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Japanese reshape skyline again

Fumihiko Maki's 61-story skyscraper will be built at the World Trade Center site.

More than a decade and a half after Japanese companies began unloading their New York real estate portfolios, which had included icons like Rockefeller Center, the Tiffany Building and Essex House, Japan has again become a major force in reshaping the city skyline. But today, the impact is seen not in the buying and selling of trophy buildings — it's in the designing of them.

Following a long financial downturn that began in the early 1990s, Japan faltered economically but flourished culturally, according to Clifford Pearson, the deputy editor-in-chief of Architectural Record and a former Japan Society fellow.

"Japan became a real laboratory for innovative architecture and design," he said.

Today, architects from Japan are behind millions of square feet of new and soon-to-rise commercial, cultural and residential space in New York.

Among the projects on the horizon are Fumihiko Maki's angular office towers, which include a 61-story skyscraper to be built at the World Trade Center site with 1.8 million square feet of office space and 146,000 square feet of retail space, and a 14-story, 430,000-square-foot building at Cooper Square, which is scheduled to be completed by early 2011.

Months after snagging the World Trade Center commission, Maki, a Pritzker Prize winner, was chosen in 2004 to design the still-unbuilt, 35-story addition to the United Nations.

Another high-profile Japanese architect, Shigeru Ban, designed the "Metal Shutter Houses," a West Chelsea condo with a façade that changes according to the amount of natural light residents want filtered into their units.

"I like to create something contextual — a particular design for a particular place," Ban told The Real Deal, noting that the retractable window coverings that shroud the structure were inspired by the metal shutters on many of the neighborhood's older buildings.

The condo, which is being marketed by Corcoran Sunshine, is slated to open this fall, and all but one of its nine sprawling units have sold. (Still available is a 4,400-square-foot duplex on the market for $10.25 million.)

The 13-hour time difference between New York and Japan can create some communication challenges, but it also means that a building is essentially being worked on around the clock, said Edward Minskoff, the developer behind Maki's jewel-box inspired Cooper Square project at 51 Astor Place. He said between the Japanese firm designing the structure and the local architect often hired to assist with the project, there is almost always someone dealing with the project.

Asked about the surge of New York City commissions awarded to Japanese firms, Minskoff said: "People are looking for innovation, and this is what we're seeing right now."

This year, Japanese innovation also extended to the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, whose Tokyo-based firm SANAA was the subject of a retrospective exhibit at the museum.

Meanwhile, the Morimoto and Megu restaurants, the Yohji Yamamoto and Louis Vuitton stores, and the Museum of Modern Art are other recent examples of city buildings designed or redesigned by Japanese architects.

Those who follow architecture in the city say such high-profile projects are emblematic of a growing openness among New York institutions and real estate developers to seek out design talent from abroad.

They also speak to the allure of the simple forms and innovative use of space that are hallmarks of Japanese design, according to the architect Terence Riley. As a former chief curator for architecture and design at MoMA, Riley was instrumental in choosing the Tokyo-based Yoshio Taniguchi to redesign the museum, which reopened in 2004.

Riley, who went on to become the director of the Miami Art Museum, said the choice of Taniguchi was one of a couple of recent commissions that "had the impact of opening the design market to foreign architects" — including those not only from Japan, but also from Italy, France, England and elsewhere. He attributes the local success of Japanese firms, in particular, to their expertise in creating structures for dense, vertical cities.

"Most contemporary Japanese architecture is urban architecture," he said. "It is increasingly exportable because it answers real needs in places like Manhattan, where sites have multiple stakeholders, where there are often daunting adjacencies."

Also at work is the highly competitive nature of Japan's architectural field, in which a growing number of architects are seeking out commissions abroad, according to the architecture critic Martin Filler.

Japan's universities produce many more architecture graduates than the building design industry can accommodate, he said. Therefore, many trained architects take jobs as on-site project managers, creating an environment that fosters a high level of construction where "the seriously talented people rise to the top," said Filler, who writes for the New York Review of Books, among other publications.

In this elite universe of architects, he said, international recognition is "very important" and "an increasingly necessary part of getting work in Japan."

Seeking out a foreign architect was not an option that MoMA's first director, Alfred Barr Jr., had when the West 53rd Street museum went up in the 1930s, according to the architectural historian Francis Morrone.

Though Barr had wanted the German-born Mies van der Rohe to design the building, he faced opposition to hiring anyone but a local architect. The museum's commission ultimately went with the New York-based Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. At that time — and until about 15 years ago — New York's architectural community was mostly closed to foreign firms. Developers instead chose local architects versed in the city's zoning and building codes, Morrone said.

Still, there are notable exceptions, and the city is home to buildings by foreign — and, specifically, Japanese — architects that predate the MoMA redesign. There is Junzo Yoshimura's Japan Society building, which opened in 1971. There's also the interior of the west wing and the auditorium at the Brooklyn Museum, designed by Arata Isozaki together with James Stewart Polshek, and completed in the early 1990s.

Now, at a time when the Internet renders many traditional boundaries meaningless, it's no wonder that Japanese design has become increasingly sought after, said Yumi Kori, an architect who teaches at Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan. "The mood of this era fits to the Japanese style," she said.

Kori, who splits her time between Tokyo and New York, said the MoMA redesign helped introduce New Yorkers to the idea that architecture could be "invisible," insofar that it facilitates a fluid relationship between indoor and outdoor space.

That fluidity was also one of Junya Ishigami's goals for his Yohji Yamamoto boutique on Gansevoort Street, which opened earlier this year. The single-story, wedge-shaped structure features large picture windows that have been cut into the brick façade.

As a result, Ishigami explained, clothes displayed on racks in the gallery-like space are visible to pedestrians, and, in turn, "the changing exterior space and the activities of the city create a naturally rich interior space."