TV Asahi Headquarters Building

An eight-story broadcaster's headquarters completed in 2003, designed by Fumihiko Maki (Maki and Associates) as part of the Roppongi Hills complex, with a ground-floor atrium opening to the Mori Garden.

Use

Office tower

Area

Minato City

Completed

2003

Floors

8 above ground

Architect

Maki and Associates

A Broadcasting Headquarters That Opens to the City

In 2003, the same year that Roppongi Hills opened as one of Tokyo’s most ambitious mixed-use projects, TV Asahi opened its new headquarters on a parcel adjacent to the Mori Tower. The building is eight stories above ground, designed by architect Fumihiko Maki through his firm Maki and Associates, and built by Takenaka Corporation. Its east-facing facade is generously glazed, and the ground-floor atrium is open to the public. From the lobby, the green of the Mohri Garden is visible through the glass — a deliberate connection between the building and the landscape immediately outside. Fumihiko Maki, who studied under Kenzo Tange and later received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, brought a characteristic lightness and transparency to a building type that often defaults to opacity. The result is a broadcaster’s headquarters that feels less enclosed than the function might suggest.

A Television Station Integrated into an Urban Project

TV Asahi had operated from Motomachi, Minato City, before moving to Roppongi Hills as part of the larger development. The conventional Japanese broadcasting facility of its era was typically organized around large, sealed studio floors separated from administrative offices — a configuration driven by technical requirements that often produced inward-looking buildings. The Roppongi Hills headquarters takes a different approach: studios and offices are brought together in a relatively compact form, and the ground level is opened to the public rather than secured behind a lobby barrier. The design dialogue with the Mohri Garden — framing the landscape through the atrium, letting daylight carry the green into the interior — reflects the ambitions of the Roppongi Hills project as a whole, which positioned itself not as a closed corporate campus but as a district woven into the city. The TV Asahi building is a small but carefully considered part of that idea.

Summary

The TV Asahi Headquarters Building was completed in 2003 with eight floors above ground. Designed by Maki and Associates and built by Takenaka Corporation, it occupies a parcel of the Roppongi Hills complex adjacent to the Mori Tower and faces the Mohri Garden. Its public atrium makes it one of the few broadcaster facilities in Japan where the relationship between the building and the city around it is experienced directly at street level. If you are walking Roppongi Hills and have looked up at the Mori Tower, take a moment to look in the other direction — toward the quieter, low-rise building beside the garden.

Related: Roppongi Hills Mori Tower / Ark Mori Building

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