Nature abstracted: a building that combines offices and shopping on one of Tokyo's most posh streets responds to contexts both physical and historical.

With its chichi shops and cafes sheltering under mature zelkova trees, Omotesando is Tokyo's equivalent of the Champs Elysees. In scale and ambience this grand boulevard is more European than the dense, jumbled Japanese streetscape. At its west end is the Meiji shrine, Tokyo's largest Shinto monument, while to the east it tapers and morphs into the city's Bond Street, an elegant ghetto of deluxe flagship shops.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The latest addition to this ghetto is a new headquarters by Kengo Kuma for LVMH, the luxury French retail conglomerate. Kuma's recent buildings (for instance the Woodblock Print Museum in Bato, AR October 2001) show him to be especially skilled at reinterpreting the austere tenets of traditional Japanese architecture in a lucid, modern way, so he might not seem like an obvious choice to promulgate the joys of luxurious excess; but the outcome is both distinctive and enigmatic.

Kuma's starting point is nature, a cherished commodity in the manmade dislocation and blare of modern Tokyo; specifically the zelkova trees, some as tall as 15m high, that line Omotesando boulevard. The new building is an abstraction of its arboreal neighbours, a seven-storey block encased on the street side by a linear screen of timber mullions that support a glass curtain wall. Spaced at 600mm centres and made of laminated Japanese larch, each mullion is tapered in section to form a slim fin which projects out 450mm from the face of the building. Though standard Japanese building regulations generally prohibit the external use of timber in urban areas, Kuma managed to sidestep this injunction by installing a sprinkler in each of the 84 mullions.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In some ways, the tight urban site made the internal organization a fait accompli, yet Kuma still manages to orchestrate some sense of drama and occasion. The timber screen encloses five floors of offices that sit above two lower floors of shops (there is a further shop floor below ground, as space in this location is far too precious to waste). Set back from the street at the west end is an entrance hall that leads up to a double-height reception space for the office floors lined with translucent glass. Part of the third and fourth floors are pulled away to create a spectacular roof terrace with views through the vertical larch screen. Offices overlooking the street also have these subtly filtered vistas, with the timber louvres providing protection from glare and heat gain.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Though the building is essentially a beautifully conceived and executed facade, Kuma's use of wood has a specific and more profound resonance, alluding to Tokyo's past when the majority of buildings were made of timber. It also connects with nature; the scale of the mullions is carefully judged to be slightly slimmer than the zelkova trunks and their spacing casts a particular fine-grained pattern of shadows, as the trees do. Finally, the larch carapace has the effect of dematerializing the building mass, another common theme of Kuma's recent work. Amid the artifice and ostentation of the surroundings, Kuma's precise, ascetic engagement with nature, light and materials creates its own kind of luxury. P. C.