Albert Abut Architecture experiment with glass in new Tokyo office for Saint-Gobain
Situated within a stone’s throw from the Imperial Palace, the site is at the confluence of two different urban tissues, crossing each other at a slight angle, both tangents to the oval city grid surrounding the Imperial Palace. The building design attempts to marry in the heights of two volumes with different orientations at ground level.
Housing the well-known glass producer Saint-Gobain, glass of various sorts is used abundantly both inside and outside the building to give each volume a different day and night luminescence, expressed by the choice of different glass types. The management rooms on the 7th floor are set in a glass cube equipped with vertical and horizontal electrical blind systems. From the pale green to the complete transparency, all the colours and the textures of the building are derived from the historical colour range of glass.
The ‘Master Ray’ type is used copiously throughout the building partitioning, sometimes with a thin layer of silver coating on its back to give a metallic look to the glass. The same pattern is also used for the original white silk screen pattern on the facades.
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