Italian artist goldsmith Giampaolo Babetto was commissioned to design the floor space for the main atrium of the new Marunouchi building in Tokyo. The work connects the building's interior and exterior spaces with a series of red and blue pigmented lit glass channels, which are inset into the granite. Babetto references the city of Tokyo as a human body, placing Marunouchi at the nerve centre, from which desire lines of arteries and veins pulsate, moving outwards from the building, beyond the confines of its architecture.
Babetto has said of his work 'It conveys the idea of endless continuity yet illuminating a mysterious underside… The idea is to give free rein to the creative imagination of the viewer’s mind, which should picture the coloured lines running endlessly throughout the entire city of Tokyo… the force of the lines should invite and lead the pedestrian from the outside to the inside, anticipating that this area develops from being a space to having the strength of identity to become a place’.
The work is part of the Marunouchi Art Project, curated and managed by Modus Operandi.
