JAPAN'S BEST-DESIGNED OFFICESConcept
A building that lets the street in
Toda describes the building in two phrases. The first is about the district: a base open to the town, where art and business cross. The second is about the office: a laboratory that connects people, things and society.
The first phrase is paid for at ground level, where a three-storey void is given to the lobby and the glass is kept low and wide enough that the street continues into it. The second is paid for on floors eight to twelve, where TODA CREATIVE LAB puts staff to work inside the new technologies and services the company is trying to sell, on the theory that you should live in a thing before recommending it. The eighth-floor reception holds TODAtte?, a museum where visitors can handle what construction was, is and might be.
01 · The street
A base that is not a wall
Kyōbashi sits between Tokyo Station and Ginza and has become a gallery district, which is the background to Toda’s claim that the building is a place where art and business intersect. At street level the base is planted and glazed rather than closed, so the lobby reads as part of the pavement.
02 · The lobby
Three storeys of nothing
The lobby is a void three floors high, and the company describes it as the place where the people who work in the building and the people who visit it pass each other every day. The upper level looks back down into it, and a timber-lined hall runs off it.
03 · The stair
Sentences cast into the wall
The main stair is concrete and glass, and the concrete carries large lettering in English — among it the line that what is necessary to do things well is, first, love, and second, that form follows function. A construction company writing its argument onto its own structure is a fair summary of the whole building.
04 · The lab floors
An office that is a test rig
Floors eight to twelve are TODA CREATIVE LAB, described as an office in the form of a laboratory: employees experience and verify new technologies and services in the course of doing their own work. The floors are open, planted and left with their services exposed, and one of them opens into a double-height space with a stair up to a walkway.
