NowTokyo

Architecture

Architecture in Tokyo

Tokyo rebuilds constantly, and most of its architecture has to answer to a tight plot on a low-rise street. Surface and section carry the work that mass carries in other cities.

• Azabudai Hills

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  Completed 2023

  Heatherwick Studio · Pelli Clarke & Partners

  A mixed district in Azabudai where the low-rise portion is the architecture. Heatherwick Studio shaped the podium as curved roofs and planted terraces that run between the towers rather than around them, with Pelli Clarke taking the three towers above. The soft forms are set deliberately against the hard towers, so the ground plane reads as terrain. Mori Building assembled the site over thirty years from a council formed in 1989, which is why it could be designed as one continuous surface instead of separate plots.

• Sumida Hokusai Museum

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  Completed 2016

  Kazuyo Sejima

  A museum for Hokusai in the Sumida district where he lived and worked. Kazuyo Sejima wrapped a single mass in mirrored aluminium and cut deep angular slits through it, breaking the volume down to the scale of the low houses around it. The mirrored faces take on the colour of the street. The cuts do the work that setbacks usually do, without giving up the mass.

• Nezu Museum

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  Completed 2009

  Kengo Kuma

  A museum for East Asian art at the quiet end of Aoyama. Kengo Kuma set a long tiled roof low over a bamboo-lined path, so the building withholds itself until the last turn. Inside the ceiling stays low and the rooms are dim, with the garden arriving through full-height glass. It is the clearest built version of Kuma's argument for architecture that yields to what surrounds it.

• Prada Aoyama

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  Completed 2003

  Herzog & de Meuron

  A small retail building in Aoyama, built as a faceted crystal on a corner site. Herzog & de Meuron made the diamond grid the structure itself, so the glass is not a skin over a frame but the frame made visible. Panels within the grid are flat, convex or concave, and the reflections break as you move. The building treats a shop as a piece of optical apparatus.

• National Museum of Western Art

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  Completed 1959

  Le Corbusier

  A museum in Ueno Park, and the only building Le Corbusier completed in Japan. He laid it out as a square spiral so the galleries wind outward from a top-lit central hall, a plan he had been developing for decades as a museum that could grow without a new wing. The concrete is left raw and the ramps are lit from above. It is his idea of endless growth built at full size.