Roppongi Hills Mori Tower (å…本木ãƒ'ルズ森タワー, Roppongi Hiruzu Mori TawÄ) is a 54-story mixed-use skyscraper located in Roppongi, Minato, Tokyo. Completed in 2003 and named for builder Minoru Mori, it is the centerpiece of the Roppongi Hills urban development. It is currently the sixth-tallest building in Tokyo at 238 meters (781 ft). The tower has a floor space area of 379,408m squared (4,083,910 sq ft), making it one of the largest buildings in the world by this measure.
The Mori Tower building is primarily used for office space, but it also includes retail stores, restaurants and other tourist attractions. The Mori Art Museum is located on the 53rd floor and visitors can view the city from observation decks on the 52nd and 54th floors. The headquarters of Mori Building Company are located in this building.
In 2004, a six-year-old boy was killed in one of the building's revolving doors. After a police investigation, three men were convicted of professional negligence that resulted in the boy's death. Later, an elevator fire in the building prompted nationwide elevator inspections.
Facilities
Grand Hyatt Tokyo Hotel Tour $600 Roppongi Hills! [å—幕付ã] - Grand Hyatt Hotel Tour & Karaoke: https://youtu.be/5mjriYP2uC0 Ryan is back in Japan and on our first day we met up in Roppongi Hills. I got to check out his ...
Mori Tower is a mixed-use facility that is used for retail and office space. The tower's first six floors house retail stores and restaurants.
Mori Arts Center and Art Museum
The Mori Arts Center is located on floors 49â€"54. This center includes various tourist attractions spread over the tower's top six floors. Two members-only facilitiesâ€"a library and a private clubâ€"are located on floors 49 and 51, respectively. Visitors are provided with views of the city at Tokyo City View on the 52nd floor and an open-air roof deck on the 54th floor.
Opening in October 2003, the Mori Art Museum is the centerpiece of the Mori Arts Center. Its interior was designed by Gluckman Mayner Architects, and it originally occupied the entire 53rd floor as well as a portion of the 52nd floor. The museum's galleries on the 52nd floor have since been removed, however. British-born David Elliott served as the museum's director until he resigned in late 2006, and Fumio Nanjo assumed the position. The museum is one of the only venues in Tokyo with a percentage of foreign visitors comparable to the Tokyo National Museum, but it attracts fewer visitors in total.
Office tenants
Floors 7â€"48 serve as office space and house various corporate tenants, including:
- Allen & Overy (38th floor)
- Apple Inc. (36th floor)
- Barclays Bank and Barclays Capital (31st - 33rd floors)
- Booz & Company (27th floor)
- BASF (21st Floor)
- CIBC (15th floor)
- Goldman Sachs (42nd floor and 45th - 48th floors)
- Google Japan (26th - 30th floors & 43rd - 44th floors)
- GREE, Inc. (8th - 9th & 11th - 14th floors)
- Lenovo Japan Ltd. (18th floor)
- Morgan, Lewis & Bockius (24th floor)
- Nokia Solutions and Networks (29th floor)
- TMI Associates and Simmons & Simmons (23rd floor)
- The Pokémon Company corporate headquarters (18th floor)
- Riot Games (34th floor)
Since the opening of Tokyo Midtown's Midtown Tower in 2007, former Mori Tower tenants such as Konami and Yahoo! Japan have since relocated to the new tower. Prior to its bankruptcy, Lehman Brothers occupied the space currently occupied by Barclays.
Incidents
2004 fatality
While on a tour of Mori Tower on the morning of March 26, 2004, six-year-old Ryo Mizokawa was killed in a revolving door at the building's second-floor main entrance. Mizokawa's head was crushed between the door rotating from his left and the outer frame; he died two hours after reaching the hospital. The door's motion safety sensor was originally set to detect anything standing 80 centimeters (31Â in) tall. This setting was changed to 135 centimeters (53Â in), however, after the door began stopping unnecessarily when detecting a newly installed, nearby safety barrier. After the incident, it was revealed that 32Â people had previously sustained injuries caused by revolving doors at Roppongi Hills since the complex opened less than a year earlier. In an out-of-court settlement, the Mizokawa family received an undisclosed compensation payment from the building's operator, Mori Building Company.
In March 2005, prosecutors indicted three people on charges of professional negligence resulting in death: senior Mori Building Co executives Yuzo Tada and Yukihiro Koyama and an executive from the revolving door's manufacturer, Sanwa Tajima Corporation, Hisanobu Kubo. Prosecutors argued that the Mori Building officials did not implement safety measures proposed after previous incidents because they would detract from the tower's entrance appearance. All three pleaded guilty to the charges, and in September they received three-year suspended prison sentences of 10Â months, 10Â months and 14Â months, respectively.
2007 fire
On April 4, 2007, an elevator system in Mori Tower produced a fire that destroyed part of the tower's lift-motor room and forced hundreds of people to evacuate the building. According to the elevator's manufacturer, Otis Elevator Company, a frayed cable scraping surrounding lift system components produced enough sparks to ignite a fire. After the fire, it was discovered that Otis was aware of rusted and frayed cables in the tower's elevator systems since January 2005. The incident spawned nationwide inspections of Japanese elevators by both Nippon Otis and the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry. The ministry inspection of approximately 260,000Â elevators turned up problems in 813Â elevators.
Livedoor incident
In January 2006 one of the building's tenants, livedoor, a Japanese internet service provider, was raided by police. The incident resulted in the arrests of two executives and the company has since relocated its headquarters elsewhere.
See also
- Media related to Roppongi Hills Mori Tower at Wikimedia Commons
- List of tallest buildings and structures in Tokyo
References
External links
- Roppongi Hills official site
- Mori Art Museum official site
