Takeshita Concert Hall
| Location: | Tokyo, Japan |
|---|---|
| Status: | Competition Entry |
| Date: | 2015 |
The Takeshita House of Music is located between a centre of youth pop culture on Takeshita-Dori, the high-street shopping of Meiji-Dori (connecting Takeshita to Omotesando), and the traditional landscape of the Togo Shrine. This context presents an opportunity to create a place of exchange between these different worlds, attracting a wider range of audiences and performers, fluidly accommodating the contrasting identities of adjacent neighborhoods.
Our proposal is an attempt to remove from the music hall any sense of exclusivity, monumentality, or association with an unapproachable ‘high’ culture. Instead, the concert hall must be accessible and open. To this end, the theatre volume is wrapped in a lightweight, open structure, which allows public spaces such as the restaurant and bar to support the life on the street as well as serving the guests seeing a performance. This type of structure is a contemporary adaptation of traditional Japanese framing typologies, which allow spaces to be selectively indoor or outdoor.
A narrow, one storey pavilion extends the commercial frontage on the north side of TakeshitaDori, and creates a permeable transition into a public square that links Meiji-Dori Street to the Togo Shrine garden path, and to the entrance foyer of the theatre.
The concert hall itself is the classic shoebox shapeof dimensions similar to Boston Symphony Hall (still considered one of the acoustically greatest halls in the world) with three tiers of wraparound balconies. The end wall behind the stage is acoustic glazing, corrugated to diffuse sound, allowing natural light into the hall while presenting the image of the city as a backdrop to the performance. Towards the entrance, the concert hall lobbies on each floor face onto the Togo Shrine park. In addition, the ground level side walls of the theatre are designed to pivot open, creating for certain events a new public relationship between the concert hall and its surroundings. These pivoting panels not only allow for a seamless transition between the plaza and the concert hall, they also help welcome a greater variety of musical genres within the concert hall by creating an open condition which is more acoustically suitable for amplified music.