Spiral
Fumihiko Maki · Tokyo, Japan · 1985
Spiral compresses gallery, retail, performance and social spaces into a compact urban cultural building on Aoyama-dori. Fumihiko Maki organizes the interior as a sequence of changing levels and viewpoints, culminating in the famous curved ramp around the central atrium. The restrained street facade makes the spatial complexity inside more surprising, and the building remains one of Tokyo's clearest late-modern examples of architecture conceived as an urban interior.