NOT A MUSEUM to Be Born on the Former Site of Imperial Hotel Plaza Tokyo; NOT A CITY to Operate for About Four Years in Collaboration with SKWAT
NOT A CITY and SKWAT will launch NOT A MUSEUM, a roughly four-year cultural complex, on the former Imperial Hotel Plaza Tokyo site, opening in summer 2027.Summary
NOT A CITY Inc. (Representative Director and CEO: Midori Omori), part of the NOTA Inc. group that operates NOT A HOTEL, is launching NOT A MUSEUM, a mixed culture space, as a temporary-use project at Imperial Hotel Tokyo. It is scheduled to open in summer 2027. The site is the Imperial Hotel Tokyo Tower Building, which is slated for demolition as part of rebuilding. Centered on the former site of Imperial Hotel Plaza Tokyo, a directly operated commercial facility that closed in March 2024, the project will use about 2,000 tsubo (approximately 6,600 square meters) from the first to fourth floors of the Tower Building, excluding some shops. The operating period is about four years, until March 2031. The concept is CULTURE, IN THE MAKING. It aims to be a place where different cultural domains—art, books, music, fashion, cinema, and more—mix, are tested, and change, allowing visitors to experience not only completed works and culture but also the very process of their creation. SKWAT will handle planning, production, and operation together with NOT A CITY. SKWAT, launched in 2019 around Keisuke Nakamura of the design firm DAIKEI MILLS, has treated idle facilities and social gaps left in cities as VOID and has occupied them temporarily to open them to the public in Japan and abroad. Through exhibitions, publishing, retail, lectures, and other methods, the project has found new value in disused places and incomplete conditions. Spatial design will be handled by DAIKEI MILLS and NOT A HOTEL ARCHITECTS. In this project, Nakamura positions the time the building has accumulated as an important asset, indicating an approach not to remake the roughly 40-year-old site from scratch but to reinterpret that time and connect it to new culture. Imperial Hotel Plaza Tokyo opened in 1983 as a commercial facility gathering luxury brands. The Imperial Hotel side also expresses hope that the site will inherit its history of transmitting fashion and culture of each era while becoming a place that sends out new culture as NOT A MUSEUM. NOT A CITY, which leads this project, was established in 2025. It aims to give new uses and purposes to urban and regional margins, buildings that have finished their roles, and unused spaces, opening up the potential of places. At a press conference, CEO Midori Omori said of this initiative, The essence for a city is culture. I want to aim for something that takes root in the city and grows. NOT A CITY envisions not merely creating individual buildings or facilities but linking accommodation and residential bases such as NOT A HOTEL and NOT A HOUSE with mobility businesses like NOT A GARAGE to create a city that integrates lodging, commerce, dining, entertainment, and movement. Another concrete example is JAPA VALLEY TOKYO, being advanced with Mitsubishi Estate in front of Yurakucho Station. Scheduled to open in spring 2027, it is a mixed space for art, commerce, and hospitality led by Pharrell Williams and NIGO®, aiming to become a new tourism hub that crosses food, fashion, and other fields centered on sake. At one corner of Imperial Hotel, which has a history of more than 130 years, NOT A MUSEUM converts the roughly four-year blank period before rebuilding into time for culture. Because it is not a permanent museum but a place with a predetermined end, what kind of culture will be born and take root in the city? This project is likely to be a test of the new city-making advocated by NOT A CITY.
(Source：美術手帖)