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5-1 Koishikawa
Bunkyo, Tokyo
Japan
An exhibition of objects has to do more than display well-made pieces. The work needed a single idea strong enough that a collection of glass pieces reads as one body — in a room that offers no flat wall and no neutral background to hide behind. Spiral's atrium ramp puts every piece in the round, at changing height, against a moving audience.
The through-line came from the andon: a light source you read through a surface rather than at. That set the material logic. Ribbed glass and half-mirror glass do different things to the same light — one diffuses and repeats it, the other returns the room to itself — and the design work sat in deciding where each behaviour belonged, at what scale, and how the light lives inside the piece rather than on it. The room, not the object, was the unit of judgment. A piece earned its place only if it deepened the one idea.
Design collaboration across the full body of work — material and light direction, the resolution of each series, and the relationship between the pieces and the atrium. Concept through to what was built.
