Faret Tachikawa, Tokyo

Why you should experience Faret Tachikawa in Tokyo, Japan.

Faret Tachikawa is an inventive public-art district where Akebonocho 2-chome's postwar redevelopment, international contemporary art, urban infrastructure and pedestrian-scale discovery converge across an open-air collection woven directly into the city.

Set along Sun Sun Road near Takamatsu-dori and just steps from Tachikawa-Kita Station, the district disperses artworks through streets, plazas and the spaces between eleven buildings across a 5.9-hectare precinct. Niki de Saint Phalle's The Conversation transforms a bench into a brightly modeled sculptural encounter, and Vito Acconci converts another piece of street furniture into a car-shaped bollard that extends from the pavement. Donald Judd contributed seven corten-steel and iron wall sculptures prepared during the final months of his life, making the Tachikawa installation his last work. The result is an outdoor collection in which internationally significant contemporary art emerges through benches, walls, vents and street fixtures as an integral part of moving through Central Tachikawa.

What you should know about Faret Tachikawa.

Faret Tachikawa is best known for placing 109 public artworks by 92 artists from 36 countries and regions throughout a district opened on October 13, 1994. The project grew from redevelopment of land returned after the full closure of the U.S. military presence at Tachikawa Air Base in 1977, an event that released a vast tract north of Tachikawa Station for new civic and commercial development. Tachikawa City pursued redevelopment as part of a broader effort to shift the area from its long association with the military base toward a regional center for business and culture. Eleven buildings containing offices, retail facilities, a hotel, cinema and library emerged across the new district. Its name combined the Italian verb “fare,” meaning to make or create, with the initial T from Tachikawa. The project received the Japan City Planning Institute's Planning and Design Award for fiscal 1994, giving the newly completed precinct formal recognition within Japanese urban planning.

Art director Fram Kitagawa organized the collection around three concepts: “A Town Reflecting the World,” “Function into Fiction (Art)!” and “A Town of Wonder and Discovery.” Artists were invited to intervene in practical pieces of city infrastructure, dispersing art across tree surrounds, water taps, ventilation equipment, bollards and other utilitarian elements. Marina Abramović, Anish Kapoor, Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Kosuth and Robert Rauschenberg joined artists from Japan, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas in a collection conceived to bring global contemporary practice into ordinary pedestrian space. Kitagawa treated the district as a forest populated by small artistic presences, giving individual works different scales and degrees of visibility across the streets. Faret Club formed in 1997 as a citizen volunteer group supporting guided walks, cleaning programs and artist workshops. The group has guided more than 20,000 people through the collection, and Tachikawa elementary schools incorporated Faret Tachikawa Art appreciation into their curriculum in 2008. Faret Tachikawa Art Management Committee joined building owners, Tachikawa City and Faret Club in 2005 to coordinate long-term care and programming. Major restoration projects accompanied the collection's tenth and twentieth anniversaries, and citizen-led art maintenance now takes place twice annually alongside more than sixty guided walks in a year. Three decades after installation, all 109 works remain distributed through the district, preserving Kitagawa's original experiment in making contemporary art part of the physical machinery of a city.

How to fold Faret Tachikawa into your trip.

Faret Tachikawa works as the anchor for a daytime progression through a twenty-first-century performance hall, an experimental museum devoted to pictures and words and a national institution interpreting Japanese polar research.

Begin at Tachikawa Stage Garden, a Yamashita Sekkei-designed performance venue established by Tachihi Holdings and completed with Obayashi Corporation as builder. The hall opened in July 2020 with 11,863.25 square meters of floor area and 2,448 seats, expanding to 3,018 people when its orchestra level is configured for standing audiences. A 21.6-meter proscenium and 13.7-meter stage depth support large productions, and the rear of the auditorium connects with a 580-square-meter outdoor stage, allowing performances to extend toward the surrounding district. Continue to PLAY!, which opened on June 10, 2020 with pictures and words as its curatorial focus. Tezuka Architects designed the interior of PLAY!, with Atsuki Kikuchi directing its visual design. The museum occupies the second floor and develops exhibitions around picture books, manga and art; its opening program paired a tupera tupera exhibition with a presentation devoted to Eric Carle. Conclude at Polar Science Museum, opened by the National Institute of Polar Research on July 24, 2010 as a public center for Antarctic and Arctic science. Exhibits include meteorites recovered from Antarctic ice, a snow vehicle used on a 5,200-kilometer round trip between Syowa Station and the South Pole, the Dome Fuji deep-ice drilling system and observation equipment used by Japanese research expeditions. An aurora theater projects polar auroras across a domed screen, placing the scientific phenomena studied by the institute within the museum's public program. The progression moves from a performance hall engineered to connect indoor and outdoor stages through an experimental museum joining visual art with children's literature into an institution built around polar exploration, extending Faret Tachikawa's commitment to publicly accessible culture across performance, illustration and scientific research.

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