Omotesando district

That afternoon I went to eat a curry lunch at a Pakistani Indian restaurant. That naan looks pregnant, doesn't it? Not good for calorie restriction, I suppose.

I headed out to the Omotesando district to see cool retail architecture. I took this entrance to the metro near my hotel. In reality it was a long underground link that is probably helpful in bad weather.

This was the first drop your jaw building I saw, which housed some high end stores. It is L shaped and has a patio two thirds up the building. (Edit: now that I have researched it, the architect is Kengo Kuma.)

Fins on the front are made of wood, a portion of them varnished, another portion left in its natural state.

My destination was the Prada building. I could sneak a peek in the distance and found this nearby building interesting in its own right.

So I reached the Prada building by Herzog & De Meuron. They were the architects for the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. The structure is an exoskeleton that supports each floor plate. The diamond shape of the skeleton allows for diamond shaped glass. Some of the glass panels are flat, but the majority are curved or bulging, creating an interesting visual texture.

It has to be one of the coolest buildings I've visited. I smiled at the "bouncer" at the door. I really only wanted to look inside. I quickly learned to say "thank you" in Japanese, which I expressed to the guard for putting up with me, for my curiosity. Actually, he put up with many other tourists as well who were mesmerized by the structure.

The architect's names are right below the name of the store.

The Cartier store next door is interesting too. It seems good design breeds good design.

I then wandered in the streets nearby, finding interesting buildings such as this office building, ready for occupancy.

An office building with an interesting staircase.

These buildings share the same base, so they may have been planned by the same architect. The composition baffles me, though. It seems like a miniature version of a live-work building. Maybe you live on a flat on the building on the right and have an office in the building on the left.

A post modern building nearby.

It's next to a new building in which Citibank has offices.

There is a living green wall on one facade and the building stacks in receding cubes.

This building looks like a standard office building with an interesting treatment of the facade...

But when you see it from the south west, it is jaw-dropping as well. You just wonder if the design stems from trying to make an interesting architectural statement, or if there were some restrictions imposed within the site, such as air rights, which determined its shape. It is conceivable to design a building in a strange cantilever because air rights dictate it. It was done in a building in the High Line in NYC.

Nearby are more interesting buildings, each unique in the massing, such as the United Nations University building with structural reinforcement expressed in the exterior, with floor plates receding as the building goes up. The architect was Kenzo Tange.

The area is filled with small buildings with fronts of curving balconies, such as this one.

This building houses a bridal boutique. The skin is metal panel.

At this point I wrote in my journal, "It's like i see these things and I feel like I'm done; no point in seeing more..." What this means is that I felt overwhelmed by all the good architecture I was seeing and would be content to go back to the hotel to rest. However, I had not yet seen the most thrilling things of the day...