engineering

Roppongi Hills

Roppongi Hills is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Roppongi Hills rather than just read about it. In short: Roppongi Hills (六本木ヒルズ, Roppongi Hiruzu) is a development project in Tokyo and one of Japan's largest integrated property developments, located in the Roppongi district of Minato, Tokyo. Constructed by building tycoon Minoru Mori, the mega-complex incorporates office space, apartments, shops, restaurants, cafes, movie theatres, a museum, a hotel, a major TV studio, an outdoor amphitheatre, and a few parks.

Key takeaways

Roppongi Hills belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Roppongi Hills to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Roppongi Hills from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Roppongi Hills (六本木ヒルズ, Roppongi Hiruzu) is a development project in Tokyo and one of Japan's largest integrated property developments, located in the Roppongi district of Minato, Tokyo. Constructed by building tycoon Minoru Mori, the mega-complex incorporates office space, apartments, shops, restaurants, cafes, movie theatres, a museum, a hotel, a major TV studio, an outdoor amphitheatre, and a few parks. The centrepiece of the complex is the 54-story Roppongi Hills Mori Tower. Mori's stated vision was to build an integrated development where high-rise inner-urban communities allow people to live, work, play, and shop in proximity to eliminate commuting time, and has a total floor area of 724,000 m2 (7,790,000 sq ft). The company argued that this would increase leisure time, quality of life, and benefit Japan's national competitiveness. Seventeen years after the design's initial conception, the complex opened to the public on April 25, 2003. The architecture and use of space is documented in the book Six Strata: Roppongi Hills Redefined.

Development Roppongi Hills cost over $4 billion and was built on a 27-acre (109,000 m2) site. The site amalgamated more than 400 smaller lots Mori acquired over 14 years. Construction within the complex began in March 2000 and was eventually completed on April 25, 2003.

Mori Tower

Mori Tower is a 54-story high-rise building designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox that houses an art museum, restaurants, cafes, clinics, stores, as well as the offices of Allen & Overy, Barclays Capital, Ferrari Japan, Goldman Sachs, J-WAVE, Konami, Time Inc., Chevron, BASF, Lenovo, Mercari, Baidu, GREE, BP, SAS Institute and Google. The Pokémon Company also has its headquarters in the Mori Tower. The first six levels of Mori Tower contain retail stores and restaurants. The top six floors house the Mori Art Museum and the Tokyo City View with panoramic views of the city. A new exit from Roppongi Station empties into a glass atrium filled with large television screens and escalators, as well as several shops and restaurants. The rest of the building is office space.

Other buildings Around the Mori Tower are several smaller buildings predominantly occupied by shops and restaurants, a cinema complex and the Mori Garden. Behind the Mori Tower lies the Keyakizaka Street, famous for its night illumination of 1.2 million shining LEDs that begin in mid-November and run until Christmas Day. Keyakizaka also features cafes and luxury stores such as Louis Vuitton. Nearby are the four Roppongi Hills residence towers, with a total of 793 residential apartments. Large open spaces have been built into the design of Roppongi Hills. About half of the area consists of gardens, pavilions, and other open spaces. The Mori Garden, an elaborate and authentic Japanese garden complete with a pond and trees is particularly popular. The garden is part of a lost mansion that housed members of the feudal Mōri clan. On Roppongi Hills the exhibition of the United Buddy Bears was shown in 2005 for the first time in Japan. The exhibition was opened by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Horst Köhler, together with the Prime Minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi. According to the Mori-Group, project partners in Tokyo, they were able to count three million visitors over the six weeks of the exhibition. The American School in Japan's Early Learning Center is housed in a residence building next to the Hills, the Roppongi Sakura-zaka Residence. A playground adjacent to the complex, near the school, is known in English as Robot Park and has robot-themed play equipment. The headquarters of TV Asahi is also situated in Roppongi Hills, next to the Mori Garden. The building was designed by architect Fumihiko Maki.

Criticism Roppongi Hills Arena is a facility with large outdoor speakers, in proximity to older housing. Since the construction of the Roppongi Hills development, complaints of noise pollution from older residents have been ignored by Mori Building management, according to residents. The building most directly suffering from noise is on top of an embankment opposite the Arena. Residents say several residents have been forced out by the noise. Henry Hilton of the Japan Today news aggregator website criticised the development when he argued:

Yet the truth is that the crowds are unlikely to return once they have been exhausted by the charade of inconvenient walkways that appear almost intentionally to confuse all but those with perfect map navigational skills. The whole maze is far from being user friendly—don't count on full protection from autumn showers or sudden gusts of wind generated by the buildings themselves.

Financial issues Mori Building has financed the project with $800 million equity and $1.3 billion in debt from a syndicate of banks led by the Development Bank of Japan. As a result, the company's overall debts are $5.6 billion, secured by billions more in assets. Goldman Sachs & Co., the project's anchor tenant, attracted deep discounts in rental prices because of the large amount of space it occupies. Japan's sluggish economy, staff cuts by foreign companies, and the flow of new office space have put downward pressure on rents. Because of eminent domain law in Japan, several past residents of the site that would be Roppongi Hills have been given residential units in the complex in return for their agreement to vacate their prior homes, so that their prior homes would be demolished and the land used for the development of Roppongi Hills.

Gallery

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Roppongi Hills

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Roppongi Hills claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Roppongi Hills before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Roppongi Hills ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Roppongi Hills

In research: Roppongi Hills appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Roppongi Hills in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Roppongi Hills is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2003 establishments in Japan, Buildings and structures completed in 2003, Kohn Pedersen Fox buildings, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Roppongi Hills outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Roppongi Hills in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Roppongi Hills means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Roppongi Hills out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Roppongi Hills in simple terms?

Why does Roppongi Hills matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Roppongi Hills?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Roppongi Hills.