This is art!!!!
The place is Takebashi Station on the Tokyo Metro Tozai Line, directly connected to Palaceside Building. On every wall from the ticket gates down the stairs to the platform, pink and light-green geometric patterns have spread. They will soon be gone, so if you have not seen them, hurry.
The patterns are “drawn” on the tiled walls in squares, chat-like shapes, rounded-off forms, speech-bubble shapes, U-shapes and more. They seem to be a topic online; posts keep appearing on Twitter and elsewhere. Try googling “Takebashi Station art” or “Takebashi Station patterns” and a flood of images comes up.
The Mainichi Newspapers news site mainichi.jp also has a photo special (http://mainichi.jp/graphs/20170113/hpj/00m/040/005000g/1).
Subjectively, the long passage walking toward the gates that exit toward the Japan Meteorological Agency, opposite Palaceside Building, feels the most artistic — the “highest finish” — partly because the tiles are relatively clean (photo at left).
According to Mainichi articles and others, Tokyo Metro plans renewal work at Takebashi Station from February 2; this was a pre-inspection of how much wall tiles and inner mortar have come loose. Tiles were marked with different-colored tape according to the degree of damage. The work ran from November 2016 between last and first trains; tape marks gradually increased and became quite conspicuous after the new year, and the topic took off at once.
Takebashi Station opened in March 1966. Palaceside Building opened that October, so the station is about half a year the “senior.” Half a century on, the station has not had a major remodel since then; the “weight of history” shows in wear, dirt, leaks, and tiles peeling here and there (photo at right). It has reached its limit.
Work is scheduled to last more than a year and a half, through November 2018. Once it starts, walls will be covered in turn with temporary hoarding, so the “art” will soon be gone for good.
After completion, it will look clean, as in the rendering in the photo below.
