Architecture Misfits #43: NIKKEN SEKKEI
As far as large Japanese architectural design companies go, NIkken Sekkei [日建設計] doesn’t have the history of Shimizu/Shimz Corporation that completed the Hotel for Foreigners in Tokyo in 1876 and that the company was chaired by a member of the Shimizu family from 1804 to 1966. This website shows some of the Shimz history and it’s a pretty interseting one. Their first president, Keisuke Shimizu II, thought Western-style architecture was going to be the future and shaped the company to provide it.
Nikken Sekkei goes back only to 1900 when it was a part of Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation. It became Nikken Sekkei in 1950 and fully independent in 1970. Renaming the Sumitomo Temporary Architecture Department as Nikken Sekkei was a good call because they were about to receive two very important commissions. The first was the 1959–1963 San-Ai Dream Center [c.f. The Floating World Part 2] completed in time for the Tokyo Olympics, and the other was for the 1966 Palaceside Building (formerly known as the Readers’ Digest Headquarters) [c.f. Misfits’ Guide to Tokyo #1]. These two buildings were responsible for shaping the image of modern Japan as much as anything Kenzo Tange was doing at the time. Both were designed by Shoji Hayashi who was Nikken Sekkei‘s chief architect at the time. Shoji Hayashi was a contemporary of Kazuo Shinohara’s at Kiyoshi Seike’s studio at the then Tokyo Institute of Technology, and that Seike had wanted Hayashi to take on a project he was too busy to do, but Hayashi was unavailable for some reason and so Seike asked Shinohara to do it instead. That house became Shinohara’s first house, House in Kugayama (1954) but that’s a different story.
Hayashi graduated in 1953 with five built houses he designed already built and, after a suggestion by the father of a trusted friend, applied for a job at this new company called Nikkei Sekkei. The year was 1953 and Hayashi recalls going to the interview at a decrepit three-storey building in Ochanomizu that had somehow survived the war. I don’t know if I’m reading too much into this, but the careers of Shoji Hayashi and Kazuo Shinohara represent two very different ways of doing architecture. To me it’s telling that this 2024 book is titled The Work [仕事, shigoto] of Shoji Hayashi and not The Works [作品, sakuhin] of Shoji Hayashi. You might think the second largest architectural practice in the world is a curious choice for a misfits accolade. Let me explain.
Wikipedia tells me that, in 2019, the Nikken Sekkei group of companies had 2,685 employees, and had completed more than 25,000 projects in more than 50 countries. About 25% of their employees are architects, another 25% and engineers and the remaining 50% are support staff. There are five offices in Japan in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Fukuoka, and Sendai, in east Asia in Shanghai, Beijing, Dalian, Seoul, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, and Bangkok, as well as Dubai, Riyadh, Moscow and Barcelona but these are most likely temporary offices for specific projects and some of the east Asian offices may well be too but if Nikken Sekkei were chasing global visibility there’d be offices in London and New York and if they were chasing projects worldwide there’d be offices in Abu Dhabi and Doha. This is not how we expect a second largest architectural practice to behave. They seem determined to do what they do and to do it where they can do it best. A cynic would call this a strategy.
They exist outside of architecture despite their 25,000 projects
Tokyo Skytree is one of them.
The tagline Experience, Integrated appears alongside their name but their name doesn’t come up in architecture discourse, although an occasional project might appear on ArchDaily. A quick look at their website reveals the breadth of their work but there’s no recognizable house style, nor any superstar architect. Nikken Sekkei are not “taught”, possibly because they believe that Architecture = Design × Engineering × Planning × Collaborative Management which is all very reassuring but has nothing to do with image or discourse. Architecture companies are divided into those we can’t avoid, and those that don’t seek our attention. The global practices that suck up all the oxygen and make a lot of noise are generally thought to be pushing boundaries, disruptive and “progressive and all that while those that don’t are said to be boring, conservative, uncreative, etcetera. Alternative forms of practice pose no threat to either. I was also one of those who doubted whether a large architectural company could be innovative. Turns out they can. Early on, they established a system in which the Chief Architect was responsible for the overall design concept, architectural aesthetics and spatial creativity, the Chief Engineer was responsibile for structural systems, sustainability and the integration of construction technologies, and the Chief Urban Designer was responsible for urban design, master planning and the coordination of social systems. It looks like a good way to manage things, but you need to make a mental leap and believe that creativity can come from collective practice just as often as it does from individual architects. The problem they had was how to harness that creativity.
