Saint Gobain Headquarters
Sited at a stone’s throw from the Imperial Palace, the site is at the confluence of two different urban strands, crossing each other at a slight angle, both tangential to the oval city grid surrounding the Imperial Palace. Hence, the building marries in the heights two volumes with different orientations at ground level. Each volume has a different day and night luminescence expressed by the choice of different types of glass. Respecting the various height regulations, the building utilizes them to its own advantage. From pale green to complete transparency, all the colors and the textures of the building derive from the historical colour palette glass. Master Ray is used in the building sometimes backed with a thin layer of silver coating to give a metallic aspect to the glass. The same pattern is also used for the original white silk screen pattern on the façades. While it drew so much from the company history/technology – the bridge, through which we access the building, symbolizing the Saint-Gobain/Pont-a-Mousson bridge logo – the building also relates to the Japanese tradition and its re-interpretation in the contemporary context : silk screened glass, whose motif recalls the yuki mi (paper shoji with a transparent zone at eye level to watch the "snow falling"), had been used for the south-west/west volume, where it controls the sun’s intensity. Playing with the reference to the Kyoto Golden Pavilion Kinkakuji, which mirrors itself in the “Kyokochi” or “Kagami no mizu umi” (the mirror lake), we placed the Saint-Gobain headquarters above a water pond (at same level as the meeting rooms floor of the 1st basement) to recall the history of its location and soften as much as possible the contact of the building with the surrounding solid fog, the man made stalagmitic concrete environment : the Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama megalopolis.