Minoru Mori, Tokyo Tower Developer, Dies at 77 TOKYO - Minoru Mori, a developer who helped shape Tokyo's skyline with towering buildings and then turned his attention to China, died on Thursday in Tokyo. He was 77. The cause was heart failure, officials of his company, Mori Building, said. Taking over a successful real estate business from his father in 1993, Mr. Mori built some of Tokyo's most prominent developments. His stylish $4 billion Roppongi Hills complex, centered on the 54-story Mori Tower, opened in 2003. The project, on 27 acres, transformed a seedy neighborhood into the city's most coveted business center, with Goldman Sachs and Google among its tenants. Mr. Mori, who drew inspiration from Le Corbusier's ideas of modern design to improve life in crowded cities, described his developments as "vertical garden cities" that offered housing, office and retail spaces complemented by parks. "Asia is different from the United States and Europe," Mr. Mori said in an interview with The New York Times in 2008. We dream of more vertical cities. In fact, the only choice here is to go up and use the sky. He later took that approach to China, building the 101-story Shanghai World Financial Center, which was completed in 2008 and is China's tallest building. Mr. Mori was sometimes criticized for the high-end nature of his developments. One of his last big projects, Omotesando Hills - which runs along a historic tree-lined avenue that is Tokyo's equivalent of the Champs-Élysées - is filled with expensive boutiques. And preservationists have said that his skyscrapers destroyed Tokyo's traditional low-rise feeling. But Mr. Mori also drew praise for his attention to the seismic risks involved in building in one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries. He spent more than $120 million fitting the Mori Tower at Roppongi Hills with huge dampers designed to absorb the shock of earthquakes, and an underground gas-powered generator. Those features proved vital last year after a magnitude 9 quake off Japan's Northeastern coast shook buildings in Tokyo and wrecked a nuclear power station that had provided much of the city's electricity. In a time of postquake anxiety and power shortages, Mori Tower was flooded with new tenant requests, the company said. Mr. Mori was born on Aug. 24, 1934, in Japan's ancient capital of Kyoto, the second son of Taikichiro Mori, Mori Building's founder, who was recognized by Forbes magazine as the richest man in the world in the early 1990s. He is survived by his wife and daughter. Mr. Mori was writing a novel when he joined the family business in 1959. "I shifted from writing literature to making buildings," Mr. Mori told The Times. Both are creative efforts, and attempts to enrich people somehow.