New Tokyo Life Style Think Zone

Roppongi Hills, the largest private urban redevelopment project in Japan, is a $2.5 billion, 24-acre complex in the middle of Tokyo. Combining culture, education, business, residence, commerce, parks, police station and post office, it implies a dramatic revision of past paradigms of Asian urban evolution

For decades, earthquake fears had turned Tokyo into a city intent on sprawl, but recent quake mitigation technologies have alleviated fears and made way for skyscrapers. And now, for ‘vertical garden cities’.

The Mori Building Company commissioned BMD to help create marketing and communications strategies for the construction and launch phases of this 21st century city rethink.

In a culture where people feel comfortable in a crowd, ‘freed space’ could feel like an uncomfortable oxymoron. Yet the notion of parks and foliage on land opened up by increased vertical density, thereby forming an enhanced environment in which nature and people co-exist harmoniously, seems somehow very Japanese.

Very Wa.

This dualistic play on vertical + horizontal metamorphosed into a mile-long, cinematic graphic narrative, designed to blanket the exterior construction-site hoarding. Through hundreds of images, it explores the story of Tokyo, interweaving the traditional and contemporary Japanese identity.

Within the site’s parameters, the “Think Zone” is a richly programmed event gallery wherein visitors experience a centerpiece video installation, “Tokyo Countdown,” which, through the lens of ‘artificial nature’ and other contradictory elements, posits the past, present and future of Tokyo in a global context.

BMD also co-authored, edited and designed 350-page monograph of essay and studies on the city’s future, free to “Think Zone” visitors, who also receive a custom-designed bag of notebooks, cards, letterheads and posters, each emblazoned with a provocation considering Tokyo’s amazing evolution.

Spaciousness needn’t be a rarity.