KADOKAWA DWANGO | Sinato Architects

This project is for the new office of KADOKAWA DWANGO, a company formed by the merger of major publishing and film distributor KADOKAWA and online-video service provider DWANGO. We gave the largest single private room, the main meeting room, a circular shape and positioned it independently of the work area. Its physical presence gives the office its symbolic core and with the circular meeting table allowing for a seating arrangement without hierarchy, we could give a spatial form to the non-hierarchical atmosphere of the company. Around the main meeting room we created a circulation route that includes the reception counter, allowing us to give a view of the office landscape by layering the view of the comings-and-goings of the office reception area with the activities of the main meeting room. The glass wall surrounding the main meeting room is coated with a liquid crystal film, which can be switched from opaque to clear depending on the use of the room. The partition wall between the main meeting room and the circulation route folds overhead, with a shape that opens towards the outside of the circle allowing the ceiling on the inside of the meeting room to seem to expand beyond the area of its plan, giving the sensation of a space larger than is immediate visible. The face of this curving wall on the circulation route side flows upward becoming the sloped ceiling plane. Forming a continuous arc in plan, it increases the feeling of centripetal action. The same sloping line is echoed in the profile of the main meeting table with its bowl-shaped tabletop of the same angle. This plays an important role in allowing the central video monitors to be placed at a height that does not interfere with eye contact between other people sitting at the table. The other meeting spaces and ‘free-address’ spaces in the working area are also circular, becoming singular points within a homogenous space of an arrangement of rectangular desks. The black beams that stretch across the space just below the ceiling level are the same color and form as the glass sash acting as a partition for the private executive rooms, this framework connecting as far as the main meeting room and entrance area, where the beams create a link between the place of everyday office work and the highly symbolic place of meeting.