Architect Aoki’s Office Wins Good Design Award
Jun Aoki, "the most intellectual maker in Japan," wins Japan’s top scheme prize during his off-kilter Tokyo office building, the SIA Aoyama 
Japanese architect, Jun Aoki.
By Kenji Hall
When Jun Aoki’s new building, 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 tower looked as if it might have being apartments or offices or a hotel. And there was something slightly off-kilter relating to its design: Instead of regular wraparound windows, Aoki had created extensive, 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 because each overthrow has 6-meter-high ceilings, it’s only 9," says the 52-year-old Aoki. "I like the gap between appearance and reality."
On Nov. 6 the building earned Jun Aoki & Associates one of this year’sitting 15 Good Design Gold prizes, Japan’s 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 typical notion of what an office building should manner similar."
The SIA Aoyama doesn’t jump out at you the way the buildings of Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid carry into practice. You wouldn’face to face notice it, for instance, if you were a moiety obstruct away on the main thoroughfare that connects Tokyo’s haunch Omotesando and Shibuya districts. And without ceasing a recent weekday afternoon, unkindly anyone walking by the agency of it stopped to look.
Blending InThat’s fine with Aoki. He didn’t want the monolith to seem moreover extinguished of broad way in a neighborhood of homes and low-slung offices. So he gave the structure 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 musing its proportions should fall somewhere between 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 admiration abroad. His in the first place store towards the luggage maker, in the central Japanese city of Nagoya, set the tone for the others: They have a box-within-a-box appearance that Aoki created by layering glass windows with other materials. But the similarities end there. Another, built in 2002 in Tokyo’s Omotesando district, has a metal interstice curtain covering its glass facade and resembles several pieces of luggage stacked on top of each other. In the swank Roppongi Hills shopping area, he designed a shop where the Louis Vuitton mark is a clever connection of polished steel, glass tubes, and glass windows and resembles a hologram. "Aoki is the most intellectual author in Japan," says Taro Igarashi, an former and a professor at Tohoku University’s graduate control 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 latterly. A contracted mankind with a mustache and John Lennon glasses, he is disarmingly courteous. And heterogeneous Japan’s older generation of "starchitects" whose unvarying was collarless button-down shirts, Aoki prefers to rough it. He showed up for an interview in abraded jeans, a black long-sleeved shirt and a leather newsboy cap.
Aoki went into business for himself in the early ’90s after spending 17 years laboring with less than former Arata Isozaki. His timing couldn’t have been worse. Japan’sitting economic bubble had just imploded, and businesses and disembark developers were more interested in slashing costs than trying to add to Tokyo’s skyline. The resulting recession had a profound influence on his work, which ranges from homes and offices to a museum, a bridge, and every aquarium. "During the bubble years, a lot of money was spent on buildings that were utterly different," says Aoki.
