The Okura Tokyo

IIn Toranomon, Tokyo, The Okura Tokyo opened in 2019 on the site of the Hotel Okura Main Wing, which closed in 2015. Yoshiro Taniguchi’s celebrated 1962 lobby has been recreated on the fifth floor of a 188-metre tower, with his son Yoshio Taniguchi as designer. The crystal-bead lanterns and hemp-leaf lattices can be seen once again.

Two buildings at the top of the slope

Climb the slope in Toranomon and you find two buildings of very different heights facing each other across a wide pool of water. One is the 41-storey Okura Prestige Tower, the other the 17-storey Okura Heritage Wing. On another side of the pool stands the gallery of the Okura Museum of Art, built in 1927.

From 1962 this site was home to the Main Wing of the Hotel Okura. Its founder, Kishichiro Okura, opened it on the grounds of the former residence of his father, Kihachiro. It was designed by committee, with Yoshiro Taniguchi, Hideo Kosaka, Hajime Shimizu, Akira Iwama and Kisaburo Ito among its members, and built by Taisei Corporation. The hotel entrance sat at the top of the slope and the banquet entrance at the bottom, and the guest-room wings spread in three directions from a central lift hall, a layout known as the “three arrows” plan.

The most loved part of the Main Wing was its Main Lobby, the work of Yoshiro Taniguchi. Lanterns shaped like cut crystal beads, lattices in the hemp-leaf pattern, tables and chairs set out like plum blossoms: it was a room that placed Japanese patterns inside the plain space of modern architecture.

In May 2014 the hotel announced that the Main Wing would be rebuilt. As its closure in August 2015 drew near, voices of regret came from abroad. The Washington Post questioned the decision, the British magazine Monocle published articles against it, and “#savetheokura” spread on social media. In its final weeks, the lobby is said to have been crowded with people coming for a last look.

In October 2015 the hotel announced that the lobby would be carried over, and brought onto the design team the architect Yoshio Taniguchi, eldest son of Yoshiro. On 12 September 2019 the hotel opened as The Okura Tokyo. The lobby of a demolished building, built again inside a new tower: is it a copy, or a new piece of architecture? That is the question this story asks.

If you stay, begin by standing in Okura Square, the forecourt enclosed by the two buildings and the museum. It was conceived by Yoshio Taniguchi. Granite is laid in a chequerboard, and a pool about 42 metres on each side fills the square. On the hexagonal island at its centre stands a willow, and straight lines drawn from here to each building mark the centre of each lobby. To make room for the square, the museum was moved 6.5 metres by hikiya, a technique of lifting a building and sliding it without taking it apart. In the morning and evening, the buildings and their surroundings are reflected in the water.

A lobby measured and copied

The recreated Main Lobby is on the fifth floor of the Prestige Tower. The site is ringed by slopes and drops steeply, so the hotel entrance and lobby are on the fifth floor, while the banquet entrance is on the first.

Before the Main Wing was demolished, every part of it was measured. An academic survey studied the walls, ceilings and columns, and each element of the lobby’s design down to its materials and construction. Some things about work done more than fifty years earlier only came to light at this stage.

Take the hemp-leaf kumiko lattice by the windows. The survey found that the three-pronged “leaf” pieces were set 3 mm lower than the frame of the lattice, a difference thought to have been calculated for eyes looking up from the lobby. The leaves were also turned 90 degrees, to keep the vertical lines of their veins from becoming too strong and to soften the light from outside.

The Okura Lanterns that hang from the ceiling take their form from kiriko-dama, cut crystal beads worn as necklaces in the Kofun period. Ten pentagonal acrylic panels are joined to make one bead, and five beads are strung vertically to make one lantern. Gold thread is set into the panels, so that by day they glow gold in natural light, and at night, when the lamps are lit, they appear as a silhouette of black lines. For the new lobby the outer panels were reused and the light sources changed to LED.

The four-petal flower pattern on the wall was designed, at Yoshiro Taniguchi’s request, by Kenkichi Tomimoto, a potter later named a Living National Treasure, and woven by Tatsumura Textile of Nishijin in Kyoto. Tatsumura wove it again from the original drawings, raising the flowers in relief. The large flower bowl at the centre, known as the “Rokkaku” (hexagon), was also Yoshiro’s idea, and its flowers are still changed during the day.

