An open competition for a Fashion Museum in the shopping district of Aoyama in Tokyo.
Our proposal was to cut 100m strips from the city in the 4 directions from the site perimeter. Each strip will act as a digital pattern for the façade of the Museum.
The 4 city pattern strips are defined by the city grid that they describe. The outline of the building blocks, the pavement and street pattern all create a new layered geometry for the façade. These geometries taken on a depth by extruding the plan of the city by 6m for buildings and 3m for roads. These extruded blocks are then folded up and join together to form the skin of the Museum Tower.
A simple steel frame skeleton with a backbone of lift and stair cores acts as a scaffold to support this new draped building envelope. The building skin is a mixture of glass and translucent polycarbonate and defined by the extruded geometry of the city below. The building surface is both opaque to control sun yet translucent to allow it to glow at night. The shadows of the frame, the display and the movement of the occupants animate the skin.
A runway or catwalk projects over Ometasando Street at first floor level and a skybar projects over on the top floor. Within the structure are a number of open courtyards which contain balconies with views across the city.