Completion of Construction for Ginza Sony Park

Aug 21, 2024

Exterior. Ginza Sony Park as seen from Sukiyabashi Crossing.

Project conceptualization for the reconstruction of the Sony Building began 11 years ago, in 2013.

While there were no plans to create a park in the initial stages, we worked hard to instill our founder's wishes in the concept, coming up with three themes with which to do so: for the building to be bold and unique, in a distinctly Sony way; to bring a new kind of rhythm to the city of Ginza; and for people to be able to spend their time there in various ways, depending on their mood.
In the process, we kept thinking about how best to give shape to Sony's individuality moving forward.
The answer we came up with was Ginza Sony Park.

Over the course of this project, we believed that an important element that makes up parks is openness.
Openness allows parks to bring in lots of different things, and pass them on. Such openness allows the space to be ever-changing.
This is why Ginza Sony Park has so much openness.

Now, construction for this park "platform" is finally complete. While currently it is just an open, empty space, the grand opening will see it bustling not just with content by Sony, but by the ways in which visitors use the space, and the activities they take part in-the ways in which the space can be enjoyed always changing.

We hope you too are looking forward to this future of the new Ginza Sony Park.

Daisuke Nagano,
Leader of the Ginza Sony Park Project

Ginza Sony Park Project

The Ginza Sony Park Project is a project to reconstruct the Sony Building, which was built based on the concept of "Open to public spirit", and has had an over 50-year history as part of the city of Ginza.

The Sony Building was created by Akio Morita, one of the founders of Sony, in 1966. Morita called the 33-square meter public space—the epitome of the concept of providing a public space—the "Garden of Ginza." In an effort to carry on our founder's vision for the next 50 years, we began a project that would redefine the "Garden of Ginza" as the "Park of Ginza," bringing a new kind of rhythm to the city of Ginza, making it easier for people to visit, and allowing various avenues of enjoyment.

Reconstruction was based on a new and unprecedented two-phase process that was also designed to be unique and distinctly Sony. The first phase was a one-of-a-kind experiment in which the site would be turned into a park in the process of being demolished (August 2018 to September 2021), instead of the new building being constructed immediately. The results were that the park received 8.54 million visitors in its approximately three-year existence, which included a part of the COVID-19 pandemic.

After this was the second phase, in which demolition and the construction of the new building were resumed. Construction for Ginza Sony Park—the project's final form—was completed in August 2024, and its grand opening is scheduled for January 2025.

From the "Garden of Ginza" to the "Park of Ginza"

Exterior. The first floor area, which features a large staircase that leads up to the second floor, is a large atrium space that while technically inside of the building, is basically outdoors.

Buildings in Ginza have a height limit of 56 meters under the "Ginza Rules," a set of district planning rules meant to protect the look of the urban landscape. The new Ginza Sony Park, which has a steel-frame concrete structure, with five above-ground floors and four basement floors, is about half the height of the limit set in the "Ginza Rules." Its height has purposely been set low in order to create a new sense of openness and a new kind of landscape in this high-concentration urban area.

Ginza Sony Park also carries on the unique elements that the Sony Building held so dear: the design concept of "Open to public spirit", its "junction" architecture, and its vertical-promenade style.

Open to public spirit

Back in the day, there was a 33-square meter public space, located on the corner of the street facing the Sukiyabashi Crossing in Ginza, called "Sony Square." The public space was based on the concept of "creating" a city in a scenic manner, and was designed to be enjoyable to those who visited the city, serving as an external space where people could interact with the city, in an urban environment where there is typically little openness. Founder Akio Morita called this space the "Garden of Ginza." In the spring, a field of gerbera daisies in full bloom; in the summer, an aquarium to bring a sense of coolness to the space. The space, which hosted various seasonal events that brought color and joy to the city, and came to be loved by many over the years, was the epitome of the concept of providing a public space.

Ginza Sony Park has inherited this 50-year concept of the "Garden of Ginza," and evolved it into the "Park of Ginza." The goal is to bring rhythm to the city and its people, creating a sense of openness that allows people to spend their time as they wish, and offering a variety of activities to inspire their curiosity.

Junction architecture

Ginza Sony Park is located in a prestigious location that allows it to serve various urban functions, with the park facing Harumi Avenue, Sotobori Street, and the Sony Street, and the basement floors connected directly to the subway concourse and one of the area's largest underground parking lots. While the park faced various challenges, including the difficulty of constructing a new building in this particular location, it was able to carry on the "junction architecture" used since the Sony Building, to link these urban functions to the building in an organic manner. The atrium space serves as a natural receptacle for the flow of people coming in from the Sukiyabashi Crossing, and the lack of doors and walls separating the inside from the outside on the basement floors is designed to make the flow of people underground as seamless as possible, all so that visitors to Ginza can come and go through the space as naturally as possible.

Vertical promenade

Staggered floors, or a "flower petal structure," was used in the Sony Building to make effective use of the relatively small piece of land on which the building stood. This structure connected the above-ground floors in a series of connected sub-floors, turning it into a vertical promenade. The new Ginza Sony Park has further iterated on this concept, bringing in the external above-ground environment in a dynamic manner, to connect everything from the third basement floor to the fifth floor (roof) in a single vertical promenade.

