Dream is still growing for architect of the vertical city

Published on Saturday 29 March 2008 14:13

MANY of his colleagues may consider Minoru Mori's 101-storey Shanghai World Financial Centre the crowning achievement of a long career. But Japan's most prolific developer has lots of plans for a 73-year-old.

As president of the Mori Building Company of Tokyo, he has remade the city's skyline with half a dozen high-rises, including Roppongi Hills, a 2bn megacomplex over 27 acres. Now, he is fielding offers to build skyscrapers like the Shanghai centre in Bangkok and Singapore and is planning to build or help build 10 more complexes in downtown Tokyo, including one that could be Japan's tallest.

At a time when urban planners in the west frown on hulking high-rises as forbidding, Mori presents a new Asian urban sensibility, where architecture reflects soaring economic ambition. "Asia is different from the United States and Europe," says Mori. "We dream of more vertical cities. In fact, the only choice here is to go up and use the sky."

Mori's career began when he set aside a novel he was working on in 1959 to join his father's fledgling real estate business. Over the next half-century, the family-owned Mori Building grew from a single rice shop into a 6bn empire of 121 structures.

Real estate specialists say the Moris succeeded by reading the future better than their rivals, and putting up buildings that fit the needs of a fast-developing Japanese economy.

Projects can move slowly in Japan, and Roppongi Hills and Mori's first big high-rise complex, Ark Hills, which opened in 1986, each took 17 years to complete. Much of that time was spent cutting through red tape and persuading hundreds of reluctant residents to move. Even in the Nineties, when land prices were tumbling, he persuaded banks and investors to lend him billions of dollars for his projects. Mori's willingness to use debt, however, led to a parting of ways with his younger brother, Akira, who started his own real estate company, Mori Trust. The oldest brother, Kei, died in 1990.

Within his company, Mori is known for both long-term vision and a preoccupation with small details. At a recent meeting to plan a 46-storey building he spent most of an hour discussing what type of landscaping would best keep away crows. And he is about to begin construction of a skyscraper in Tokyo which, when completed in 2012, will have taken more than 28 years to finish.

With his successes, however, have come detractors. Japanese nationalists accuse him of cosying up to foreigners because he has so many international tenants, preservationists assail his skyscrapers for destroying Tokyo's traditional low-rise feeling, academics call him outdated.

Controversy has also surrounded the best-known development, Roppongi Hills, with its 54-storey barrel-like office tower. When it was completed in 2003, the complex was heralded as a symbol of the end of Japan's 'lost decade'. But it soon turned into a symbol of the excesses of Japanese revival, when its most famous tenant, a Ferrari-driving, internet entrepreneur was arrested for insider trading.

Still, Mori seeks to reach higher. Of his 10 new complexes, he said one might include a skyscraper nearly 1,100ft high.

Mori says his aim is to replace Tokyo's chaotic, low-rise industrial-era neighbourhoods with a more modern and convenient urban environment suited to knowledge-based enterprises like finance and software and he still shows a flash of the frustrated philosopher, calling his recent buildings "vertical garden cities", a term referring to his favourite architect, Le Corbusier.

Not everyone approves. "Mori knows these kind of projects better than anyone," said Yuichi Fukukawa, a professor of urban planning at Chiba University. "It's scary, but if he wants to fill Tokyo with more Roppongi Hills, he can do it."