TOKYO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

CENTENNIAL HALL

 This project is taken from an existing building - Tokyo Institute of Technology Centennial Hall. The 3d model is drawn base on the floor plans, a few photo the elevation and the rest from part of my design. As the result this building does not look exactly similar.  Mechanical shading devices are fixed on north and south facade (to reduce direct sunlight go into the building). The mechanical shading devices rotate accord with  altitude of the sun. (Shading devices and building animations)

After nearly three decades spent following a self-prescribed regimen of a house a year, Kazuo Shinohara (b. 1925) has begun to design structures of practically every conceivable building type, from museum and office building to hospital and police station. He has entered competitions for a company head­quarters in West Germany and the new National Theater in Japan. For Tokyo Institute of Technology, the university at which he taught until 1986, he has built Centennial Hall, which serves a mixed bag of uses. In short, in recent years, an architect whose metier we had understood to be residential design has enormously broadened his scope of activities.

 Is this development a mere consequence of increased opportunities to design a greater variety of buildings, elicited by an ever-burgeoning international reputation and met, on his own part, by a desire to test his talents on larger commissions?

 He is, by his own admission, a contrary man. In the days when the Metabolists were pro­posing technologically oriented solutions, he took an aestheticist stance. He avoided using Le Corbusier's name when it was on everybody else's lips in Japan, choosing instead to refer to the Swiss as a certain well-known architect. And whereas the normal career pattern for a modern Japanese artist (or architect) is to embrace Western ways early in life and to revert to a more traditional approach in old age, Shinohara's point of departure was traditional Japanese architecture, and it is only recently that he has started to show interest in modernist, Western architecture.

The architect, long fascinated by the Apollo lunar landing module and the F- 14 jetfighter; first imagined a gleaming cylinder floating in space. Ultimately, the cylinder-reduced to a hafl­cylinder came to be supported on two wall slabs; nevertheless, under the right conditions it seems suspended in mid-air.

His career has had its own internal dynamics. His well-known changes in style may reflect in some measure larger transformations in society, and Shinohara himself suggests, for example, that the schism made manifest by the university disorders of the late 1960s may have some relationship to the appearance of so-called "fissure spaces" in his second style. All in all, however, the turns in his career seem to have been inner-directed. If external factors such as the availability of larger commissions can be dismissed, what then accounts for the recent expansion of his repertory?

    The answer may be that Shinohara no longer needs to work solely with houses. Indeed, houses by their very nature may hamper the full expression of his emerging worldview. He began with a vision of a perfect, unitary world. His earliest houses, such as the Umbrella House (1962) and the House in White (1966), with their centralized schemes and large, sheltering roofs, were self-contained, ideal spaces. The additions to his oeuvre over the years record the gradual destruction and fragmentation of those spaces. Compare any one of the early works to the House Under High Voltage Lines (1982) or the House in Yokohama (1984), and one sees how a serene and predictable world has given way to a world with its full share of shocks and surprises, one that opens itself up, albeit in idiosyncratic ways, to the larger world.

    The process has reached a critical stage. Shinohara very well may continue to design houses, but there is no longer any point in restricting himself to that building type. Having acknowledged the larger world, that is, once having allowed the city to exert its influence, whether noxious or benign, on his houses, he cannot go back to designing hermetic spaces. There is no regaining the purity or sanctity of the house. Once the house becomes a part of the city, then there is less to distinguish it from other urban fragments, and a den­tist's clinic, say, will do as well for the architect as the subject of design as would the den­tist's residence.

From Tokyo Shinohara has abstracted the notion of progressive anarchy, which he defines as the vitality that a city comes to possess through the catalyst of the strange, irrational mechanism called chaos and which is embodied in the design of Centennial Hall.

    Centennial Hall is located just inside the main gate to the campus of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and accommodates a museum, social facilities, and meeting rooms. A gleaming half-cylinder, clad in stainless steel, penetrates a four-story block wrapped in aluminum and glass. The formal elements of Centennial Hall are not knit tightly together. Instead, they are juxtaposed as if by happenstance.

    The half-cylinder is bent slightly in the middle, so that one end points to a nearby train station and the other to the middle of an open space on the campus. Shinohara is thus effecting a symbolic connection between town and gown. Yet the casual way in which he does this underscores the accidental quality of relationships between elements in Japanese cities.

    Inside, on the third floor the bottom of the half-cylinder cuts diagonally across the ceiling of a lobby, a reception room, and a small conference room, and to an observer the effect is startling, as if he were looking up at the belly of an airliner that had crashed into a conventional building. Shinohara intends the clash of completely different scales, materials, and axes to generate what he calls "random noise," which he believes to be the source of new values, ideas, and points of view.

   Centennial Hall is one of the most important Japanese buildings of the 1980s, and together with the projects emerging from his atelier represents a notable departure from his previous work.

    Over the years, Shinohara's preoccupation with houses has caused some observers, even ones who recognized his brilliance and originality to begrudge him unqualified praise. The foremost architects, it was implied, are those who excel in works at all sorts of scales and with all sorts of program requirements. The suggestion may or may not be valid, but soon the whole point as far as Kazuo Shinohara is concerned may become irrelevant.