tadao ando’s com­plic­ity in cor­po­rate cul­tural van­dal­ism in cen­tral tokyo. tadao ando is largely admired in the west for his archi­tec­ture of uncom­pro­mis­ing and cool min­i­mal­ism. but the other side to ando’s prac­tice is an uncom­pro­mis­ing and cool com­mer­cial­ism. omote­sando hills is the hara­juku devel­op­ment which swept away one of the few remain­ing exam­ples of tokyo’s pre-war embrace of archi­tec­tural mod­ernism; the bauhaus–inspired dōjunkai Aoyama Apart­ments, which had been built in 1927 after the 1923 kantō earth­quake.

these apart­ments, although in sore need of restora­tion, could, with a will, have been pre­served. what has replaced them is not the ando of the pared down cold un-dressed con­crete of his more well-known works, but a mon­u­ment to mod­ern con­sumerism — since the ini­tial excite­ment of the open­ing, the build­ing now looks like any of the other sani­tised anony­mous cathedral-like shoop­ing malls which have sprung up all over tokyo, thanks to the mori cor­po­ra­tion and their vision of the urban garden.