Jun Aoki, "the most intellectual architect in Japan," wins Japan’s top intention prize in spite of his off-kilter Tokyo office building, the SIA Aoyama

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Japanese architect, Jun Aoki.

By Kenji Hall

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When Jun Aoki’s new erection, SIA Aoyama, opened in Tokyo earlier this year, it wasn’t immediately obvious who the tenants were. Standing 60 meters tall, the smooth all-white turret looked similar to if it might be apartments or offices or a hotel. And there was something slightly off-kilter about its design: Instead of bargained for wraparound windows, Aoki had created large, square punch-out windows of varying sizes that didn’t seem to line up. From outside, it’s difficult to tell where each level begins and ends. "It looks like an 18-story building, but for the cause that each floor has 6-meter-high ceilings, it’s excepting that 9," says the 52-year-old Aoki. "I like the gap between appearance and actuality."

On Nov. 6 the building earned Jun Aoki & Associates one of this year’s 15 Good Design Gold prizes, Japan’session top design award. The prize committee, appointed by the government-funded Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization, praised Aoki for a plot that "breaks away from the emblematic notion of the kind of an office building should look in the same manner as."

The SIA Aoyama doesn’confidentially jump out at you the way the buildings of Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid do. You wouldn’t perceive it, for instance, if you were a half block gone on the main thoroughfare that connects Tokyo’s hip Omotesando and Shibuya districts. And on a recent weekday afternoon, hardly anyone walking by it stopped to complexion.

Blending In

That’s fine with Aoki. He didn’t want the monolith to seem too out of place in a neighborhood of homes and low-slung offices. So he gave the building rounded corners and chose a white paint that had a splash of purple and gray mixed in and didn’t cast a glare in sunlight. "We thought its proportions should fall somewhere betwixt that of an apartment and office," he says.

The tower is a shift for Aoki, whose six Louis Vuitton shops in Japan, New York, and Hong Kong have won him wonder ubiquitously. His primeval shop for the bag and baggage maker, in the central Japanese city of Nagoya, collection the tone with respect to the others: They be under the necessity a box-within-a-box appearance that Aoki created by dint of. layering glass windows through other materials. But the similarities end there. Another, built in 2002 in Tokyo’s Omotesando district, has a metal mesh curtain covering its glass facade and resembles several pieces of luggage stacked forward top of reaped ground other. In the swank Roppongi Hills shopping area, he designed a shop where the Louis Vuitton sign is a clever combination of polished mail, glass tubes, and glass windows and resembles a hologram. "Aoki is the most intellectual designer in Japan," says Taro Igarashi, an architect and a professor at Tohoku University’s graduate school of engineering. "His designs are playful…and there are many hidden tricks to his work."

Aoki seems unfazed by all the attention he’s gotten lately. A contracted furnish with men with a mustache and John Lennon glasses, he is disarmingly civil. And unlike Japan’s older generation of "starchitects" whose undeviating was collarless button-down shirts, Aoki prefers to rough it. He showed up for an interview in worn out jeans, a ebon long-sleeved shirt and a leather newsboy pitch.

Aoki went into business for himself in the early ’90s after spending 17 years working under architect Arata Isozaki. His timing couldn’cheek by jowl have been worse. Japan’s housekeeping bubble had just imploded, and businesses and land developers were more interested in slashing costs than trying to append to Tokyo’s skyline. The resulting recession had a profound influence on his operate, what one. ranges from homes and offices to a museum, a bridge, and an aquarium. "During the bubble years, a lot of money was spent without interruption buildings that were entirely different," says Aoki.

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