Architect Aoki's Office Wins Good Design Award

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"I'm more interested in designs that might at first glance seem orthodox but in fact reflect an unusual or innovative take on something that already exists."

The SIA Aoyama project fell into his lap. Long before any construction had started, in late 2005, a small recording label promised to rent the entire building from the developers on one condition: Hire Aoki. Within two months, Aoki had a proposal.

"Like a Loft"

His goal was to create a space that would be as close to a blank slate as possible. The hope was that the tower's tenants would have greater freedom to customize the space as they saw fit. His team discovered the building code would allow for ceilings 6 meters tall, and they set out to minimize dead-space corridors and maximize usable office area. "It's like a loft," Aoki says. "The occupants would be able to decorate and redesign the space themselves."

Natural lighting was also key. "Old buildings in the West have tall ceilings with windows that let in lots of light during the day. By mimicking those buildings, we didn't need windows all the way around," he says. And rather than parallel rows of long cylindrical fluorescent bulbs, Aoki chose lamps with a translucent shade that hang from the ceiling.

The place would be more suited to fashion houses and design studios in the neighborhood, not the cubicle-crammed variety filled with dark-suited salarymen. (It now houses clothier Sanei International. To give the building its mystique, Aoki asked construction company Kajima to create a uniformly smooth exterior—"like a polished rock"—of reinforced concrete. That required Kajima to hide the joints that connected each floor and normally stuck out, a technical problem the company took six months to solve.

The building's most distinctive characteristic, though, is its windows. They are all perfect squares, but are cut to seven different sizes. Adding to their motley appearance: Some of the glass panes are nearly flush with the outer wall while others aren't. Aoki and his staff made nearly 100 patterns from paper cutouts before settling on one they liked. The deciding factor: Its resemblance to things found in nature. "For example, a tree's leaves initially look similar, but if you line them up they're actually very different," says Aoki.

With Hiroko Tashiro in Tokyo.

Hall is BusinessWeek's technology correspondent in Tokyo.