kazuyo sejima shapes POLA GINZA as garden-like landscape in tokyo

kazuyo sejima frames POLA GINZA flagship as a temporal landscape

POLA GINZA, conceived by Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, co-founder of SANAA, rethinks the beauty flagship as a space of perception. Developed as POLA’s global flagship in Tokyo, the project brings together architecture, sound, light, and scent to explore how beauty is sensed, internalized, and activated across mind and body. Grounded in the Science. Art. Love. philosophy of the brand, the space prioritizes atmosphere and experience.

Conceived as a place that awakens what POLA calls the ‘latent sense of beauty’ in both mind and body, the project unfolds as an immersive sequence of light, sound, scent, and material atmospheres, a spatial narrative built around perception, self-awareness, and time. The renovation brings together an interdisciplinary group of Japanese creatives, including Kazuyo Sejima, composer Keiichiro Shibuya, lighting designer Shozo Toyohisa, and olfactory artist Kan Izumi, each contributing a distinct sensory layer to the whole.

Sejima frames the project as a garden-like environment that operates on its own sense of time. In her words, visitors are briefly removed from everyday rhythms and invited into a different temporal register, one that supports introspection and self-observation.

all images by Kenshu Shintsubo

a flora forest at street level in tokyo

At ground floor, visitors enter what Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima describes as a Flora Forest, an animated interior landscape structured by imperfectly symmetrical heptagonal columns. These vertical elements act as spatial cues, creating subtle fluctuations that connect inside and outside, movement and stillness. Walls emit an even, diffused glow, while light shifts almost imperceptibly across surfaces, producing an environment that feels alive rather than staged. The space also hosts a permanent generative sound installation by Keiichiro Shibuya. His work, Abstract Music, POLA version, continuously recomposes itself in real time, drawing from an extensive archive of sound data that is algorithmically layered, altered, and reassembled.

The experience continues below ground. From the animated forest above, visitors move down to the first basement, where the atmosphere slows further. This level houses POLA’s esthetic and treatment spaces, arranged as fully private rooms. Here, materials, scent, and light shift toward an earthier register: warm illumination, fragrances that recall soil and filtered daylight, and a quiet that feels intentional rather than absent.

Treatments are structured around Resense Scan, a diagnostic system developed using POLA Chemical Industries’ proprietary technology. Facial video analysis is used to visualize current skin and condition states, forming the basis for individualized counseling. From there, the experience unfolds through facial treatments using original masks, radio-frequency body care that introduces gentle warmth, and foot baths integrated into each private room.

Kazuyo Sejima rethinks the beauty flagship as a space of perception

light behaves like matter

Shozo Toyohisa’s approach to lighting design avoids spotlighting or theatrical contrast and relies on overlapping wavelengths of light and inverse-phase illumination that subtly pulse and dissolve into one another. The effect is a kind of atmospheric blur, where light feels almost tangible, closer to mist than illumination. The environment never fully settles into a fixed state, encouraging visitors to sense change rather than observe it.

Across floors, light, sound, and scent are designed to avoid synchronization, creating moments of dissonance that sharpen perception. Kan Izumi’s olfactory contribution follows a similar logic, introducing two complementary fragrances. One reflects POLA’s contemporary identity through the tension of science and craftsmanship; the other draws on vegetal warmth and memory, grounding the body and slowing attention. Rather than branding the space, scent operates as a quiet guide, anchoring experience without dictating emotion.

the project brings together architecture, sound, light, and scent to explore how beauty is sensed