Koizumi Sangyo Office Building

Peter Eisenman – Koizumi Sangyo Office Building, Tokyo-Japan, 1988-1990

The aim of the Koizumi project was to develop something from the inside. Instead of imposing something new from the outside. In the postwar tradition of curtain wall construction, there is the possibility of introducing anomalous elements that could explode and cause both the inside and outside of the structure to change, like putting a grain of sand in an oyster to make a pearl grow. Therefore, K Architects and Associates designed an office building and Eisenman Architects inserted “two pieces of sand” in the opposite upper and lower corners. By growing out from the inside, the architecture mirrors the internal functions and describes the process of creating, marking and reading space.

The three-dimensional L-shape used in the exfoliation is initially an unstable form. The interaction of two L-shapes, one green and one pink, is represented throughout the building in “traces” and “imprints”. The tilt of the other two into each other, which vibrates the spatial dimension, is the tilt of the orthogonal that reduces the imprints and produces. This destabilizes not only the space itself, but also the traditional notion of how space should be read.

The spatial interaction of the other also results in two grids, both remnants of the facade. One is a trace of the L-shape in the vertical dimension, the other is a trace of the oblique or slanted dimension. Although the L-shapes appear in the upper and lower corners of the building. Unlike the typical office building, where every floor is the same, here something different appears on every floor. No floor has a complete closure. There is always a textual opening somewhere else, below or above. At the same time, it is necessary to occupy the building and understand it not as a single entity or a single reading but as a series of multiple and varied conditions. Each floor is not an object to be understood alone but is seen as part of these multiple texts.
Translation from the site Eisenman Architects