Born 1956 in Kanagawa Prefecture (Japan),based in Tokyo

Aoki worked with the Arata Isozaki & Associates (overseeing such projects as the Art Tower Mito) before establishing his own practice in 1991. Offering house designs such as "H" (1994), in which rejecting the division of rooms by function, he created a series of open-plan spaces connected in the manner of a corridor, Aoki captured the limelight with his fresh, intelligent manipulation of space. From the late 1990s onwards he worked on a number of public facilities, in 2000 winning first place in a competition to design the Aomori Museum of Art, which opened in 2006. The museum features gallery spaces emerging between excavated trenches and the concave/convex underside of the structure set on top of them, and a design that suggests the building has already undergone alterations, despite being new. Aoki's design for "Louis Vuitton Nagoya" (1999) used the site's lack of depth to stunning advantage and became an LV success story as the firm's first freestanding store in Japan. Not only did Aoki subsequently go on to also design Louis Vuitton stores for the Ginza, Roppongi, and New York, the Louis Vuitton Nagoya style was adopted by other LV stores around the world. Aoki also participated as an artist in "Continuity/Transgression" at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 2002, using renovation-type techniques to create an otherworldly space dubbed "U bis" that inverted the front and back of the museum. The same installation is now reversing spaces again at its current touring location, the National Museum of Art, Osaka. Aoki's projects include several others bridging art and architecture, including interior design work for the TARO NASU GALLERY, and collaborations with artists such as Noe Aoki and Hiroshi Sugito.