OPEN HUB Park

Open Hub Park is an interdisciplinary creative space for the NTT Communications Group. Located in NTT Communications headquarters building, it is a shared work space where employees can host cross-departmental meetings, informal conversations, and activities. The overall design aims to encourages communication and creative idea generation, transcending borders between departments within the company, in contrast to traditional board meeting rooms.

As remote work becomes more common, the meaning of a real workspace is paradoxically being questioned. The space is intended to be an ecosystem where real and virtual, objects and information, diversity and homogeneity, stillness and movement, playing and working, and other contradictory concepts and functions coexist organically, thereby providing an opportunity to rethink the meaning of gathering in the real world and coexisting with the virtual world. The project was designed to create a space like an ecosystem where people can coexist in an organic way.

Within the existing office space, which is defined by a Cartesian coordinate system extending 15m x 85m from east to west, various rooms (meeting rooms and studios) with glass partitions are scattered by overlapping grids at 45 degree angles. The remaining open space is a single, connected space, but in order to induce a variety of activities, a café, library, and workspace are organically woven into the space, as well as a variety of other non-purpose-specific spaces (landscape, hammock forest) and devices for digital experience.

Furthermore, by overlaying the static planar system with a dynamic Turing pattern of color and material separation, the intention was to create a visual continuity and unity of the space as a whole, while allowing each place to function autonomously. The complex intermingling of actual visibility, the optical effects of glass
reflection and refraction, and the Turing pattern, which creates a fluctuating sense of scale, creates a multilayered sense of depth in the space that cannot be experienced without actually being there.
In contrast to reflective and transparent glass, mirrored surfaces, and metal, materials such as scaffold boards and recycled boards are actively used to create a sense of raw materiality and to reveal an awareness of objects as a counterpart to information.

Various digital experiences are incorporated into the park, including a monolith as an interactive display that
welcomes guests, a giant 3x10m LED monitor that visualizes data, a robot visitor that connects remote and
real places, and a life-size mobile display. The park will be equipped with a variety of digital experiences that will expand the concept of space and redefine the nature of communication.

Year: 2022

Category: interior

Status: Completed

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Collaborator: Digital Experience: whatever / Graphic Design: Ken OKAMOTO

Photo Credit: Yasuhiro Takagi

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