Not everything is the same, though. According to the hotel, the lobby was turned 90 degrees and the ceiling of the mezzanine raised by 280 mm. In the Main Wing’s last years, buildings around it had cut off much of the daylight; the new layout is said to have brought it back. The colours were matched not to the room as it looked at closing, but to how it would have looked about 25 years after opening. Handrails were added to meet current codes, and sprinklers were tucked discreetly into slits in thin ceiling strips.

To look unchanged, a great deal had to change.

To a guest, almost nothing seems to have changed. That is no accident. This is a lobby that was measured again for size and light, and reworked, precisely to keep the impression that nothing had changed.

If you stay, sit in the lobby both by day and by night. The gold thread in the lanterns reads as gold in daylight and as black lines after dark. Then go up to the sixth-floor mezzanine and look down: each lacquer table and its five chairs are arranged to form a plum blossom when seen from above.

A 41-storey tower and a 17-storey retreat

The new Okura is made of two buildings with different characters. The Prestige Tower is a 188-metre, 41-storey high-rise in which hotel and offices are stacked. Floors 8 to 25 are offices, floors 26 and 27 hold the fitness centre and spa, and guest rooms begin on the 28th floor. On the top floor, the 41st, are the teppanyaki restaurant Sazanka and the bar lounge Starlight.

Above ground the structure is steel, with some columns of CFT construction, steel tubes filled with concrete for strength. Vibration-control devices are also built in, and the hotel says the building was designed not to collapse even in the kind of great earthquake that comes once in several hundred years.

The Heritage Wing is a mid-rise of 17 storeys and 75 metres. Its 140 guest rooms are on floors 6 to 17, and even a standard Heritage Room measures 60 to 63 m². Its fifth-floor lobby is deliberately left bare, the whole space treated as a tokonoma alcove in which flowers and objects are placed. The main wall is decorated after the paper of the Sanjūrokunin Kashū, a National Treasure anthology kept at Nishi Honganji in Kyoto, and was moved here from the Heian Room of the old Main Wing. In the double-height stair between the fourth and fifth floors hangs a 12.5-metre wisteria chandelier by the architect Lina Ghotmeh.

North of the Heritage Wing lies the Okura Garden. It makes use of a slope with a 19-metre drop and carries on the idea of the stream garden that was once on the seventh floor of the Main Wing, expressing water flowing out from the pool in stone and gravel. Many of its trees, among them a great ginkgo, were moved from the Main Wing. About 1.3 hectares of green space, including Edomizaka Park, is open to the public, and this is said to have been one of the things that made the rebuilding possible.

For guests, the two buildings are a choice. Take the tower for height and views, the Heritage Wing for the garden and quiet. Wherever you stay, the two fifth-floor lobbies are connected inside the hotel. Stay in the tower and walk to the retreat’s lobby; stay in the retreat and walk to the father’s lobby.

Yoshio Taniguchi and his father’s lobby

Yoshio Taniguchi was born in Tokyo in 1937. He studied mechanical engineering at Keio University and architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. After working in Kenzo Tange’s laboratory and office, he set up on his own and designed the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures at the Tokyo National Museum, the new building of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, among many others. Known as a master of museum architecture, he died in December 2024, aged 87.

His father, Yoshiro Taniguchi, designed the Toyokan (Asian Gallery) of the Tokyo National Museum. The son’s Gallery of Horyuji Treasures stands on the same grounds. At the Okura, too, the son found himself working right beside his father. His task here was the design of the lobby areas that would become the face of the new Okura.

Taniguchi is said to have accepted the commission on condition that he could design the outdoor spaces as well as recreate the lobby. According to the hotel, the key he chose was “landscape”. Buildings eventually reach the end of their lives, but the land and the city remain. Only when there is a flow from the roads and squares into the site, and on into the building, he believed, can a landscape be made that stays in people’s memories.

So the answer to our question is this. In size and material, the Prestige Tower lobby is close to a copy of his father’s room. But the lines drawn from the slope to the pool, and straight from the hexagonal island to the heart of the lobby, are new, drawn by the son. To copy his father’s room, the son first remade the landscape that leads to it. Walk along the edge of the pool in Okura Square before entering the lobby, and that order becomes clear.

Three things to see here

「To copy his father’s room, the son first remade the landscape that leads to it.」

SUMIBIKI editors

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