Facade of Void: TOD's building by Toyo Ito

Facade of Void TOD’S Omotesando Building by Toyo Ito Ren Luo

In the book ‘S, M, L, XL’, Rem Koolhaas introduces Bigness Theory into architecture. Regarding to the

fact that contemporary building projects’ scales as well as their complexities have been constantly growing into enormous, Rem believes that it is absolutely necessary to re-exam previous architectural dogmas, one of which always indicates that the facades of a building should own visual logic relating to its interior and environment. The term ‘Bigness’ does not only refer to the size of a building, but also to the fact that establishing connections between one building’s interior to its exterior has became less important. Due to developments of air-conditioning technology and manual lighting systems, architecture has drifted away from its urban context. Needing the city no longer, the building could now turn to self expression from head to toe. The very value of architecture is locked with wills of its architect and client. Toyo Ito’s TOD’S building in Tokyo somehow delivers this image in its unique way.

Designed for the acclaimed Italian fashion giant TOD, TOD’s building locates at Omotesando Avenue-

the fashion engine of glamorous city Tokyo. This area, by the time when Ito started to design, was already full of fashion stores with various visual styles. It is architect’s challenge to push the new building’s design even farther so that it can stand out from its competitors. Obviously, Ito’s final proposal successfully achieved this goal. By using unique tree-like facade, Ito transformed the project- usually become kitsch when it exclusively try to fulfill its destiny as a showcase- into an urban icon. Store here is no longer an opaque box with luxury interior ornate, but a transparent and elegant solution responding to Omotesando’s sumptuousness. However, after closer inspection, we could conclude that: the success of this building has nothing to do with its interior space or even its program except its facade. As the climax of the whole performance, this carefully designed facade conceals a voids within it: viewers will find only curtain call once they trespass it.

Despite Ito’s explanation indicating that the unique facade stands as both envelop and structure system,

TOD’s building is actually not the first of its kind. The HSBC headquarter in Hongkong, designed by i1970s, also own a striking facade which not only visually, but physically supports the whole building. Yet this two samples’ equivalents stop here. As for HSBC, Foster integrates service programs- fire stairs, utility spaces, elevators as well as window washing platforms- into the facade system. Foster even designed a reflected-panel set on the envelop in order to provide natural light for the main atrium.

Fig1. TOD’S building ‘s out look

All these calculation make the facade system as an indivisible part of the whole building. It interacts with building’s daily events and program requirements. TOD’s building, on contrary, is not playing game like this. Although its facade supports the building as main structure, it did not interact with interior programs. From head to toe, it is simply a single layer closure, spatially detached from the building’s use.

What Ito provides is a quarantined urban space for his client- a void, which means nothing but also means anything. The envelop reflects only itself as well as stands for itself. One could say the facade does not care about what it contents, nor its environment; or could argue it provide infinite possibilities. Yet it forces us treat the project more like a garden wall in the middle of Tokyo: it produces a mystery quiet space, which contents nothing fancy but a blank ground, like a speechless Japanese dry landscape.

Renaissance architects always tested portions of their buildings’ out-look in order to match them beauti-

fully to the interior designs: windows indicate usable spaces, columns hint vertical structures and horizontal foot lines dividing the facade show heights of all floors. Even more, they also delivered information about the building’s physical mechanism by reveal that fake columns on facade ‘support’ slabs.( shown as footlines) This tectonic preference makes facades of Renaissance buildings own a certain character of transparency- viewer could grasp the entire building’s narration by inspecting its facade. As a matter of fact, HSBC building also accomplished this by exposing those huge metal trusses so that viewer could reach the understanding that the volume is hang by these structures. Ito’s trees, to some extent, have no intention to reveal this classical metaphor in architecture. Although it indeed hold this building physically, the facade seems too vulnerable to do it: for its size is relatively thin and delicate. Even more, it does not give any hint about its mechanical relationship with slabs. All these trees’ branches go straight from bottom to top, without being stopped by slabs and beams as Renaissance buildings did. It visually covers the truth about this building from viewer, making it as a miracle of engineering. From this moment on, pushing Rem’s ‘BIG’ theory even farther, the facade gains its total independence. For it no longer need to be constrained by all the dogmas of the project- it stops becoming information board of the building. Being able to physically support itself, it even does not need extra structure. The facade it alone is already an architecture- a completed enclosure system of its own. This gives a building opportunity to own entirely different faces at same time: one to its program, one to city, and one to self-performance.

Fig. 2 (right) HSBC Hong Kong headquarter Fig. 3 (below) Interior look of TOD’S buillding