ABSTRACT

In awarding the 1998 Pritzker Architecture Prize to Renzo Piano, the jury’s citation praised the architect’s prolific portfolio of buildings as “staggering in scope and comprehensive in the diversity of scale, material and form,” adding that Piano “has remained true to the concept that the architect must maintain command over the building process from design to built work.”1 Although at the time Piano had not yet completed his design for Maison Hermès in Tokyo, the jury’s comments seem prescient. Over more than three decades, Piano and his associates have developed a reputation for working closely with material manufacturers and fabricators to explore and execute new formulations and leading-edge applications for building materials; Maison Hermès is clearly a beneficiary of this process. Piano’s office collaborated with the Italian glass manufacturer Vetroarredo to design the custom glass blocks that comprise the building’s façade, as well as with Swiss fabricator Schmidlin to develop the steel framing system that supports the glass blocks. The building’s envelope consists of 13,000 individual glass blocks, covering a total surface area of more than 2,600 square meters (28,000 square feet) and imparting the building’s defining character: a unique form of translucency derived from light refraction through thousands of modular lens-like blocks.