The office, perhaps more than any other single building type of the present day, carries the true notions of the ideologies it is born in.
Florian Busch: R4
In Tokyo, on a critical site dominated by a myriad of constraints, Florian Busch Architects built an office building as a field of multiple focal points that would deal with the surroundings at discrete levels as well as in the overall unity of the building.
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- 08 May 2015
- Tokyo
The R4 building, designed by Florian Busch Architects, addresses the question how scale and location inform an inner-city office type, and how exactly this contextual necessity might in fact perfectly reflect an environment of unforced, informal, perhaps even natural “work efficiency”.
The site, a left-over perched between amassments of junk, proved more and more critical in this process: inconspicuous despite its prime location, dominated by a myriad of constraints that make it highly difficult to build on, between narrow road and a derelict cemetery, flanked by a 40m-tall apartment building and other nondescriptness, sights of a nearby park. Here, the architectural response could hardly be one mass of undifferentiated transparent homogeneity. Instead, a logical response was a field of multiple, varying focal points that would deal with the surroundings at discrete levels as well as in the overall unity of the office building.
R4, Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo
Program: office
Architects: Florian Busch Architects
Structural engineering: Akira Suzuki / ASA
Environmental and mechanical engineering: ymo
Contractor: Shin Corporation
Area: 145.2 sqm
Completion: 2015