Japanese Polish

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2000

Business meetings in Japan are rather different from elsewhere, as this huge piece of furniture makes clear.

Bartle Bogle Hegartys Tokyo office meeting place was the only interior design project (out of many) that won through to the final round of jury debate. In effect, the affair is a huge, movable (the firm plans to relocate in a couple of years' time) and very well-crafted piece of furniture. It had to make no impact on the building in which it is temporarily housed, but it had to generate intensity of feeling and focus discussion.

It is a calm wide U made exquisitely in polished Japanese lacquer: almost a toy, which you have to take off your shoes to enter. The form hovers over the bright red carpet and the table. Carefully considered lighting fixed to the contraption ensures that the place has a special intensity, quite different from the normative level of cool grey luminance provided by the usual open-plan office.

The space can be made more intense when it is enclosed by its silver curtains which not only allow the exchange of whispers, but allow the executives to show each other secret images.

Architects

Mark Dytham, Astrid Klein

Klein Dytham Architecture, Tokyo