how big you want? there are a lot of housing projects at the very least. check the magazines like GA document, 新建築 and so on.

jean nouvel and grimshaw (i think its him - in marunouchi) and others have done towers here recently. nouvel's is not very good.

No, I'm not very impressed with Nouvel in Japan. You'd think the French/Japanese style connection would've continued into architecture. Apparently not.

Big = Visibly big or significant of a landmark-scale.

shinonome canal court was recently completed. google the name for images and info. sejima, riken yamamoto, others have built there. landscape design by a famous designer whose name currently escape me...

kurokawa recently completed his art center

ando and al recently did extention to roppongi hills at tokyo midtown and he also did his thing at omotesando hills.


nouvel was working for money money money. design was not part of the design. the tower i was thinkin gof in marunouchi is by Michael Hopkins not grimshaw and is called the shin-marunouchi building. i can't find any good pics online after a quick googling, but it is nonethless one of my favorites of the new towers that have been going up around tokyo station.

there is more but that is all that i know of off top of my head. good luck with search

for the projects jump just mentioned, starting from the som/edaw master plan, just check out architectural record from 11/07. big coverage of the kurokawa, ando & kuma.

...side tangent: Who, in your opinion, is the "biggest" architect in Japan?

personally i like SANAA and ito, but they don't do so much in japan lately. the guys who build the most are the big construction companies, like nikken sekkei, takenaka, etc. basically they are equiv. to SOM or HOK, but do construction too. design content is about the same - sometimes really exceptional work, but usually rather bland and well built. no one really equiv to H+DeM or OMA here that comes to mind. what a pittah.

kuma seems to be everywhere these days. maybe not big yet, but he's a good bet.

my feeling is he is of the master type though, so am not so sure he can get much bigger, steven. i do like his work, however.

the brilliance of rem, and even sejima or ito is that they are not caught up in being the master designer with minions helping to realise their vision and no real input allowed from below...they are quite content to pick the brains of the clever people they hire. kuma, ando, and others who are really tied up in a personal style or vision, are not like that at all. zumthor too. that is not bad, but it makes scaling up hard. the only one i know who was able to get big and keep a tight structure is ando. he does it by only doing prelim design and by setting a simple style that his kids can use as a pattern.

as a way of running an office rem's appeals to me quite a lot. it is my socialist education at archi-school, i think. it also seems to be a way of getting big and staying creative, something most corporate firms are not able to do...