Pizza spectacle

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1997

La Maremma by the Richard Rogers Partnership is a new Italian pizza restaurant in Tokyo which encapsulates a bizarre set of circumstances. The client is Fuji TV which occupies a gigantesque 20-storey building by Kenzo Tange, overlooking booming Tokyo Bay.

The site reserved for La Maremma was on the seventh floor, intended to be reached by a ceremonial seven-storey flight of steps, or by lift. The architects were presented with a weird plan, shaped like the end of a golf club, and interrupted by the giant order of the building crashing through it. From the seventh floor there should have been an extraordinary view of the Bay, but the site was set back and the view obscured by a parapet and a great deal of aerial clutter.

In consequence the architects have obliterated the prospect, turning the long inner curve of wall into a huge screen for a continual lightshow. The idea developed out of their earlier design of a lightshow for a Tokyo exhibition (which got them the present commission). Windows were blocked out and the surface lined with reflective white fabric suspended on wires. The structure is stabilised by timber bands and the effect is somewhere between Japanese blinds and ship's rigging.

Embraced by the wide screen, La Maremma consists of a big public dining room in the golf club head served by a linear kitchen running from the reception along the inside wall, and a small private wood-panelled club slotted into the truncated handle. Between them, where the inner wall turns a right angle is a service point. The model for the gleaming kitchen which defines the length of the restaurant was provided by the River Care, originally designed by the practice as its staff canteen, now a fashionable restaurant. As in London, there is a long shiny counter of folded stainless steel and a bread oven, with preparation of the food being carried out in full view of the dining room.

Aside from the fundamental purpose of providing food, the reason for the restaurant's existence is somewhat surreal. Fuji has its own staff canteen, but La Maremma was conceived as a showground for visiting celebrities who parade along what is in effect a catwalk running between the counter and dining room to their private destination. The spectators are the starstruck diners who come to catch glimpses of them. The whole is a piece of symbiotic theatre. The space is suffused with changing light, and behind the strutters are the pizza chefs dexterously wielding their dough - the doughy acrobatics being not unlike the showy antics of knife-twirling Japanese chefs. Mirrored panelling on the counter's side multiplies the images of diners watching the stars watching them.

Underfoot, the floor is of poured resin embedded with stainless steel chips which shimmer under the light. To soften the acoustical effect of this and other hard surfaces in the restaurant, the ceiling sprinkled with tiny lights is of perforated plasterboard and acoustic quilt; while behind the screen a zigzagging glass wall, six foot in height, has been designed to disperse sound.