MA2 | Fashion Tower Museum
The project is an approach founded within the harmonious balance of technology, materials, form, and context. Achieving an iconic tower for Tokyo’s premier fashion district requires a methodology that achieves the beautiful, with the elegance and poetry of formal exuberance. Exuberance in the architectural discourse proposes robust variation in form, tectonics, and spatial experience. Within the context of the site on Omotesando Street, exuberant variation is subtle; sensitive to its surroundings, balance in composition, and its vertical expression portrays clarity.
The tower is composed of carbon fiber composite structural frames on the exterior, to integrate the varied surface façade. The project proposes to take advantage of Tokyo’s plastic recycling-production facilities utilizing plastics as an architectural material. Varied curvatures along the exterior – range in clear surfaces, translucent-frosted material, to opaque acrylic or fiber reinforced polymers. Combining carbon fiber for a structural skeleton with plastic surfaces for formal expression and elegance, it generates a continuous glossy surface with easy molding and fabrication capabilities.
The design intent is to achieve complexity with few molding component structures. The form of the building is based from an emergence logic which is derived from the rules of self-organization to create complexity. From simple to complex is the strategy of formation. The architecture is contained in a narrow street and surrounded by a neighborhood density and scale; from this the tower must emerge as an iconic figure. The technique is regulated by the sensitivity of street conditions and the aspirations of an artistic structure incorporating technical innovation and beauty.