Bird's eye view. Bird's eye view of Ginza Sony Park and its surrounding buildings at Sukiyabashi Crossing.

Interior. The atrium space, surrounded by concrete staircases, connects seamlessly out into Sukiyabashi Crossing.

Blurred boundaries with the city

Ginza Sony Park's atrium space extends out towards the Sukiyabashi Crossing, and the edge of the park is connected to the public street by a gentle slope. By not clearly delineating what is inside and outside, and integrating the building into the city, the park allows visitors to come and go through the space as naturally as possible. Gaze out at the Sukiyabashi Crossing from inside of the building, and you feel as if the crossing is a part of Ginza Sony Park, or that the park is a part of the Sukiyabashi Crossing.
As on the above-ground floors, the second basement floor is connected to the subway concourse-a public space-with a gentle slope, in a seamless transition to this urban function.

Embracing history

The frame of the former Sony Building remains in the portion of Ginza Sony Park that connects to the subway concourse. It gives a glimpse into the history of this property, from the beams and columns that show what the building may have looked like in 1966, to the escalators that retain the design of the Sony Building when it first opened, and a blue tile wall from over 50 years ago, unearthed during demolition. Parts of the building frame that could not be dismantled and had to remain, and beams and columns that have been purposely left in place. The completed building, which is comprised of both the new building frame and the old, was constructed by carefully scrutinizing what to keep and what to rebuild, in a process that could be called the design of the demolition process.

Exterior. The atrium in the first and second basement floors allow glimpses of Sony Street from through the building.

The rhythm of a city stroll

The vertical promenade extends from the basement to the roof, and embodies the "vertical walk around Ginza" concept. Go up the large set of stairs in the atrium space connected to the Sukiyabashi Crossing, and beyond the gentle slope facing the Sony Street, on the Harumi Avenue side, you will find a spiral staircase that leads to the roof. The landing is bathed in light filtering in through the skylight, and is a semi-outdoor space where you can feel the outdoors, whether it be the rain or wind. This spiral staircase is the prologue to a story that continues onto the third floor, the fourth floor, and the roof. By drawing visitors in naturally from their strolls to these floors, the building creates a sense of flow and continuity to their experiences. The non-uniform nature of these spaces, with the variations in ceiling height across floors, also brings a sense of rhythm to the experience.
The vertical promenade allows visitors to feel the light and air of the city not just above-ground, but in the basement as well, and allows them glimpses of the Ginza sky and cityscape. Visitors will feel that they are connected to and spending time with the city of Ginza, even while they are in the building, with a view that can only be seen at Ginza Sony Park.

Exterior. Ginza Sony Park, with its low height and grid-like façade, is nestled between Maison Hermès and Tokyu Plaza Ginza. Trees line the street in front of it.

Less is more

Of the many kinds of openness there are at Ginza Sony Park, the sense of openness created by the purposely low height of the building, is an aerial openness within the urban environment. At the roof of the building, instead of visitors looking down upon the surroundings; visitors get the interesting experience of looking up at the Ginza sky from something like a miniature garden, located in the heart of the urban environment. Look out towards the Sukiyabashi Crossing, and they will feel the cars driving by on the Tokyo Expressway (KK Line), which is to undergo its own revitalization project. All in all, a new kind of urban space. This is a unique open space that makes you feel that you are in the city even when you are on the roof, with the sounds from pedestrian crossings and hustle and bustle of the city against the backdrop of the beautiful glass building next door.

Despite being new, the Ginza Sony Building has already become a part of the city due to the civil engineering and public architecture approach Sony took with its design. The exposed concrete architecture, which includes elements of civil engineering and is rare in the city of Ginza, has an unpretentious and almost primitive texture due to its use of ordinary veneer formwork. This, combined with the low height of the building, is meant to embody the park's status as a "platform" within the city.

The stainless steel grid-like frame covering the concrete building frame will serve as a loose boundary between the park and the city, with the light coming in through the gaps in the frame shifting and changing like sunlight filtering in through the leaves of trees.
In addition to serving as a functional façade for various activities utilizing the wall, it will also act as a utility tunnel for piping for when the facility is expanded—a platform with an eye towards future expansion.

Interior. Sky as seen from deep underground, ringed by the exterior basement walls and construction platform.

A bath bucket 20 meters deep

Typically, in underground reconstruction projects, the existing basement walls cannot stand on their own, and in many cases the new building frame is built on the inside of the existing exterior basement walls. This means underground spaces become smaller and smaller with each reconstruction-a persistent problem among all urban buildings.
In this project, we reinforced the exterior basement walls of the former Sony building to create a free-standing structure similar to a Japanese bath bucket, then built the new basement building frame inside of it. This method protects the building from the pressure of the soil and the groundwater flowing beneath the ground in Ginza, and allows us to secure the same amount of public space as in this building for future reconstruction projects, without having to add more underground exterior walls. In this way, the structure of the building addresses the problem of underground spaces shrinking with every reconstruction, and is thus designed for the next 50 years.