Heatherwick Studio’s design for Azabudai Hills aims to bring some soulfulness and a slice of wildness to the megacity
has dreamt up the organically flowing lower-level architecture, connecting the public area components through abundant greenery.Azabudai Hills broke ground in August 2019, with Thomas Heatherwick witnessing the Shinto priest blessings, as is customary at the start of construction projects in Japan – before switching to remote management due to the pandemic.
‘In the UK, we talk about construction work as managing conflict,’ says Heatherwick. ‘So I arrived in Tokyo thinking, what do we have to fight for? And everyone looked at me blankly. They are all endeavouring their absolute best to achieve what we really want within the budget and timescales. It’s one of the smoothest construction projects we have ever worked on.’ He adds: ‘I was inspired years ago by visiting Japanese craftspeople making religious artefacts for Buddhist temples.
Central to Heatherwick’s design at Azabudai Hills is a large pergola-style steel structure, with its grid format manipulated to create an organically curved rooftop, upon which people can walk among undulating expanses of greenery. It was driven by a desire to explore the boundaries of the human scale within a densely packed city. ‘There are more humans than ever, but we are actually similar in size to hundreds or thousands of years ago,’ he says.
It’s a big year in Japan for Heatherwick: the construction of Azabudai Hills coincides with a major new exhibition, at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, highlighting 28 projects around the world. ‘Soulfulness is something we are really missing,’ he says. ‘We need to think about the built world around us in a more emotion-centred way. I am interested in how we look at buildings more with our feelings than our intellect. For me, it’s about how we can avoid soullessness.
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