Quotes of the Day
As the rest of Japan nurses its hangover from the bubble years, Minoru Mori, the country's most powerful and influential building tycoon, is partying like it's 1989. Shrugging at one of the worst real estate environments in Japanese history and sniffing at predictions of more property woes to come, the 68-year-old president and CEO of Mori Building recently cut the ribbon on his company's grandest achievement to date—a $2.25 billion, 11.6-hectare mega-complex comprising apartments, shops, restaurants, cafés, movie theaters, a museum, a hotel, a major TV studio, an outdoor amphitheater and a sprinkling of parks all anchored by a surprisingly attractive, barrel-chested 54-story office tower (designed by New York City-based firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates) smack in the heart of Tokyo's bustling Roppongi district. Called Roppongi Hills, the complex constitutes Japan's most ambitious urban-renewal scheme since the postwar era. Seventeen years in the making, it is also Mori's boldest declaration yet in his one-man campaign to save Tokyo from itself.
What about Tokyo needs saving, you may ask? Ugh, says Mori with a grimace and a sigh from across a titanic pink and white stone conference table at his company's headquarters (recently relocated to ... where else?). Mori hardly knows where to begin. Tokyo, he declares, is losing the race to remain the undisputed capital of Asia, primarily because it is such a difficult, ugly and expensive place to live. Thanks to a half-century of what he calls misguided zoning and public-policy decisions (spurred, in part, by earthquake-fear mongering and a fetishistic promotion of suburban home ownership), Tokyo's urban centers are disjointed agglomerations of short, shoddy buildings that empty out and shut down every evening (except for a few nightlife neighborhoods) as workers hop overcrowded trains to their cramped homes in the city's never-ending exurban hinterlands. "Commuting three hours a day is a reality for many people," Mori says. "But that leaves no time for them to be with their family, shop, go to a museum, go to a show or do any of the things that really make life enjoyable. Tokyo residents' quality of life is terrible."
All this might sound like the same old utopian vision of the "vertical city" that legendary modern architect Le Corbusier and his legions of followers frequently attempted (yet usually failed) to achieve throughout the 20th century. But Roppongi Hills improves on the old model by recognizing the virtues of carefully engineering the built environment to seem more organic and evolving than it actually is, in part by mixing the uses and purposes of various street-level spaces.
Massive urban-renewal projects have developed a well-deserved bad name over the past few decades because many architects have followed Le Corbusier's dictum—build tall towers with open, green spaces all around—a tad too rigidly. They tuck strictly zoned areas dedicated to shopping, dining or entertainment far from one another and well out of view—all in the service of big, empty courtyards. Too often, however, this regimentation has created street-level ghost towns of alienating public spaces, wastelands of open squares that actually repel rather than attract pedestrians.
Mori (who still counts Le Corbusier as a major influence in his life) says he has made that same mistake himself, most recently at the five-hectare Ark Hills complex, which he built in nearby Akasaka in 1986. There, the residences, offices, shops and public spaces are located away from one another, with a vast open area in the middle connecting them. This layout, he has come to believe, can be off-putting and inconvenient. That's why he decided Roppongi Hills should, in his words, "do Le Corbusier one better." He instructed the teams of international architects and designers working on the project to mix different uses of space throughout to ensure that the pedestrian experience was humanizing rather than alienating. Crowning the 54-story Mori Tower office building, for example, is not a floor or two of restaurants but six floors of public and semipublic spaces, including an art museum, an observatory deck, cafés, an academic center and library, a club and conference spaces. Likewise, by making the street-level areas narrower and more twisted than most centralized urban-design projects, Roppongi Hills replicates the complexity and surprises that make exploring minimally planned and (at least originally) haphazardly zoned neighborhoods such as New York City's Greenwich Village or Paris' St. Germain des Près so rewarding. Though nothing at Roppongi Hills is as old or rustic as those particular collections of streets, the air of discovery is similar. Tree-lined walkways, vehicular-restricted streets and shopping boulevards provide glimpses of a 17th century-style Japanese garden here, a glassed-in atrium there, a Shinto shrine farther beyond, perhaps, or one of a liberal sprinkling of outdoor sculptures by renowned artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Cai Guoqiang. "One of the ideas we worked with was, how do you create a vast project that doesn't feel vast?" says Jon Jerde, president of the Jerde Partnership, a Los Angeles firm that specializes in designing outdoor public spaces. "Through the materials and lighting, acoustics and other factors, we tried to make sure visitors didn't have a singularity of experience but a subset of experiences that create a whole."
Focusing on the pedestrian experience is important, but trying to repopulate central Tokyo is perhaps the most ambitious element of Mori's vision for improving the city's quality of life. Though Manhattan island and Tokyo's four central wards are roughly the same size, half a million people live in the core of Tokyo—Gotham is home to 1.5 million. And though New York City is far from a perfect model in every respect, Mori maintains that population density contributes much to the Big Apple's enviable cultural diversity and richness. Hoping to attract occupants to the four luxury apartment towers at Roppongi Hills—as well as lure hundreds of thousands of middle-class residents to nearby neighborhoods—he pounds relentlessly on the two benefits that he thinks his version of city living can provide: commuting times measured in minutes rather than hours, and a broader array of cultural offerings than even sophisticated Tokyoites are accustomed to. The Roppongi Hills Mori Art Museum, for example, will keep longer hours and host more evening functions than most other museums in Tokyo do, and the site's 10-screen Virgin Cinemas is one of the few theaters in the city to show movies after midnight. "We not only want to give people more time," Mori says, "we want to provide them with more rewarding things to do with that time." Masahiro Terada, senior managing planner at UG Toshi Kenchiku, an urban-planning and consulting firm in Tokyo, says that Roppongi Hills has indeed been a magnet for house hunters so far. "Already we have seen that people are choosing to relocate in nearby neighborhoods, just to be near Roppongi," he says.
No matter how well the project works as architecture (and it does work—rarely has a set of buildings, especially in Tokyo, seemed so refreshing) or as a force of lifestyle change in the years ahead, there is little doubt that Mori is facing some significant business challenges due to Tokyo's troubled real estate market. Dubbed the "2003 Problem" in Japan, 2.27 million square meters of office space is expected to come on line in Tokyo by the end of this year, far surpassing the record of 1.83 million square meters in 1994. Add to this a still deflating land-price bubble that's seeing prices continue to fall about 5% a year, and plenty of observers are forecasting average vacancy rates of 10% (from the current 3.5%) by the end of the year. Mori brushes such concerns aside with characteristic self-assurance, claiming that the office glut will be the other guys' problem. Open for business since late April, Roppongi Hills' commercial space is already 80% rented, Mori says. He even claims that the fact that many of Roppongi Hills' occupants are arriving from other Mori properties could be seen as a positive, because those vacated premises will assuredly be taken by companies looking to upgrade from other managers' properties.
Despite the hurdles that lie ahead, urban-planning consultant Masahiro Terada describes Mori's highfalutin talk as more than just a sales pitch. "Mori is showing how a redevelopment can bring change in a tangible way," he says. "If Mori Building continues to develop this philosophy and others follow suit, Tokyo will be a much more livable city even a few decades from now." And a more livable city is something every Tokyo resident would welcome.
- Jim Frederick | Tokyo
- Tycoon Minoru Mori wants to make Tokyo a more livable city