Rock Field Kobe Head Office and Factory (ロック・フィールド 神戸ヘッドオフィス／神戸ファクトリー)

The head office and factory of Rock Field, a prepared-food company from Kobe, occupy a former warehouse and distribution centre of a department store. The building had stood unused since the 1995 earthquake; the company's head wanted to turn it into his head office rather than let it go to waste, and talked it over with Ando. The frame was sound: tearing it down would have been a waste. This warehouse, 160 m wide, became a modern food factory, completed on 1 October 2004.

The head office received the City of Kobe's architecture culture prize in February 2005. In April 2006 a company nursery opened there for the employees' children. Ando and the head of Rock Field had known each other since the company moved in as a tenant of the Rose Garden, the building Ando had put up in Kobe in the mid-1970s; as the company grew, they built its factories together, up to the one in Kobe.

Ando's office designed the building and supervised the works. It has four levels, a steel structure with a part in reinforced concrete, a 24,306 m² site and 30,619 m² of floor area. The existing structure was reinforced; the factory takes up the lower levels and the offices those above.

Nothing recalls the original warehouse: standard metal panels cover the whole 160 m façade. Inside, a central corridor is arranged around light courts, and a water garden occupies the roof. Plantings accompany the buildings. For every factory Ando built for it, the company made the same request: surroundings that are pleasant for employees and in harmony with local nature.

The building houses the company's head office and its Kobe factory, which makes Japanese, Western and Asian dishes, charcuterie, fried food and soups. On 12 November 2019 a large green apple, an object Ando conceived from a poem about youth by Samuel Ullman, was installed at the head office at the request of the company's chairman.