Citicorp / Tobishima Headquarters, Tokyo, 1990

Citicorp/Tobishima Headquarters was an invited competition for a 24 story, 63,000 M2 office tower in the newly developing Daiba area of Tokyo Bay. An Art Gallery, Multipurpose Hall, Reception Room and various Restaurants and Cafes open to the public form the remaining program for the site.

Daiba is part of Tokyo Teleport, a satellite city currently being built on landfill in Tokyo Bay and envisioned as an urban sub-center designed to remedy some the of the difficult infrastructural problems encountered in Tokyo proper. Unlike the dense visual environment found in Tokyo, the Daiba site is characterized by a more generous spacial arrangement with unobstructed views both from Tokyo and from a new bridge approaching the area.

Taking this into consideration, the building has been designed at two scales, one relating through the use of grand gestures to the site's location at the waters edge, and the other relating to the more immediate surroundings and scale of the pedestrian.

The tower is arranged as a dynamic composition broken into three primary elements in order to reduce its apparent bulk and to create more elegant proportions. A neutral block of flamed black granite acts as a visual backdrop and securely attaches the building to the ground. A metal frame intersects the block and presents a facade toward the promenade, while a waving screen of green glass is layered over the frame creating an iridescent surface which refracts sun light and poetically refers to the everchanging motion of the sea.

Two secondary architectural elements are present at the top of the building. On the South side, a helipad is cantilevered off the surface, accenting the more neutral surface of this facade and forming a unique skyline seen from the Teleport highway below. On the North, the reception room with its billboard like facade surfaced in mirror glass acts as a beacon toward the city, amplifying the light of the setting sun.

At the base of the tower a loose arrangement of objects of smaller scale and refined detail are placed. The Banking Hall, Art Gallery, Restaurants and Multipurpose Hall present a landscape of pavillion and garden analogos to traditional Japanese garden design, and which lend a rich experiential quality to the public realm.