A huge, modern but baroque building. The Tokyo Metropolitan Building No. 1, known as Tocho. It is the work of the great architect Kenzo Tange. The towers separate and rise up to 243 m above the civic square. We are in the Shinjuku district, full of buildings... but quiet in the rain. The satellite tower of the Tocho, building No. 2, rises in three cascading steps. The whole complex is the City Hall of the huge Tokyo metropolis of 13 million people.

However, there is silence here.

The surrounding towers are silent.

It is Mode Gakuen's Cocoon Tower, designed by Tange's partners. But the great man died in 2005, just before construction began. The Shinjuku Park Tower is a design by Kenzo Tange. Almost as tall as the Tocho, and built after it.

These dishes are microwave antennas, on top of the "loggia" of the Tocho.

What words do these women exchange?

They are there, but I don't hear them.

Other towers are silent, as if frozen in time. 

I wander through them, but I am always here, invisible, in the Tocho.

Those microwave dishes, listening to...

What is in the invisible messages they carry?

I'm here, but I don't hear them.

I listen to the building and the facades themselves speak. The patterns of lines and rectangles of Tange's façades are like echoes of motherboards electronics. It spoke of Japan's powerful economic rise in the postwar years, pushing upward, but with order and complexity, like its towers.

It is a complexity not shared with silent neighbors.

This is the statue of Keiko Amemiya, Here in the sky. He shields his gaze, as if from the celestial light, but now he looks towards the Tocho. The immense building rises like a gothic cathedral, like Notre Dame... which also tried to reach the sky.

With arms outstretched, this is the sculpture In the windby Goro Kakei.

These are my companions, frozen in time.

From Munehiro Ikeda... Adam and Eve

I wonder if they remember last year, l'année derniere...?

Herbert Wright