Who are cities built for? The Azabudai Hills complex, which now occupies 8 hectares in the heart of Tokyo, in the particularly expensive district of Minato-ku, invites you to ask the question. Three glass towers rise above a gleaming mattress of high-end shops and services that a troglodyte structure, strange to say the least, encloses in its concrete membranes. A body of water and small planted reliefs give the whole thing the neat look of a Playmobil town.
If it seems directly from an artificial intelligence program, the architecture of the lower levels is officially the work of Thomas Heatherwick, an English architect called every time we seek to give an Instagrammable character to a real estate project. luxury. We owe him, among other things, the Vessel, a flared metal structure, with no real purpose other than to serve as an emblem of the Hudson Yards, this district of Manhattan which the Spanish architect Andrés Jaque created, in an installation presented in 2023 at the Biennale de Venice, the emblem of globalized real estate speculation.
Halfway between Dali’s soft watches and Ridley Scott’s alien eggs, his flashy intervention makes us forget these towers that nothing fundamentally distinguishes from the countless thrusts of blue glass which standardize the landscapes of cities around the world. As long as we focus on their appearance, however, it is still Hudson Yards that we come to think of. With its slightly rounded line, its volume split into four blocks aggregated like petals, the Mori JP Tower, the tallest of the three, which rises to 330 meters, which also makes it the tallest in the country, clearly recalls the skyscraper sky designed by the American agency Diller Scofidio + Renfro for the New York district.
Associates within the American agency Pelli Clarke & Partners, Fred Clarke and Mitch Hirsch reject any American influence. This silhouette which now obstructs the perspective of many streets of Tokyo was inspired, they maintain, by the convex shape of the roofs (mukuri) of certain temples and vernacular constructions from the Edo period (1603-1868). Of this project of which they only completed the facade (in association with the Japanese Jun Mitsui), they also highlight the exceptional transparency of the glass which gives the impression, from the inside, of “floating in the sky » and promotes these apartments known to be the most expensive in Tokyo today – and which have sold, they assure, like hotcakes. The Hudson Yards sales pitch claimed the same elements of language.
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