Architecture as Exhibition Apparatus: TOKYO NODE at Toranomon Hills and the City-Facing Screen

At an intersection in Toranomon, you hold a smartphone up toward the high-rise tower in front of you. Inside the screen, the outer wall of glass and stone is quietly cut away, and from behind it a dancer appears and begins to move along the side of the building. The actual wall, of course, has not changed at all. Yet through that small window in the device, the skin of the newest building in the city has, for the moment, become a single screen.

This is the scene that TOKYO NODE Xplorer, an app operated by Mori Building, shows at the foot of Toranomon Hills Station Tower. And this event — a building's wall becoming a surface for moving image — reflects back, from the side of the street, the character of one facility placed at the very top of that tower. What this essay treats is that facility: TOKYO NODE, an information-dissemination hub that opened on 6 October 2023.

An Exhibition Apparatus Stacked at the Summit

TOKYO NODE is not a free-standing building. It is distributed across the 8th floor and floors 45 to 49 of Toranomon Hills Station Tower, a supertall built as one with the station of the Hibiya subway line. The design was by OMA's Shohei Shigematsu. The facility totals roughly 10,000 square metres. Exhibition, performance, research and development, dining and a garden are stacked vertically in the upper part of the tower.

Its core is GALLERY A, B and C on the 45th floor, together with the HALL on the 46th. The three galleries on the 45th floor total roughly 1,500 square metres. GALLERY A, among them, has a domed ceiling reaching a maximum of about 15 metres. B, with a ceiling height of 5.5 metres and a floor area of about 1,020 square metres, is an exceptional footprint for the upper floors of a supertall. C is 12 metres of free space. The HALL on the 46th floor is about 460 square metres with roughly 330 seats, its ceiling reaching a maximum of 11.6 metres.

What deserves attention here is that these spaces weave "surfaces for projecting images" into the architecture in advance. Behind the HALL's stage there is a horizon screen 16 metres wide and 9 metres tall, with a transparent LED vision placed in front of it. A 4K-capable projector at 36,500 lumens superimposes an image from the front, and together with a stage mechanism that rises and falls, the same room can be recomposed for a business presentation, for a live concert, or as an immersive screening space. The screen is not equipment carried in afterwards; ceiling height, elevating floor and projection distance were designed as a single whole from the start.

What TENKEI has examined under the category "ZO (造)" has been cases in which the screen is integrated inseparably into the body of the architecture. The spherical outer surface of the Sphere in Las Vegas; the M+ facade, legible from across Victoria Harbour — each of these architecturalises "a single enormous surface to be seen from outside". TOKYO NODE, by contrast, architecturalises the screen as "an apparatus you enter and recompose". Not a surface, but the variable vessel itself becomes the exhibition apparatus.

Walls That Move — The Opening as Demonstration

The opening commission performed that character directly. It was Syn: Unfolded Horizon of Bodily Senses, by Rhizomatiks and ELEVENPLAY, the dance company led by MIKIKO. Over the 38 days from 6 October to 12 November 2023, with the gallery and its 15-metre ceiling as the stage, 24 dancers gave a performance of roughly 70 minutes.

The protagonist of Syn was, alongside the dancers, the movable "walls" that re-partitioned the space itself. Rather than being shown a single-track narrative, the audience walks in an order of its own choosing among several scenes renewed each time the walls move. A prologue in which AI analyses the human; a main section in which walls and dancers deform the space; a closing section leaning toward music — the same room takes on the shape of separate places as the performance proceeds. The 15-metre ceiling, the elevating stage, the movable walls: all of them were used as variable elements moving for the sake of a single work. Architecture was not a fixed vessel but a set of surfaces edited moment by moment for the duration of the performance.

That the opening commission took movable walls as its subject, in the form of a performance, was no accident. TOKYO NODE's architecture is itself designed from the outset on the premise of being recomposed. Rhizomatiks × ELEVENPLAY, who have long interrogated the border between stage space and technology, were chosen as the artists who could make that thinking visible most sharply. Since then, the facility has run a succession of exhibitions whose programming is exchanged with each run, beginning with a large-scale solo show by Mika Ninagawa. Precisely because the vessel is not fixed, it can take on moving-image expression of any kind without having to choose among them.

A Screen That Seeps Out into the City

TOKYO NODE's other axis is TOKYO NODE LAB on the 8th floor. This is not an exhibition room but a year-round experimental base where Mori Building prototypes new urban experiences together with outside creators and companies. The AR app TOKYO NODE Xplorer — the "wall dissolving, dancer appearing" described at the top of this essay — was born from this LAB.

