Kenzo Tange’s Peace Memorial Park is the largest and most significant architectural public space in Hiroshima, and it always will be. But on a recent visit my curiosity was piqued by a weirdly eccentric post-modernist confection of a public plaza in the messy center of the city’s central shopping district. Even in aging cities outside of Tokyo, teardowns are the norm; the new Hiroshima Gate Park Plaza, built across the street from the ruins of the Genbaku Dome, on the site of the city’s old baseball stadium, is slated for recycling in less than 20 years. So it seemed wild to me that a small park/event space named Alice Garden has survived, mostly intact, next to the department store Parco, for over 30 years.
After wandering into the space by chance and being surprised by the extent of its design—and, again, its survival—I’ve spent the last couple of weeks researching Alice Garden and its designer/architects. So far, I’ve had little success. Its architecture is mostly undocumented online, and questions of design and history fall beyond the capacity of the city offices tasked with managing the space and calendar. Though maintenance is a mess, the site is not wholly neglected. Alice Garden was in regular, light, use, and active with event programming. But its integrity feels threatened by indifference to its holistic design, and to its barely historic era: a boldy whimsical, almost corny, post-modernist plaza from the early 90s feels very susceptible to underappreciation.
At its core, there are contradictions in Alice Garden that make it more interesting, but that also put it at more risk. One is, there’s no creator to rally around. So far, I can’t find an architect or firm involved besides Parco, whose tile-covered new building [shinkan], completed in 1994, matches the all-tile plaza. The closest I’ve come to identifying an architect is Parco Space Systems, the shopping center company’s design subsidiary. After decades of corporate consolidations, it has been subsumed into J. Front Prime Space.
And then there’s the fundamental design incongruity between the Garden and one of its central elements. Linear Cycle (1994) is a major public sculpture by artist/musician Takashi Suzuki, that sits on an elliptical plinth that doubles as as an event stage. Suzuki’s sculpture is modernist and rational in a way that belies the surrealist narrative po-mo jumble of the park it inhabits. Whatever brought these elements together, I think the passage of time—and their survival—has made them a family. They have earned their place, and deserve attention—and more attentive care.
As recently as May 2022, the entire sidewalk between Parco and Alice Garden shared a tile pattern that connected to the tile facade on the lower two floors of the store. The half-painted purple column betrays a graffiti buffing effort that has never involved more than one bucket of paint— or a ladder.
It was only after looking back on Streetview captures that I realized the grey sidewalk was only put in after like 2022, which makes it recent and egregious. Someone made a decision to destroy this.
At several points, someone just said, you know, all this place needs is a couple of plants, and brother, that is not all it needs. The day of my first visit was hot and sunny, and the plaza was definitely hot, sunny, and felt bleak. It was the combination of seeming hostility and design time capsule that attracted me. Some more normal people were interested in the shade of the two trees off to the right.
On a second visit, I ate lunch under the shade of the trees peeking out behind that curved wall, and watched 200 students sit in rows as they waited to enter the parking garage under that white billboard, which is somehow also a massive okonomiyaki restaurant.
Oddly, it was only on the second visit, when this truck was getting set up, that I clocked the tile facade. The plaza had felt distinct and public, and the repaved road cut the visual continuity from the private business. The Alice Garden calendar seems full of beer garden pop-ups, though it was also used as the staging the area for events around the corner, where there’s higher foot traffic.
It’s not until a couple of weeks after visiting that I learned Parco added the shrubbery and landscaping around the sculpture later, probably to deter climbing. This obscures some of its most impactful aspects of the sculpture, where it touches the ground on three points. The artist was not consulted.
The combination of Suzuki’s open mathematics, the whimsical shapes and colors of the restrooms covered with signage, and the shredded tile grid of the plaza really came together here.
The way Suzuki’s sculpture and this restroom are both cubes, but couldn’t be farther apart, conceptually, is amazing to me. But the real life of this plaza is what sticks with me, the way dirt apparently sticks to all these tile surfaces.
Seeing this sign is the moment I locked in on figuring out the story of this plaza and sculpture. There’s always a lot of geijutsu 芸術 /bijutsu 美術 discussion about how Japanese doesn’t have a word for art. But the way this massive sculpture is not a chōkoku 彫刻, which is carved, or sculpted, ig, but an objet オブジェ feels perfect.
The bleachers on the right are dwarfed by the curved parking garage entrance behind it to the left, covered with black glass chevrons. For no discernible reason, four large tiled walls with cutouts of the four suits of playing cards curve across the plaza. So this is the Lewis Carroll reference, and the potted plants are the garden? Whatever fantastical is here is getting flattened by the abject.
With the kind help of his dealer at Gallery Yamaguchi Kunst-bau, Hiroshima-based Takashi Suzuki explained that he created the sculpture and its elliptical plinth for the plaza, but was not involved in any of the other aspects of the design. The form of Linear Cycle (1994) related to an earlier work, Cycle (1992), which had flat planes instead of lines traced by steel beams.
The way the lighting reveals the interior voids of Suzuki’s planar sculptures makes me really want to see the shadows cast by Linear Cycle, which now seem to be echoed in the offset pink grids of the tile.
The cosmological geometry of Suzuki’s work feels at odds with the post-modernist forms and surrealist literary references of Alice Garden, but I can’t imagine one surviving without the other. A great place to start the preservation of Alice Garden would be to remove the shrubbery from around Suzuki’s sculpture, and to let it stand powerfully on its platform again, while shadows of its nested cubes sweep the plaza.
Suzuki Takashi at Gallery Yamaguchi kunst-bau [g-yamaguchi]
Suzuki Takashi music [youtube]
Alice Garden info/calendar [chushinren.jp]