SIGMA’s new headquarters building is GORGEOUS

When you drive up to the new SIGMA office, it immediately stands out from its drab, industrial-looking neighbors, with a dramatic facade, a sweeping, curved driveway and beautiful landscaping.

This is the main entrance. There are actually two buildings, the main 4-story one directly in front of us and a lower, 2-story building mostly hidden behind the foliage on the left. The smaller building is mostly small conference rooms intended for meeting with customers, but also houses some common areas and the company cafeteria.

Half to two-thirds of the building’s front is a sheer metal monolith, with luminous aluminum panels reflecting misty-looking images of the landscaping in front of it and the sky above.

The design aesthetic of the building is very open and airy, spare and … serene, for lack of a better word. The stone floor tiles and earth-toned seats in the main lobby make me think of a Japanese rock garden.

A few steps down a hall and a turn to the left brings you to the entrance to the Customer Building, passing through SIGMA's “Lens Cellar”. Yamaki san is a great wine enthusiast, and his concept of a “Lens Cellar” is a take-off on the idea of a wine cellar. On display is a full set of all of SIGMA's products produced since 2012. (2012 is when they launched the SIGMA GLOBAL VISION product line, and the display also includes some unpainted versions of the first models, to show off their full metal bodies.)

Exiting the Lens Cellar, you’ll find yourself on the first floor of the customer building. There are a set of small conference rooms on the left, there’s some open-area seating in the foreground, with the employee cafeteria in the background.

This view is to the right of the previous shot. There are a lot of floor-to-ceiling windows in the building, connecting the interior spaces to the outside. The courtyard on the right is between the two buildings, and is a place employees can sit to eat or work when the weather is nice. (Basically Spring and Fall, winters are chilly and summers are oppressively hot and humid. It was blazingly hot and humid almost all the time I was there, this trip. Add the requirement to wear masks at all times, and even the native Japanese were sweltering :-0)

The employee cafeteria is about as nice a place to have lunch in as I could imagine. Floor-to-ceiling windows on 2 ½ sides of the space look out on the surrounding forest. The courtyard in the previous shot is behind us to the right. Immediately on the right (out of frame) is a glassed-in corridor to the main building, where the kitchen for the cafeteria is located.

This is the conference room on the second floor where I met with Yamaki san to conduct my interview. The building is nestled into a corner of a forest, with trees on two sides of it. The conference rooms all look out into the forest, with floor to ceiling windows bringing the outside inside.

OK, this is just a bit odd, but I couldn’t resist taking a photo of the second-floor men’s room. [lol] I told Yamaki san it was the most beautiful men’s room I’d ever seen. He laughed.
(He’s very polite ;-)

Also on the second floor is a large, open multi-use space. This can be used for larger customer meetings or by employees either as a quiet space for working by themselves or for larger meetings away from the main engineering areas. The floor to ceiling windows looking out into the forest combine with the randomly-arranged potted plants and wooden flooring to merge the interior space with the surroundings. More than any other, this space and this photo captures the feeling of the building as a whole.

Nature is an essential part of the building’s design. Particularly notable is the natural-landscape garden on the roof of the customer building. This shot shows the view as you exit the building proper into the garden area. The wide angle distorts the scale of the deck in the foreground.

Yamaki san said that he told the landscape architect that he wanted a natural feeling to the garden, rather than the rigidity of more traditional Japanese designs. The result is a beautiful, very organic space that feels like you’re visiting nature rather than a constructed environment.

(A typical DaveE overly-detailed side-note: Yamaki san told me that the surrounding forest had been used as a source of firewood for generations by the local populace. To maximize wood production, they’d used a method called coppicing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing  As a result, the vegetation was extremely dense and very unlike that of a natural woodland. From the time he first purchased the property, Yamaki san had arborists working to restore the forest to a more natural state. This involved clearing out a lot of the overgrowth, resulting in a lot of scrap wood. Rather than send it to a landfill (or whatever the Japanese do with such material), Yamaki san had it shredded to create a wood-chip base for the new garden and its paths. As the forest is maintained over time, trimmed vegetation will also be converted to chips and used to maintain the garden paths.)

This is a view down a main corridor on the ground floor of the main building. At every turn, I was impressed by the skill and design vision of the architect. It was as if every view had been designed and composed as if it were a photo: Leading lines draw your eye towards some expression of nature, or just to an interesting arrangement of shapes and tones.

Yamaki san explained that the white pillars aren’t merely decorative, they’re an integral part of the structure. To allow the open, airy design, high-strength pre-stressed concrete pillars were used to support the structure, carrying the weight of the building so the wall area could be used for windows. (Remember, this is in earthquake-prone Japan, so buildings are constructed to very high standards to withstand large amounts of ground movement. The pre-stressed panels are very strong relative to their size, so provide the support needed by Japan’s strict earthquake-resistant building codes.)

