Pop-up card: Lost buildings in Tokyo
I updated my pop-up cards.
In addition to the former Toyo Kinema, which I wrote about yesterday, I updated the former Shiba Church, United Church of Christ in Japan, and the former Sogo-Mujin Company (Jimbocho Building Annex). All of these buildings have already been demolished.
This photo shows the old church building of Shiba Church.
This time, you can download this pattern, if you’d like to use it.
As mentioned on the main site, the old church building of Shiba Church was demolished in 2016 to make way for the redevelopment of the area around Metropolitan Route 2. And a new church building be completed in 2020.
The old church (demolished) building was built in 1936, and in 2015, the Kanto Branch of the Architectural Institute of Japan submitted a request for its preservation. According to the document, the building was of high design and technical value, with stained glass, lighting fixtures, wooden fittings such as the entrance door, and detailed decorations such as the pulpit and congregational seating.
Looking back at the history of Shiba Church, an even older period, a church building was newly constructed in 1922. But it was destroyed by fire in the Great Kanto Earthquake the year after its completion. I could not find a photo of this church.
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The other pop-up card is the former Sogo-Mujin Company. The building was called “Jimbocho Building Annex," but I could not find out when the name was first used.
It was built in 1930 as a building of the Sogo-Mujin Company.
In 1951, the Mutual Bank Law was enacted, and the Sogo-Mujin Company was converted to the Dai-ichi Mutual Bank, and then to the Taiheiyo Bank in 1989. However, the Taiheiyo Bank went bankrupt in 1996, and the Wakashio Bank, to which the business was transferred, later became Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, so the building had been owned by SMBC since 2003.
I wasn’t sure what happened to the building after that, but in recent years it housed the Japan Thai Association office until around 2018.
A real estate company purchased the building in 2019, and it was demolished in 2020 for redevelopment. They are going to combine the surrounding land to build a new building.
Before the demolition, there were requests from the locals to preserve the building, and the ward had also requested partial preservation of the building. I also saw some comments on the Internet that regretted the demolition.
About the pop-up card, I thought about making a three-dimensional relief above the entrance and the decorations around the windows, but I ended up pasting different parts to make it look three-dimensional. I think it wasn’t quite enough, though.
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This was a hectic update on New Year’s Eve.
Thank you for your support this year.
With the cards I made this time, I now have 450 pop-up cards in the Japanese Modern Architecture series.
I hope you will continue to see them next year.