small leap to escape from the noblemen's dull taunting. "If I had to choose a symbol to inaugurate the next millennium", Calvino wrote, "this is what I would choose: the nimble leap by this poet-philosopher who rises above the heaviness of the world, showing that his own gravity holds the key to lightness..".
The architectural structures of Takamatsu's "moon", that hovers lightly above this tall building, contain exactly the same meaning.
(Text by Maurizio Vitta)
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