Gyre Building, Omotesando

Tokyo used to be able to resist spectacular consumer architecture, the kind of luxury mall developments that tend to spread more easily in Singapore or Hong Kong. It specialized in individual lots, shops and restaurants that sprout magically and innocuously after a rain shower, and then disappear again, unnoticed. What Tokyo lacked in orderly town planning it made up for in self-directed, independent allotments. Everyone tending to their own garden: a kind of modest housekeeping, a reluctance to be demonstrative about civilization and wealth, perhaps, meddling only with one’s own devices. This meant that there were few public monuments on a grand scale, in the European sense. As the writer/musician Momus aptly put it in his Wired column, Tokyo is “cluttered, ugly, [full of] practical residential dwellings whose basic template is still essentially a 19th century one. Most of greater Tokyo — the world’s largest urban area — consists of undramatic, undemonstrative, stubbornly un-Futuristic stuff.”

That’s part of Tokyo’s attraction, a slapdash jumble of styles without too much of the oppressive sameness of recent urban redevelopment in Asia. Recently, though, it’s started down the same road to superstructures with glossy, seductive storefronts. Earlier this year, there was Tokyo Midtown, a seamless lifestyle and consumption facility housing the Ritz-Carlton, high offices of finance, restaurants, shops, and some truly stunning woodwork and parquetry - which of course quickly got pocked by the bevies of lunching ladies who clickety-clacked all over Midtown’s polished runways and corridors in their heels.

Another one with similar aspirations was just completed last month. Designed by Dutch firm MVRDV and administered by Takenaka Corporation, the Gyre Building toes the same line of high-sounding branding and lofty cultural aspirations. There are luxury French brands, organic bakery-cafes, a photography gallery, a French bistro with ‘creative’ spice use, and an outpost of New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) design store. This extensive tenant mix is huddled together in a translucent black ‘Gyre’, which according to Takenaka means “eddy and rotation.”

“An eddy is a magnetic field which draws things in, and it is a moving body which attracts new energy and new people. This eddy generates the concept of “conscious luxury,” making the establishment the　generator of new culture not only for Omotesando but also for greater Tokyo.”

It’s not enough of merely be a shopping and entertainment destination, of course. Now there are levels of curation and selectivity in boutiques that used to be associated only with art holdings and scholarly collections. Consumerism is a credo that has in itself become marketed as merchandise, a sort of meta-consumerism with its own politics. You shop for a particular consumerist caste and then acquire the accessories to realize it. First, products got tagged with brands, and now lifestyles and the facilities that cater to their diffusion get their own separate campaign.

Gyre’s curated theme is “conscious luxury.” “Feeling the joy that one’s own consumption behavior has a positive impact on the world, and always enjoying a highly conscious shopping style,” i.e. even if the price is higher, consumers will select the wise and moderate product which is “right.”

What on earth this could mean is unclear. When was luxury ever oblivious to its own spectacular aura? The whole concept depends on a keener-than-thou discrimination of the ever-receding distinctions between similar products. That doesn’t mean that Gyre is being disingenuous about it, though; it probably knows that its retail selection is at distinctly more artisanal than the competition, that it espouses some higher doctrine other than mass production values, and that it has somehow branded itself above the competition. In Tokyo, where consumerism is often a self-realizing artistic practice, Gyre fits right in on Omotesando, a few hundred meters of retail architecture that houses some of the most expensive assemblies of products (and the people they adorn) in the world.

Darryl is a translator in Japan and has a deep love for the built environment.