GOOD DESIGN Gold AWARD 2008
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08B09025
SIA Aoyama Building

Award Number : 08B09025

Award-winning item :

SIA Aoyama Building[SIA Aoyama Building]

Company :

Simplex Investment Advisors Inc.

Producer :

Simplex Investment Advisors Inc. Real Estate Business Department

Director :

JUN AOKI & ASSOCIATES Jun Aoki

Designer :

JUN AOKI & ASSOCIATES Jun Aoki/ Shinichi Tokuda

 

Outline

This building was developed to address two themes. In a trendsetting area with a greater mix of workplaces among homes, can we design office buildings that are at once landmarks yet not out of place? And can we design office buildings that redefine workspaces and invite people to see them in new ways? The architects expressed their answer to these questions externally in an unembellished white tower, with an arrangement of windows in various sizes, and internally in how tenants experience spacious rooms that are much airier than most office buildings because each floor is 6.4 m tall.

 

 

Designers Comment

Focus only on the high ceiling, and you would think it's too tall for an office. But step inside, and you can appreciate that rather than the ceiling height, it's the generous overall air space that makes the room feel nicely balanced. Two levels of windows on each floor and curved walls skew your perception of scale, making you feel as if you've shrunk. What we wanted to evoke in an office, where people spend most of the day, was not a sense of comfort from a controlled environment as much as a sense of distance ensuring freer behavior, which we feel in natural environments.

 

 

Judges Comment

This is an office building that breaks away from the typical notion of what office buildings should look like. From the outside, it looks like a pure white, monolithic structure with square openings scattered here and there, so that you can't tell what it is used for or how many stories it has. The spacious one-room interior offices have pairs of windows placed vertically and ceilings nearly 5 meters high. It does away with the idea of an office building as a glass façade, and creates a new image for office buildings with its superior base isolation structure.

 

 

 

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