in Nagoyaland
I'm am silly in love with an underground walkway that runs about four blocks from Nagoya station to Lucent Tower, a skyscraper a block from our building. It's not Disney-magnificent or anything, not worth flying across the Pacific for, but, darnit, I just adore it.
The entire thing is done up in silhouettes, animal silhouettes along both walls and on the ceiling. It starts at subway level with shadows of the cityscape, recognizable sites from around Nagoya. Which ends when you come to the shadow of a cat. As if in stop-motion photography, the cat follows a small flight of stairs down as it leaps after a butterfly. Now you're in "The Tale of Stray Kittens" by minim++ (the media group commissioned by the skyscraper)
Each phase along the white-walled walkway is lit with different lighting. The first phase you follow your cat guide into is a yellow-lit meadow land with tall grasses, rabbits, grasshoppers. Next, you pass into forest, deep green illumination, some mocked up to cast the shadows of tree limbs on the ground. Grizzly bears, elk and wolves share the woods with an orangutan, hyenas, and some wimpy hippos. Then, the lights go red and you are mouse-sized, passing through a forest of footwear.
The center is sky blue with two sets of shadow birds flying into each other. Then, a seagull leads you to the deep blue of the sea. Then, there's the purple frog pond with violet hydrangea (the only silhouettes not black), frog shadows on the floor tiles where light effects throw ripples. The final phase before riding the escalator up to the lobby of Lucent Tower, is the ruddy desert oasis.
In the land where underground malls undermine the city streets like gopher burrows, it's the only underground passage that doesn't make me feel like a rodent. Yay, minim++
The entire thing is done up in silhouettes, animal silhouettes along both walls and on the ceiling. It starts at subway level with shadows of the cityscape, recognizable sites from around Nagoya. Which ends when you come to the shadow of a cat. As if in stop-motion photography, the cat follows a small flight of stairs down as it leaps after a butterfly. Now you're in "The Tale of Stray Kittens" by minim++ (the media group commissioned by the skyscraper)
Each phase along the white-walled walkway is lit with different lighting. The first phase you follow your cat guide into is a yellow-lit meadow land with tall grasses, rabbits, grasshoppers. Next, you pass into forest, deep green illumination, some mocked up to cast the shadows of tree limbs on the ground. Grizzly bears, elk and wolves share the woods with an orangutan, hyenas, and some wimpy hippos. Then, the lights go red and you are mouse-sized, passing through a forest of footwear.
The center is sky blue with two sets of shadow birds flying into each other. Then, a seagull leads you to the deep blue of the sea. Then, there's the purple frog pond with violet hydrangea (the only silhouettes not black), frog shadows on the floor tiles where light effects throw ripples. The final phase before riding the escalator up to the lobby of Lucent Tower, is the ruddy desert oasis.
In the land where underground malls undermine the city streets like gopher burrows, it's the only underground passage that doesn't make me feel like a rodent. Yay, minim++