Mori Building, an urban developer founded in 1959 with the mission of making Tokyo the world’s best city, is known for its ambitious urban development projects like the ARK Hills and Roppongi Hills complexes in the Roppongi area of Tokyo. The present project was designed as a way for Mori Building to share with a Japanese and worldwide audience its vision for redeveloping Tokyo, especially the Toranomon-Azabu area, by 2029.

This is the newest representative monument of Tokyo, where the entirety of the city accumulated, digitized and uniquely presented. What would otherwise be infinite rows of tedious data are brought to life as they are projected onto the 1/1000 city model, embodying the vibrance and liberty of the city itself. As the first step into their faith in “making Tokyo the world’s best city,” we believe this direct, yet, intuitive form of data communication will serve not only as the flagship of the brand’s philosophy, but would inspire the politicians and entrepreneurs who’ll lead the way to an aspiring Tokyo.

The facility is not open to the general public like an art gallery; it can be visited by invitation only and is accessible to just an exclusive few. There are three main target audiences, none of them restricted to Japan. First, CEOs, CMOs, and other C-suite executives from companies that are considering moving into a Mori Building property. Second, individuals considering buying one of the roughly 4,000 residential units soon to go on sale (for between 100 million and 10 billion yen). Third, urban development partners: politicians, scientists, university researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, kids, and others ready to join Mori Building in creating Tokyo’s future.

We developed a system for mapping data about Tokyo onto a 1:1000 scale model of the city.

MORI BUILDING URBAN LAB consists of 2 Big Data and pairing these creates a unique and unprecedented experience.

The 1st big data is a 1/1000scaled miniaturized model of all existing buildings across Tokyo North/South 24.65, East/West 17.0 km.

This model utilizes Tokyo’s geographic data as landscape foundation to cut out buildings from styrene board, pasting in hundreds of thousands of photos onto the buildings. It has taken over 10 years of work to complete and still undergoes updating every 6 month aligning to the changing new city landscape, and offers an overwhelming physical experience that cannot be duplicated by CG or Google map. The other Big data presents the ever-changing city of Tokyo. It combines various data like changes in the coastline over 120,000 years, shows the contour lines in a heat map, demographic changes until 2050.

• Numerous C-suite executives, politicians, and artists have visited the facility. • A cross-sectoral project studying Tokyo’s future has been launched with MIT, the University of Tokyo, and the Japanese government, among others. • The facility was used to unveil Mori Building’s upcoming urban development project, generating lots of buzz