Hakuten and Shiseido Turn a Ginza Storefront into a Living Ecological Map

Ginza is not the first place you think of when someone says ecosystem. The district is a grid of luxury flagships, neon signage, and polished granite, a landscape so thoroughly engineered that nature registers mostly as ornamental ginkgo trees planted over a century ago. Yet Hakuten Corporation and Shiseido Creative looked closer, collecting specimens from sidewalk cracks, drainage ditches, and planting beds to construct a three-dimensional ecological portrait of the neighborhood. The result, Ginza Ecological Map, occupied Shiseido's street-level window gallery throughout 2021: a 10 square meter installation that reframed the commercial heart of Tokyo as a site of surprising biological richness.

What makes the project worth studying is not its novelty as a nature exhibit but its methodology. The designers conducted fieldwork in Ginza, gathering soil, insects, plant cuttings, and minerals while interviewing longtime residents about the district's overlooked natural history. Each of the 72 compartments in the display holds one item, presented with the clinical precision of a museum specimen yet warm enough in its plywood and timber materiality to feel like a cabinet of curiosities. The installation argues that ecology is not something you escape to; it is something already underfoot.

72 Compartments, One District

The primary installation reads as a single faceted wall of plywood, its pentagonal grid visible through the full-height glass facade of the Shiseido gallery. From the street, the piece operates almost like a geological cross-section: each compartment frames a specimen at a scale small enough to hold in your hand yet specific enough to locate on a map. The angled geometry of the shelving catches light differently across the day, lending a kinetic quality to what is, at heart, a static taxonomic exercise.

At night, the warm glow of internal lighting transforms the wall into a lantern set within greenery, reversing the usual Ginza relationship between artificial illumination and nature. The grid becomes almost pixel-like, each cell contributing to a composite image of the district's biodiversity. It is exhibition design operating as urban commentary.

Earth as Material, Soil as Evidence

One of the installation's two thematic tracks focuses on earth: the diversity of soils collected from around Ginza's dogwood, camellia, and ginkgo plantings. The nine textured cubes arranged in a pale timber box are quietly astonishing, revealing color variations from charcoal black to terracotta to pale clay. These are not imported pigments; they are the literal ground beneath a luxury shopping district, compressed into sample blocks that could pass for artisan ceramics.

Alongside the soil cubes, the team produced pottery and crayons from the city's earth and dyed textiles using local plant pigments, displayed on a trestle table with colored tabs like a fabric swatch library. The metallic-finish samples in a diamond grid arrangement hint at the mineral content lurking in Ginza's substrata. The message is clear: the raw materials for making things have never left the city center. We just stopped noticing them.

Organisms in a Metropolis

The second thematic axis, organisms, pairs insect specimens and plant cuttings with their exact locations in the district. The radial arrangement of pressed purple globe thistle blooms set against a brass clock mechanism is the installation's signature image, and for good reason. The globe thistle was collected from beneath the Wako clock tower, one of Ginza's most iconic landmarks, so the display adopts a clock-like motif in tribute. It is a small poetic gesture that elevates specimen display into storytelling.

Paper butterfly cutouts on a gridded cutting mat reveal the workshop process behind the finished displays, a glimpse into how the designers translated fieldwork into exhibition objects. The streetside photograph of purple thistle flowers blooming against a backdrop of traffic confirms the installation's central claim: Ginza's ecology is not hypothetical. It is flowering in the planting beds right now, largely ignored by the thousands of pedestrians passing daily.

The Gallery as Laboratory

Inside the gallery, the language shifts from display to investigation. House-shaped cases mounted on a white brick wall evoke both domestic architecture and natural history museum vitrines, collapsing the scales of home and habitat into a single form. Beneath them, timber trestle tables hold tools, printed matter, and gathered samples in a layout that reads more like a research station than a finished exhibition.

A visitor in a white coat examining the grid of compartments reinforces that atmosphere. The designers treated the space as a place where looking closely is the primary activity, not a space to be photographed and forgotten. The wall-mounted specimen cabinet with its study table completes the effect: this is a room for cataloging, comparing, and wondering what else might be growing in the gaps between Ginza's paving stones.

Fieldwork and Community Knowledge

The image of a hand placing a leaf into a glass jar near a decorative metal grate, moss visible below, distills the entire project's ethos. Collection happened in situ, by hand, at the scale of a single leaf or soil sample. A timber stamp and printed sheet displayed on a terrazzo slab suggest a process of indexing and cataloging that mirrors archival practice: each specimen gets a location, a name, a context.

Crucially, the research was not conducted in isolation. Conversations with long-term Ginza residents informed the selection of specimens and the narrative connecting them. The photograph of four people gathered beneath a tree outside the gallery captures something the installation's formal beauty might otherwise obscure: the project is rooted in oral history and local knowledge as much as in design skill. The ecological map is as much a social document as a scientific one.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan drawing reframes Ginza's street grid as a botanical atlas, overlaying illustrated plant species onto the block-by-block layout of the district. Directional labels orient the viewer geographically, grounding the specimens seen inside the gallery in specific locations outside. It is the key that unlocks the installation's logic: every compartment in the plywood wall corresponds to a point on this map. The drawing transforms urban planning notation into a field guide, suggesting that every city grid is, if you look hard enough, an ecological grid too.

Why This Project Matters

At just 10 square meters, Ginza Ecological Map is one of the smallest projects we have covered, and one of the most conceptually dense. It demonstrates that exhibition design, when grounded in genuine research, can shift perception more effectively than a manifesto or a master plan. The installation does not ask Ginza to become greener. It reveals that Ginza already is green, in the cracks and ditches and planting beds that register as maintenance rather than ecology.

The collaboration between Hakuten Corporation and Shiseido Creative also models something worth replicating: a commercial brand lending its prime retail window to environmental inquiry rather than product promotion. The result is neither greenwashing nor art for art's sake but a rigorous, beautiful argument that the natural world persists in the most constructed environments on earth. In a post-pandemic moment when many of us are rethinking our relationship with nature, this small timber grid in Ginza offers a genuinely useful frame: stop looking for nature elsewhere. Start looking down.

Ginza Ecological Map by Hakuten Corporation and Shiseido Creative. Located in Chūō, Ginza, Tokyo, Japan. Completed in 2021. 10 m². Photography by Junpei Kato.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.