Urbanperm Minami Aoyama

Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan

Photo © Daici Ano

Administration Buildings

Architects: Yuko Nagayama & Associates

Location: Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Year: 2008

URBANPREM MINAMI AOYAMA is a commercial building located in a small street off from the main Aoyama Street. While Aoyama Street is lined with tall buildings, it becomes a residential area once you take a step aside from the main street. This property is located in the midst of such dramatic gap of scales of Tokyo.

Therefore, we came up with the idea of building something that does not belong to either of the two scales, which stands in its own “ambiguous” position. The building is curved like a pot belly. Since the top of the building cannot be seen from the street, you cannot tell how many stories the building has. Furthermore, there are two rows of slit windows to each floor, making it even more confusing to understand its scale. When the sun lightens the the building, the sunlight makes a gradation pattern on its curved wall, and streams into the building from the slit windows. With the concept of creating an “ambiguity” that denies simple comprehension of the whole, we intended to design a new encounter between architecture and humans.