Walking in the Danchi

March 22, 2017 8:21 AM

Walking in the Danchi - a photo-blog of concrete Danchi style buildings in Japan. [via]
posted by Think_Long (11 comments total)

Here's the view from my office window in Japan (in Canada right now, though).
posted by My Dad at 9:18 AM on March 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

This style of building is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, extremely common in Hawaii. You see it all over the place in the built-up areas like downtown Honolulu, Pearl City, and Waipahu. I didn't realise it was a Japanese import, but that makes sense given how much real estate in Hawaii is held by Japanese companies.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:19 AM on March 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

Danchi (団地 lit. "group land"?) is the Japanese word for a large cluster of apartment buildings of a particular style and design, typically built as public housing by government authorities. - Wikipedia

Very cool!
posted by rebent at 9:41 AM on March 22, 2017

"Danchi" can have negative connotations, akin to "housing project" or "social housing" in English.
posted by My Dad at 10:07 AM on March 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

You see a lot of this style of housing in Germany - mostly built in the Marshall Plan post-war construction boom.
posted by ereshkigal45 at 3:15 PM on March 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

A lot of danchi apartment blocks are pretty old and run-down nowadays, because a lot of them were built in the postwar recovery era and haven't really been worked on too terribly much in the intervening 40+ years, but there are some newer ones. MUJI did a neat thing, though, where they collaborated with the Urban Renaissance Agency, the government agency in charge of public housing like this, and renovated some danchi apartment blocks to make them really nice and fancy inside. So far it hasn't been a whole lot of them, but it's a cool idea.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:22 PM on March 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

These buildings are not attractive.
posted by shoesietart at 6:42 PM on March 22, 2017

You should see all of Japan's other municipal buildings. Pretty much every school, city hall, and major police station follows an architectural style best described as "rectangular."
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:46 PM on March 22, 2017 [5 favorites]

It's useful to regard post-war Japan as a successful communist country.
posted by My Dad at 8:55 PM on March 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

You're not wrong
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:11 PM on March 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

The fact that the photos are tagged "plattenbau" is pretty accurate. They wouldn't be all that out of place at the edge of a German city.
posted by frimble at 8:06 AM on March 23, 2017