Weird Mikimoto Building

The Mikimoto building is a retail shop operated by famous jewlery manufacturer and retailer K. Mikimoto & Company. The building has irregularly shaped windows randomly placed on the facade. The outer walls‚ made of steel plates reinforced with concrete‚ serve as the support structure for the 50-meter high‚ ninestorey building. Thanks to this integrated design‚ no support columns interrupt the interior space.

Mikimoto Ginza 2 was designed by Toyo Ito‚ winner of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the 8th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Bienniale.
Here are his thoughts on Mikimoto building: "In this work, I have followed the same system already experimented in the Tod’s building, but I didn’t use concrete this time. This time the skin is steel. Since Ginza is a very sophisticated area, I wanted to make the architecture primitive…
Although the skin is built with 12 mm steel plate, when you weld it everything tends to bend. Furthermore, if you don’t do it perfectly, at the end you see the weld joints. To achieve a perfectly flat surface we had to work a lot. We, the engineers, the workers… all had to experiment with a lot of different solutions."