sympathy tower tokyo – rie qudan
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The Japanese capital’s new landmark, Sympathy Tower Tokyo, was built in order to enable sympathy and support for the unfortunate modern-day equivalents of Jean Valjean – and in a more concrete and proactive manner than mere words could ever achieve.
[…]
It’s all just as Sara Machina – the tower’s legendary architect – intended. She has done a very good job of making anyone who sets foot inside immediately question whether it wasn’t, in fact, the outside world that was the real prison.
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‘Max, if you want my opinion, there isn’t all that much difference between being understood and being misunderstood.
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‘Fucking text? The Takt I used to know never used that sort of language.’ ‘I picked it up from Max. His mannerisms are super infectious. The guy’s basically a walking pathogen.’
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A vision of the tower’s future. I see it now, in all its boundlessness – and yet really it’s the most ordinary future imaginable. You wouldn’t need to be an architect or a designer of enormous buildings to predict it. It is a future in which Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō has crumbled to the ground. It might take mere minutes or a hundred years, but the tower will fall. Sooner or later, all buildings do. It is a precondition of their creation, just as death is a precondition of our birth.
