JAPAN'S BEST-DESIGNED OFFICESConcept
A distributor that built a library
Media Do moves ebooks between publishers and retailers. Nothing it handles has a physical form, which makes what it built on the eighth floor a deliberate contradiction: a library, running across the entire floor, in the offices of a company whose business is the disappearance of the printed object.
The company gives the reason without embarrassment. The library is there as an expression of respect for the people who work in publishing. The fifth floor had already said the same thing differently: its theme is Respect & Sustainability, its entrance holds a twelve-metre counter and a circular bench, and the object at the centre of it is made from Kitō cedar from Tokushima, cut into circles and straight lines to repeat the geometry of the building it sits inside.
That building matters too. The Palaceside Building was designed by Shōji Hayashi of Nikken Sekkei, houses the Mainichi Shimbun, and is one of the more important pieces of post-war architecture in Tokyo. Taking a floor of it, and then designing to its lines, is a second kind of respect.
01 · The fifth floor
Circles, and a twelve-metre counter
The fifth-floor entrance sets a large circular bench against a counter twelve metres long, with an object in Kitō cedar from Tokushima worked in circles and straight lines — the building’s own vocabulary, brought indoors.
02 · The eighth floor
A park, first
The 2022 renewal gave the eighth floor the theme Creation & Energy and put three things at its entrance. The first is a park: planted beds at seating height, with trees in them, and the city out of the window behind.
03 · The library
Running the length of the floor
The second is the library, which is not a wall of shelves in a corner but a set of them extending across the whole floor, with reading seats worked into it. The company describes it as respect for the people who make books.
04 · Meeting, and the seminar hall
Long tables, and a stepped room
The meeting spaces run from a long table at the window to a stepped seating room that doubles as a seminar hall. The materials stay consistent throughout: timber, black steel and planting, against the building’s grid.
05 · The working floor, and the view
Desks, and the moat
The working areas keep the same planting and the same timber, and the windows do the rest: the building sits across the road from the Imperial Palace moat, so the view from the desks is water and trees rather than more offices.