A first idea was to create the Nikkei Galaxy database of 6,000 past and present employees and the projects they’d worked on but this system was found to not be very good at identifying hidden ideas. Around the time of the pandemic when everyone was isolated and doing their own thing, theh employees were asked what goals they thought the company should be aiming for. Chief Design Officers Tomohiko Yamanashi and Hiroaki Otani say this was not a design strategy but part of a shift to a policy aimed at enhancing everyone’s design abilities. The results were shared on their intranet as fifteen Nikkei Design Goals. They discovered there were many interesting ideas bouncing around within the company but no coherent way to organize and access them. Design goals for each project are discussed at weekly design meetings. The 15 goals showed the limits of the company but also showed where collaboration with outside parties was necessary. Importantly, all this information is kept on the company servers for any employee to access. Manifestations of the fifteen goals are gathered in this book so anyone can make use of them.
(1) Global environment
(2) Wellness & Resilience
(3) Transit Oriented Development
(4) Flexible Design
(5) Digital Transformation
(6) Conversion & Re-use
This is a timely category as it’s not just about conservation and preservation of historic buildings but extensive repairs such as seismic retrofitting to extend the useful life of existing building stock.
(7) Design to Regulations
Apologies for the sloppy scanning but I’m very much taken by the ideas on this page. I’ve mentioned the building on the top right before. [c.f. The Fire Escape Stair] This is one of those ideas that somebody probably had but kept it unshared in their desk or online folder. The idea was to see what happens when the fire escape stair is put on the outside of a building. One of the things that happened was better proportioned office spaces. A company with less resources simply wouldn’t have the capacity to explore something like this. Much ingenuity is at work in all the other categories but this building is shown as an example of designing in accordance with building regulations even though it appears as yet another wacky building in Japan. The project below it is equally intriguing. Japanese apartment balconies are not for sitting having a drink and watching the sun set. They are for drying laundry and placing the A/C compressors. Setting the balcony lower puts them out of sight from both sides and the lower balustrade means the interior is better connected with the street. Why didn’t anyone think of that before?
(8) Organizational Design
(8) Global Design
(10) Risk Management
(11) All NIKKEI Design
(12) Value-up Design
(13) Sophisticated Design
(14) Design for Unpredictability
(15) Aspirational Design
This is about identifying new goals for Nikkei to taken on.
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There’s little I can say as a conclusion because this is an ongoing project. Nikken Sekkei are aware their design goals aren’t conceptually equivalent and that their weighting may change. Their emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration within the company has been there from the beginning, but there’s this new awareness of when they need collaborate externally. What I find amazing is that all this happens in some dimension we have little awareness of. Before the introduction to Japan of Western ways of doing architecture – not just the styles, materials and techniques but the relationship that architecture had with society, carpenters were just craftspersons who did their job well. I get the feeling Nikken Sekkei is a vastly upscaled version of this.
• • •
NIKKEN SEKKEI!
For showing us an alternative form of practice,
misfits’ salutes you!
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Eva Denis
says:Dear Mr Brenton McKay,
My name is Eva, and I am currently a second-year Master’s student in Architecture at ENSA Paris-Belleville. I am writing to you in the context of my master’s thesis, for which I am researching the emergence and development of modernism in Japan between roughly 1925 and 1945.
My interest in this subject began during my exchange year at the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo, where I attended courses on the Metabolism movement of the 1970s. As I explored the origins of this movement, I became increasingly interested in the earlier phases of Japanese modernism—particularly the connections between Kenzo Tange, Kunio Maekawa, and their formative experiences with Le Corbusier’s studio. This led me to investigate the transmission of early modernist ideas to Japan, including the work of architects such as Kenji Imai, who travelled to France in the early 1920s and published articles that introduced Le Corbusier’s ideas to Japanese readers.
After reading Gérard Monnier’s Le Corbusier and Japan and your article Inconvenient History on Misfits’ Architecture, I found that your perspectives clarified the complexity and the plurality of actors involved in this early transfer of architectural knowledge. Your writing presented essential nuances that I would very much like to discuss further as I refine the direction of my thesis.
As my research laboratory in Paris does not specialize in this specific field, I am conducting interviews with scholars who can offer expert perspectives on modern Japanese architecture. It would be an honour for me to have the opportunity to speak with you, if you are available. I would be grateful to discuss the topic with you, even briefly, and to benefit from your insight as I define the structure and focus of my thesis.
I am currently based in Paris, but I can easily adapt to Korea Standard Time if you are still teaching there. If you need additional information regarding my research goals or background, I would be glad to provide it and I remain very responsive by email.
Thank you very much for your time and consideration. I hope to have the chance to speak with you.
Kind regards,
Eva Denis
Master’s Student, ENSA Paris-Belleville
Paris, France