Palaceside Building appears in “Nikken Sekkei: A 115-Year Life Chronicle,” issued by Nikken Sekkei Ltd.—the building’s designer—as it looks back on its history (photos at right and below) show the cover.
It is a “company history,” but not the usual kind. It is assembled, the book says (“In Place of an Epilogue”), by treating Nikken Sekkei as a single “living system” and introducing it from birth to the present.
The book is not for sale, but it expands and reedits articles of the same title serialized on the company website, and can be read almost in full online (http://www.nikken.co.jp/ja/archives/history/index.html).
A taste…
Nikken Sekkei’s roots are in the Sumitomo zaibatsu. In 1895 (Meiji 28), Sumitomo decided to found a bank and, holding that the head-office and bank buildings should be “architecture of a hundred-year plan,” created a Temporary Construction Department at the Sumitomo head office. As the name suggests, it was at first only to build the head office, but it began with the Osaka Library and the Sumitomo family’s Suma villa. It later became a standing body meeting the building needs of Sumitomo’s growing businesses. … (much skipped) … During the war, national policy merged Sumitomo’s real-estate units into Sumitomo Land Engineering; after the war, through the twists of zaibatsu dissolution, it became independent in 1950 (Showa 25) as Nikken Sekkei Komu. Thereafter it left Sumitomo and took its own path.
Now the Palaceside Building pages (top photo). Six pages introduce the project; pride at tackling a job under pressure to replace the celebrated Reader’s Digest building, on a tight 33-month schedule, seeps between the lines.
The subtitle, “Realizing the texture of Japanese architecture with modern technology,” frames aluminum horizontal louvers that suggest Japanese delicacy and a rhythmic wall of vertical downspouts and gutters. It defines the work as “a huge office building with the ‘texture of a see-through composition’ that Japanese architecture has traditionally held.”
That came from the thought of the late Hayashi Shoji, who led the design team. His words are quoted: “Detail is a microcosm; an interpretation of space exists there in complete form, however condensed.”
Reading the book, one feels again how much of the makers’ feeling is packed in.