Tomas Maier joins fight to save Hotel Okura.

As the creative director of Bottega Veneta, Tomas Maier has consistently sought to protect the brand’s heritage of craftsmanship. In this same spirit, Maier is now taking on a new kind of preservation project. In partnership with the Japanese publication Casa Brutus, Maier and Bottega Veneta have launched an initiative to raise awareness of the potential destruction of numerous significant Modernist buildings in Japan due to economics, politics and the preparation for the 2020 Olympics.

Maier, the son of an architect and a lifelong architecture enthusiast, became interested in Japanese Modernism in the mid-1980s when he first visited the Hotel Okura, a 1962 landmark designed by Yoshiro Taniguchi. (Supporters of the campaign are encouraged to use the hashtag #mymomentatokura to document their favorite details of the building on social media.) In the video shown here, Maier discusses the campaign and explores the hotel’s unique features, which continue to inspire his work. “It would be a great loss for the next generation to be unable to embrace the beauty of these icons for themselves,” he says. via: tmagazine