The first floor of the main building includes a large auditorium. A large screen drops down from the ceiling in front to show graphics delivered by a high-resolution projector above left. Here again, I was struck by the vision of the architect; I love how the different forms, shapes and lighting play off of each other, and even the simple choice of three different colors for the chairs contributes to the space as a whole.

Turning a corner in the main building, we’re presented with a library that brings to mind Victorian-era walls of books, albeit with a very modern design aesthetic. This staircase leads to the second floor of the main building, one of the main engineering centers of the complex.

The books here are a well-curated collection of photo books, accumulated over the last several years as part of an ongoing project. Yamaki san explained to me that most photo books are printed only once and in relatively short runs, so many are lost to the sands of time, scattered across many private collections. He wanted to preserve more of the legacy of the photographic community, so hired a professional photo critic to curate this collection. It currently stands at 4,000 volumes and is being added to all the time. This was just one of the delightful architectural surprises the building held. As I said above, so many elements of the building were designed and composed to produce views that any photographer would immediately see as shot-worthy. This was one of them.

Here’s another more mundane example of the same thing. This view is 180 degrees from the one above. Turning around from looking at the stairwell library, something as simple as an elevator door looked like a piece of modern sculpture. Its spartan simplicity contrasted nicely with the busy-ness of the library area.

Here’s one of the two engineering areas, on the second floor of the main building. In the foreground are mechanical designers, working on the intricate mechanisms of upcoming SIGMA lenses (which is why the computer screens are blanked-out ;-) Optical designers are further along, as is one of Yamaki-san’s two desks.

I visited SIGMA's new HQ building in the late afternoon, which is why the huge wall of windows in the shot above is mostly covered by window shades. The windows on the office floors of the main building face west, so the afternoon sun would stream in if it weren’t blocked by the shades. Yamaki san said that the shades are electronically controlled and programmed to open and close during the day to allow the maximum view of the outdoors, while blocking the sun as needed to maintain a comfortable work environment.

This is one of Yamaki san’s two desks, right next to the optical design section. (The two rows of desks closest to his desk are the optical designers. I was surprised that there were so many more mechanical designers than optical ones, but it made sense once Yamaki san explained that any given lens design only took one optical designer to create, but the many individual parts required multiple mechanical engineers to design.

Yamaki san splits his time between this desk and one on the third floor, with the camera and electronics engineers. He said that he views his connection with the engineers as critical to the success of the company and a large part of SIGMA's success over the years. It’s very unusual to find a CEO as closely-coupled with his engineering staff as Yamaki san is to his. This also explains how it is that he can comment so intelligently on virtually any aspect of SIGMA's engineering and manufacturing processes. He’s truly unique in the photography space, particularly since his purview spans everything from design to manufacturing to marketing.

Looking at the optical design section, I was struck by the range of ages among the designers. Quite a few seemed very young, but there were obviously a few veterans among them as well. (Yamaki san told me that the gentleman in the foreground had no less than 25 years of optical design experience, and was the creator of the 24-70mm f/2.8 Art lens.)

Yamaki san explained that he likes to hire top talent directly out of school, letting them learn on the job and gain experience from the senior engineers. He said he tries to hire about one optical designer per year, to keep a good spread of age and experience across the teams.

A casual gathering area between the lens and camera design sections, intended to foster greater communciation between the two groups.

This shot and the one above show the connection between the lens designers and the camera/electronics designers. The former are located on the second floor, the latter on the third, with a broad staircase and meeting area connecting the two.

Yamaki san explained that one concern he had about moving to the new building was that all of the engineers had previously been on the same floor together. He believes that communication between the groups is essential to SIGMA's success, so wanted to insure that it would be very easy for members of various teams to interact with each other. So far, he says it seems to be working well.

This is a view of the third-floor engineering area. I’m guessing, but would say that about half of the engineers here are working on camera designs and electronics. I was surprised to see such a large team engaged in ongoing development work, given that SIGMA's full-frame Foveon sensor is still well in the future, and a camera built around it even more so. (Although of course, there’s the fp camera line that currently consists of two models. I’m sure there are future versions under development, but I studiously avoided looking too closely at any of the screens shown here, and have blanked every computer screen in all of the shots I took to avoid compromising any proprietary information.)
I commented to Yamaki san on what a huge investment this must represent for SIGMA, and he said that indeed it was, but it’s an area he feels is critical to SIGMA's future.

(A missing shot... :-/)
As I'm writing this, I realized that I didn’t get any shots of the fourth floor of the main building, where all the administrative, sales and marketing staff are located. Other than the different job functions people perform there, it looks much like the two engineering floors, a large open-plan workspace with huge windows on three sides.