Why you should experience Roppongi Hills 66 Plaza in Tokyo, Japan.
Roppongi Hills 66 Plaza is a kinetic public plaza where Roppongi's contemporary-art culture, grand sculpture, ambitious architecture and constant pedestrian movement establish the defining threshold to the Roppongi Hills complex.
Set along Roppongi-dori near Keyakizaka-dori and just steps from Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, the elevated plaza turns arrival from Roppongi Station into an encounter with Louise Bourgeois's enormous bronze spider Maman. Its long legs frame changing views of the 238-meter tower while the open terrace creates an important pause between the subway approach and the dense cultural program beyond. The plaza also belongs to a pedestrian network conceived to overcome the substantial elevation changes that historically fragmented Roppongi 6-chome, connecting Metro Hat, Mori Tower and surrounding streets through escalators, elevators and elevated walkways. The result is a plaza where Roppongi's contemporary character becomes immediately legible through public art, vertical architecture and carefully choreographed movement.
What you should know about Roppongi Hills 66 Plaza.
Roppongi Hills 66 Plaza is best known for placing Louise Bourgeois's Maman at the principal entrance to Roppongi Hills when the 11-hectare development opened in April 2003 after more than 15 years of planning involving 400 participating property owners. Bourgeois conceived the original Maman for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 1999, transforming the spider she associated with her mother, JosΓ©phine, a mosaic restorer, into a towering meditation on protection, weaving and maternal strength. The Roppongi bronze belongs to an edition of the sculpture and rises more than nine meters, suspending a sac containing marble eggs beneath its abdomen while eight attenuated legs create a permeable architectural enclosure around pedestrians. Mori Building positioned that encounter beneath Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, the 54-story centerpiece designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, making Bourgeois's sculpture the human-scale intermediary between the development's grand vertical architecture and its principal public approach.
Minoru Mori connected 66 Plaza to a much larger experiment in remaking Roppongi after the Tokyo Metropolitan Government designated Roppongi 6-chome for redevelopment in 1986, beginning negotiations across a district fragmented by 17 meters of elevation change, narrow roads and dense low-rise housing. Mori Building and TV Asahi helped organize the redevelopment process before a preparatory association formed in 1990, Tokyo granted urban-planning approval in 1995, the redevelopment association followed in 1998 and construction began in 2000. Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates gave Mori Tower its commanding architectural presence while Mori Building used 66 Plaza, Metro Hat, pedestrian walkways and new circulation routes to connect previously divided levels of the district and separate pedestrian movement from vehicles. Louise Bourgeois completes that sequence at its most visible threshold, turning Minoru Mori's urban strategy into an encounter between infrastructure, architecture and contemporary art before the complex unfolds beyond the plaza.
How to fold Roppongi Hills 66 Plaza into your trip.
Roppongi Hills 66 Plaza works naturally as the opening threshold to an afternoon exploring how Roppongi Hills connects public sculpture, contemporary art and inherited landscape, beginning beneath Bourgeois before climbing through Mori Tower and concluding in a garden surviving from the site's premodern history.
Begin at Mori Art Museum, opened in October 2003 near the summit of Mori Tower under founding director David Elliott, where the inaugural Happiness exhibition brought historical and contemporary art together and established contemporary culture as a central element of Minoru Mori's vision for Roppongi Hills. Continue to Tokyo City View, where the upper levels of Mori Tower reverse the perspective established beneath Maman, revealing from above the dense Tokyo fabric that the 11-hectare Roppongi Hills redevelopment reorganized around vertical architecture, pedestrian circulation and substantial open space. Conclude at Mohri Garden, where MΕri Hidemoto established an estate during the seventeenth century, Nogi Maresuke was born on the property in 1849, Nikka Whisky later operated a factory there and TV Asahi acquired the site in 1977 before its pond and greenery were incorporated into Roppongi Hills. The progression moves from Bourgeois's public sculpture through Elliott and Mori's contemporary-art institution and KPF's elevated cityscape into the surviving MΕri estate landscape, revealing how Roppongi Hills deliberately binds new cultural production to the history beneath its architecture.
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