Xplorer superimposes three things: Sony's VPS (visual positioning system) technology, PLATEAU — the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism's programme for building 3D urban data — and the high-precision building data Mori Building holds. Point the camera at Toranomon Hills Station Tower or at its surroundings, and the device works out to the centimetre which way it is facing, fixing AR content exactly onto the real building. The three-dimensional footage of a dancer, shot in a volumetric studio, cutting open the tower's wall to appear — the scene described at the opening — is how it comes about.

Here the singularity of this facility as a case of "ZO" is concentrated. Where M+ and the Sphere pasted enormous physical screens onto architectural skins and offered them to the city, TOKYO NODE holds no physical street-facing screen at all. Instead it converts the building's own outer form precisely into data and, through the devices of those who come to the district, opens a temporary image surface anywhere in the surrounding blocks. The logic of the exhibition apparatus stacked at the summit — not a fixed surface but a recomposable place — seeps out, just as it is, into the blocks at ground level.

Opening a Ma, Kindling a Tenkei

Seen through the paired concepts of ma (間, the interval) and tenkei (点景), the outline of TOKYO NODE's design comes clear.

What the HALL and the GALLERY embody is a thinking that opens up ma thoroughly. The 15-metre ceiling, the movable walls, the elevating stage, the screen woven into the architecture rather than brought in as equipment — every one of these is an emptiness prepared so as not to fix any particular expression. By emptying the vessel side in advance, the same room can take on entirely different works from run to run. The movable walls of Syn can be called an extreme demonstration of that ma, opened and closed in real time during the performance itself.

What Xplorer shows on the street, on the other hand, is unmistakably tenkei. Within the familiar scenery of Toranomon, for only the instant a device is held up, a small presence — a dancer — rises into view. As with the boats and travellers of a landscape painting, it does not occupy the scenery. It appears in a place, behaves for a while, and vanishes when the device is lowered. The vast ma that is the building kindles, in the hand of each visitor to the district, a single tenkei each time.

A variable vessel emptied out at the summit of the city, and images kindled instant by instant in the blocks below. What TOKYO NODE demonstrates is one answer: that a screen facing the city need not necessarily be "one large surface kept permanently alight". Empty the vessel in advance, and kindle a figure upon it only when one is needed. Rather than covering the city with the sheer mass of fixed surfaces, give the scenery meaning through an editable blankness and the fleeting image that rises upon it. That is a form of urban screen belonging to a lineage quite separate from the "continuously posted advertising surface" the word signage calls to mind.

What the person holding up a device at the Toranomon intersection sees is a dancer emerging from behind a glass wall, and at the same time the distant shadow of an exhibition apparatus stacked on the floors above that wall, endlessly recomposed. The ma opened at the summit of the building gives the city's scenery a bearing, as a tenkei at ground level. (Read it alongside immersion that enters the work with the whole body, a case that poses the question from another angle.)

Sources

1. fig.001TOKYO NODE 開館記念企画 “Syn : 身体感覚の新たな地平” by Rhizomatiks × ELEVENPLAY ティザームービー 2(2023-10)
2. fig.002ELEVENPLAY x Rhizomatiks “syn” (2023) multicam — Daito Manabe(2023)
3. fig.003【プレスリリース動画】「TOKYO NODE Xplorer」に SoVeC のデジタルツイン技術が採用(2023)
4. [4]TOKYO NODE — Official Site
5. [5]TOKYO NODE HALL — Facilities and Specifications
6. [6]Toranomon Hills Station Tower — Mori Building Projects
7. [7]虎ノ門ヒルズ ステーションタワーが10月6日オープン。「TOKYO NODE」開館記念企画はライゾマティクスとイレブンプレイの新作 — Tokyo Art Beat(2023-10)
8. [8]TOKYO NODE Xplorer, an AR App for New Urban Experiences — TOKYO NODE LAB
9. [9]TOKYO NODE — Wikipedia (Japanese)

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Mori Building Co., Ltd. (TOKYO NODE operations)

LOCATION

Tokyo

MODEL

Operator commission — The venue operator commissions and programmes artists per run, mostly as ticketed exhibitions; the opening was commissioned from Rhizomatiks × ELEVENPLAY

CADENCE

Successive run-based exhibitions (the opening, Syn, ran 38 days, 6 Oct–12 Nov 2023); the 8F LAB operates year-round as an R&D and co-creation base

SPEC

c. 10,000㎡ total (8F, 45–49F). Galleries A/B/C total c. 1,500㎡ (A is a dome up to c. 15m, c. 240㎡). HALL c. 460㎡, ~330 seats, max ceiling 11.6m, a 16×9m horizon screen plus a transparent LED vision and a 4K / 36,500-lumen projector

SINCE

2023-10

STATUS

Active

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